Why You Should Avoid Shrimp Toast At A Chinese Restaurant

Virtually everyone gets a hankering for Chinese food every once in a while, because your average Chinese restaurant has pretty much everything for everyone – if only thanks to the fact that their menus feature lots of Chinese food you won't find in China. Even so, "Western Chinese restaurant" is virtually a cuisine all in itself, so as long as you make sure to look for the signs that you're in a good Chinese restaurant, you can happily chow down your General Tso's chicken and fortune cookies. After all, they might not be authentic authentic, but they're at the very least massively delicious. 

However, there are some Chinese restaurant dishes that might seem mouthwatering and possibly even taste like heaven itself – yet, you would probably do well to steer clear of them. Unfortunately, it looks like one of these dishes is shrimp toast. But why is this delicious dim sum a no-no? Let's take a look at why you should avoid shrimp toast at a Chinese restaurant.

Delicious shrimp toast makes the list of things you should never order from a Chinese restaurant due to one very simple reason: There are great ways to make it and one decidedly less-than-great one, and the overwhelming chances are that the version you're familiar with uses the latter preparation method. 

Here's how it works. Your average shrimp toast is a fairly easy concoction – you take some toast (duh), apply a shrimp paste mixture, and prepare the delicacy by pan-frying or baking it. The thing is, when did you last eat this particular delicacy prepared in either of those ways? Order shrimp toast from your local, and chances are that it's going to be deep-fried, which can alter the food in a pretty dramatic way. 

This is not necessarily an awful thing, taste-wise – at least, provided that the oil is changed often enough, and that they actually won't fry it so much that all the nuances in that delicious paste turn into a greasy mulch. However, when a single piece of deep-fried shrimp toast comes with 148 calories (via FatSecret), those six slices one might casually munch on as a side to that orange chicken don't seem like such a small deal anymore.  

Shrimp toast – delicious when done right, but when dunked in hot oil, it's just not worth it.