Normally CaptCliff’s restaurant reviews are brutally honest and dark, often skewering lesser food establishments for their faddishness, their inconsistency and especially their overall tendency toward providing too little for too much. I’m generally looking for a good value, not a culinary masterpiece of molecular gastronomy balanced on a half grape. To break this pattern of negativity I offer this glowing review. Canton Cooks has been around for, well, forever. It reminds me of a place called Chin’s Chop Suey in Glencoe, Illinois where I grew up as a kid, only bigger. Every time I get divorced and or my kids graduate from one school or another, or just on any random Sunday if you ask most people, “where do you want to go for Chinese?”, the answer is Canton Cooks. Sure it seems the owners family has broken up into competing factions of self-replicating Chinese restaurants from China Cooks to Canton Cooks2 all located a short distance apart. I cant even remember who runs which place and if they are friend or foe at this point. All I care about is good taste and where I’m probably going to take 8 famished people after the High Holidays and on X-mas day. This is where the line moves the fastest, where the owners remember me no matter who I’m with, and where they make the best Beef Chow Fun and Hong Kong Style Crispy noodles, Seafood (no squid please)…… There is something comforting, ineffable and consistently authentic about the menu, the place and the food which is further reflected in the servers wry smiles and laid back professionalism. I get a kick out of the fact that as I age, they do too, but still keep bringing me the good Cantonese stuff. Whether I dine in or demand a big round table for 10 there is going to be a predictably good meal with excellent leftovers. It’s sort of the Jewish-Chinese version of The Help. We have some kind of spiritual and olfactory bond between us, which, on a short ride home with a cardboard box full of takeout is like a Southern gentleman shlepping home a Pecan pie and fresh batch of fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. I realize we are both gonna gain weight from the collective caloric overload involved, but at least we’ll fall asleep with a fat-happy smile on our Baby Boomer faces. PS If you dine-in be sure to shave first because you’re going to see your accountant, your rabbi, your former neighbors, and the divorce lawyer who beat you to a pulp 15 years ago. Dont worry, everyone will say hi, even the lawyer.