Where is Chinatown Located??? (Austin, Sugar Land: HOA, neighborhood, pharmacist)

[bmglab]

Originally Posted by sallybell

canadian, the best dim sum i have found in houston is at yum yum cha cafe on times blvd in "the village" shopping center near rice university. it is the only dim sum place in this particular area. and it is not any where near chinatown. they do not push the dim sum carts around, rather they give you a menu and make it up fresh per your order.

regarding walking in houston, houston is mainly not a walkable city. there are no sidewalks in most places or neighborhoods are sketchy, so you probably would not want to walk. there is lots of traffic whizzing by. erase the pic of new york or toronto from your mind. we really don't have any areas like that here.

the one area that is what i'd consider walkable is the rice university area. perhaps some others can throw some suggestions in too. maybe the "heights" area as well. the problem is lack of sidewalks and if sidewalks exist, you would have to cross major roads while walking.

Although in a very convenient location in the village. Yum yum cha dim sum is not very good. The do not use the right sauces or spices and the dumplings are strange. For dim sum on par with HK, Vancouver, San Francisco try Fungs Kitchen. At least the dim sum there tastes like it is supposed to.
The reason why chinatown is not walkable is the distance between each shopping center is kind of far. Also, in Houston we are lazy and love to drive from shop to shop!

[Guerilla]

The main Chinatown is along Bellaire Boulevard between Highway 6 and just before Bellaire reaches the Southwest Freeway. There is another one in downtown. They are building some new lofts there and it is getting cleaner.

[mpbaby17]

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[crbcrbrgv]

I'm kind of confused by the "Chinatown is between Highway 6 and 59 along Bellaire" comments. I always thought that Chinatown (or Asiatown as some call it) starts at about Boone and ends around 59. About half of it is located in Alief and the other in Sharpstown. Crime is not high but it is definitely not low either. It's not nearly as bad as some of the Alief/Sharpstown gloom and doomers would have you believe though.

[bamba_boy]

Originally Posted by crbcrbrgv

I'm kind of confused by the "Chinatown is between Highway 6 and 59 along Bellaire" comments. I always thought that Chinatown (or Asiatown as some call it) starts at about Boone and ends around 59. About half of it is located in Alief and the other in Sharpstown. Crime is not high but it is definitely not low either. It's not nearly as bad as some of the Alief/Sharpstown gloom and doomers would have you believe though.

80% of the Asian businesses are between Gessner and Kirkwood roughly. However it's expanding constantly west towards route 6. Still pretty dense with mostly Asian even past Dairy Ashford. Then it's kind of 50/50 and decreasing until Rt 6. Not much eastward growth because the 59 freeway kind of forms a fortress wall separating the very heavily hispanic area between the town of Bellaire (east of Renwick) and Sharpstown Mall. Sharpstown Mall is soon to be some kind of redeveloped, remodelled indoor "Outdoor Market" with a hispanic theme so I doubt if that area gets swallowed up by ChinaTown but it does have the excellent Fung's Restaurant , across the street from the Mall. Just west of the mall between Fondren and Gessner it's sort of part Asian, part Hispanic, and only commercial on the north side, with mostly gringos in single family homes actually right on Bellaire Blvd on the south side. That stretch could easily go ChinaTown in the future. It will be interesting to see if the Hispanic Mall development swings west or ChinaTown swings east - battle between East and West, as it were.

To make a long story short, the actual boundaries of Bellaire ChinaTown have never been defined and in physical reality, they are fuzzy at the edges as pure Asian in the core becomes more and more diluted by other types of businesses rather gradually. Not only is it fuzzy in snapshot, but it is evolving and growing: currently with a fairly fixed east boundary that can perhaps grow just a little, and a wide open western frontier into which it is expanding to fill in with Asian businesses all the way to Rt 6. It's not quite there yet like an early poster said but it's getting there fast.

The history of the area is amazingly parallel to that of Monterrey Park / Alhambra east of Los Angeles. The same strip mall developer that started the Diho Market plaza in Houston on Bellaire started a small similar Asia-themed development there and the seed spread to where Asians are now about 40% of the population of the whole towns, including electing Chinese mayor in MP. Like Sharpstown/Alief they had previously been mainly white/hispanic middle-class suburbs. The Alh./ MP area got it's development maybe 10-15 years ahead of Houston's. I'm not sure the same thing will happen in our future, however, because many Asian residents, as opposed to businesses, are not settling there but buying houses 5-10 miles down the 59 or 8 in Sugar Land where the schools are better (however Sharpstown has the best Catholic schools in Houston).

[SteveArmy]

its easy to see that the "asiantown" begins and ends with a Fiesta-mart(gessner and 6). the HEB on 6 does have a few asian stores tho. the other asians(indian/middleeastern) of missionbend is slowly mixing into east of Synott tho.
one big plus of missionbend chi-town is fireworks are legal

[SouthernBoy205]

Houston is really suc an overrated city for its size. I didn't know it had a Chinatown. Shoot, in fact, I didn't know that any southern city had an ESTABLISHED Chinatown. COOL!

[Oildog]

thread is 3.5 years old...

[desertsun41]

Originally Posted by Oildog

thread is 3.5 years old...

Yes it is, and the newest posts have not answered the thread reviver who really needs some help/advice. The location has been hashed out already.

I have noticed regular Chinese drug stores along Bellaire. When I was in Canada, the Chinese drug stores all had a Chinese medicine area where a Chinese Pharmacist (if that is what they are called) all man these big bins of strange plants, all meant to cure some illness. Some of these plants are more expensive then our worse prescription medicine.

[SteveArmy]

Originally Posted by A&M Bulldawg

Houston is really suc an overrated city for its size. I didn't know it had a Chinatown. Shoot, in fact, I didn't know that any southern city had an ESTABLISHED Chinatown. COOL!

when boosting houston, it's *chinatown", when boosting our MPCs its "alief/sharpstown"