DINING OUT
Oriental Star
　　(* means fair)
　　(** means good)
　　(*** means very good)
　　(**** means excellent)
　　3221 Duke St. Alexandria
Phone: (703) 370-4100
Hour:Saturday though Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Reservations: Accepted.
Price range: Lunch: Under $10.
Dinner: $10 to $18.
Credit cards: Visa, Master Card and American Express accepted.
Advisory: All-you-can-eat buffet Sundays from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Wheelchair access is good; no-smoking area available.
　　We tried soups from both sides: seafood with vegetables ($2.95) and hot and sour ($1.50), both Chinese in origin, and a Thai chicken-coco-nut soup ($2.50). The last had every drop of sweet fire you should have come to expect if you have had it elsewhere, along with the rich flavor of coconut milk and wonderfully tender chicken. The hot and sour is fairly good, but the seafood is better: a decent amount of seafood (mostly sea legs) and some cleverly carved vegetables in a flavorful broth.
　　Other appetizers include some very good fried dumplings ($3.50 for four), beef or chicken satay ($4.25 for four), and some nice Chinese-style spring rolls ($2 for two).
　　And one of the nicer touches was an appetizer we didn't need to order: a dish of Thai marinated cucumber that came gratis.
Most entrees are in the $7 to $8 range at dinner ($5 to $6 at lunch). Of the entrees we tried, I would particularly recommend the shredded pork in garlic sauce ($7.25) and the orange beef ($9.95). Both are fairly spicy, but the pork is not overwhelmed by the garlic, nor the beef by the orange peel and hot pepper.
　　Another good entree we tried was the yu-ling duck ($9.50), though I was surprised it came with a much heavier sauce than I have ever seen on this dish. Still, the duck itself is very tasty.
　　All in all, the Oriental Star is a welcome find-a cut or two above the average, with some extra touches on top of that, all reasonably priced.

　　There is wizardry afoot in a large number of Washington area restaurants, where the skill for counterfeiting meat has become rather sophisticated. Even without a blindfold, it is often impossible to tell. Get up close and inspect the grain. Breath deep its waft. Feel it yield to the fork, and to the tooth. Text for “bounce.” Mutton isn’t dressing up as lamb, soy is.
　　According to the National Restaurant. Association, one in five dinners now looks for a vegetarian meal when dining out. And judging by the number of sports offering mock meat, these vegetarians are hungry for something with a bit more bite that a lentil casserole, but just as healthy (high in protein, low in fat and cholesterol).
Raised on the meatiest of British diets, I was the first to sneer at these alleged substitutes. I love my meats – my roast beefs, my burgers, my porky sausages. Can’t get enough of them. So, I proclaimed boldly, let me be the judge of these so-called meats. Hearing rumors of some particularly good versions, I hurried off to the following eateries to taste for myself.
-Alexa Beattie
　　Oriental Star Restaurant. Did someone say mock shrimp? Yes, the girl behind the counter at this Chinese-Thai fusion restaurant. Oriental has one of the most extensive vegetarian menus because if offers a mock version of almost every dish. But the “shrimp” are particularly remarkable-little cocked pinkies of dried soybean curd, the closest in comparison to real meat in look, taste and feel. Note the veiny bodies, the bounce-back. I struggled for a texture to compare these beauties with, and all I came up with was this: shrimp. (Oriental’s “pork,” by the way, is more hammy than ham.) Prices: $8.75-$10.25.
3221 Duke St., Alexandria. 703-370-4100

The Star:
　　An Oriental cut above
　　By JEFF BARON
　　Journal staff writer
　　I was eating a bowl of seafood and vegetable soup at the Oriental Star when an orange butterfly floated by.
This is not the sort of experience you would expect at the typical bargain Chinese restaurant, but the Oriental Star is not a typical bargain Chinese restaurant.
　　This is a restaurant that makes the effort to carve the carrots for its soup into butterflies, birds and flowers. It turns out some excellent Chinese dishes – and Thai dishes – in a perfectly nice setting and happens to charge bargain prices for them.
　　The nice setting (shades of light gray and gray-brown, right down to the place mats) is in a typical narrow storefront restaurant at the Hechinger Commons on Duke Street. The service is equally pleasant, and helpful to boot, with a minimal language barrier.
　　But that’s all to be expected in a nice new shopping center. The first surprise is the menu, with its smattering of “Thai style” dishes among the Chinese.
　　And the Thai dishes are for real, with the right spicing. In fact, I suspect the challenge at Oriental Star is to decide what type of food to eat, or whether it’s OK to mix and match. (It certainly is as far as I am concerned, and the waiters do not seem to mind.)