This is an actual Chinese restaurant. The chef and waitstaff are Chinese---and not from Wenzhou or Guangdong, thank God---and so too are the majority of the customers. Even stranger, the restaurant is new, clean, and modern-looking, like restaurants that people go to in China, unlike Europeans who prefer to eat their Chinese food in the dank, depressing hospital-like environment of your typical traiteur asiatique. This is an actual Chinese menu you find yourself holding. It has pictures, and aesthetic ones at that, and you kind of want to eat all the things you see, and there are some oddities of the French language in this menu, and no one really cares. This is a real Chinese waitress coming to serve you. She is somewhat poorly dressed with bad posture and a look of complete bureaucratic disinterest on her face. She is not impressed with you, your happiness does not matter to her at all; she would be sad if you died, but only because it would mean she would need to fill out the necessary paperwork before ending her shift. You greet her: 「好久不見!」Expressionless, she responds 「那是因爲你不來。」 Yes! This is it! The sort of studied indignity that is the aperitif of any truly great Chinese meal. This is real Chinese food that arrives at your table. It is hot; it is well-presented on modern plates. It has not touched a microwave. "Chinese food can be like this?" your French friend asks. "Yes, it can," you answer with a mischievous grin, and you dig in. This is your sick friend, in front of you, who wants to leave but is polite enough to wait for you to finish slurping the greasy napalm that is acting rapidly inside of her. 「吃哪兒補哪兒」, you want to tell her, munching on a piece of tripe as you watch the poor girl try to pretend that her stomach lining is not liquefying in heat, and nor that her liver is flailing in the sea of oil and fat that it has been plunged. This is your friend never wanting to come back, but this is fine, because this is not a restaurant for her. The restaurant is IN France, yes, and French customers are free to come and go as they like, but their presence here is but an unexpected geographic accident and by no means the point, and the lengths to which they've gone to hide the restaurant from accidental passers-by is testament to that. Quatre amis does not compromise. It is what it is, and you must either accept it or leave it to the throngs of homesick Chinese customers for whom it is really run. read more