Oyster battle coming to North End street

I imagine most people who dine in the North End and the restaurateurs who serve them actually care. It's just that your (and my) idea of what constitutes worthwhile dining doesn't include what most of the North End serves, what I call "Jersey Shore Italian": the immigrant cuisine of Sicilian and Campanian immigrants to these shores in the late 19th-century that has undergone 100 years of adaptation to local ingredients and tastes.

It is what it is, and what it is is something that a huge chunk of the dining public likes: familiar, unchallenging red-sauce dishes in big portions for the money. Hordes of locals and tourists alike crowd Mike's, which prefills its cannoli, a damnable sin, ignoring the clearly superior Maria's and The Modern. People line up for the Cheesecake Factory, too, and take umbrage when a Globe reviewer correctly skewers the god-awful Union Oyster House as an execrable tourist trap.

I agree that there are some North End operators who are miserable crooks: price-gouging (watch out for those daily specials with the unspecified prices), refusing to serve anything but bottled water, etc. I don't care for turn-and-burn shops, either: no reservations, no liquor, no dessert, and they drop your check with the entree. Some of the marketing is hilariously awful, like Nick Varano's ring-a-ding-swinging third-rate Sopranos-wannabe shtick.

But even beyond the eight or so N. End restaurants I actually like (most of which do some slightly Americanized version of more contemporary traditional Italian regional cuisines), I think most operators are earnest businesspeople giving their customers what they want. It's just that there's no accounting for taste, especially mass taste.

And I do dine out in Boston now and again.

I agree that it's not a place to order The General, even though I frequently see white people doing that there. But it does fantastic live-tank seafood and very good traditional Cantonese cuisine.

What's your idea of good Chinese food, TDK?