There are several advantages to dining in Chinatown during lunch. For one, if you’re unfamiliar with the area, daylight makes it infinitely easier to navigate the often obscure and foreign signage, reducing the probability of getting lost.

Second, the lunch specials in Chinatown are downright cheap, usually ringing in at $5 or less.

And third, because it’s so inexpensive, you can order several dishes and have enough to take home for dinner.

This week, I decided to try a new place that opened a few doors down from the Golden Foods Supermarket. Its name, Shanghai Restaurant, is easy to remember but a bit confusing, because there’s another restaurant by the same name located on the same street just a few blocks down. This particular Shanghai has a 35-item $4.75 lunch special, which includes soup, white rice and hot tea from 11 am to 4 pm Monday through Friday.

As I enter the restaurant, I am greeted by the sight of steamed buns on display at the window. A waitress gets up and gives me the traditional Cantonese greeting “Ni hao” to welcome me, and then gestures to a table for me to be seated.

At this point, two waitresses come to the table, one to get my drink, another to get my food order. They are both obsequious and polite despite an obvious language barrier. I ask them for a recommendation, but they don’t understand what I’m saying. So I ask more slowly and use smaller words, asking things like “What is good?” and “What do you like?” until I see a spark of recognition in their eyes indicating comprehension.

We finally settle on beef with broccoli and sweet and sour spareribs, but when the order came out, I got salt and pepper spareribs instead. I guess the server understood less than I thought.The beef with broccoli had a healthy dose of garlic and was full of flavor, but the meat wasn’t as tender as I would have liked. Nonetheless, the portion was generous and I quite enjoyed this dish. The salt and spicy pork ribs were a bit on the greasy side and less flavorful than I’ve had elsewhere. I’d probably give the ribs a B- and skip them next time.

I looked around to see what other people were ordering, and a Chinese gentleman behind me was finishing off what looked to be a full-sized tilapia with brown sauce, also available on the lunch menu. The adjacent table had some good-looking sautéed string beans with ground pork, stir-fried clams with basil and kung pao chicken, which I would try if I came back.

The ambience of this restaurant was rather dingy and unremarkable. I appreciated that the servers were conscientious even though we had some trouble with communication. Patronage was primarily Chinese, but there were a couple of mixed tables as well. What I did notice was this: There wasn’t a single table where only one dish was ordered, and even after eating heartily, everyone took home a small to-go box.

SHANGHAI RESTAURANT, 9888 Bellaire Blvd. #6 at Corporate, 713-771-8825