双色鱼头, 猪脸, 干锅鳝鱼腊肉, 等等…… Shuāngsè yútóu, zhūliǎn, gānguō shànyú làròu...
聚湘园湘菜酒楼 Jù Xiāng Yuán Xiāngcài Jiǔlóu
Two-tone fish head, pork head, eel and bacon hot pot, etc.
Bushuair / Aroma Garden
4600 Number Three Road, Richmond
An afternoon. Starting early. A strip mall, in Richmond. A Hunan restaurant.
Beside the Skytrain tracks. A concrete bridge, trains racketing down Number Three Road.
The Empire Centre, past where Hon's has been emptied out for a buffet joint that just never opens.
Inside the front door, smiling Mao portrait above eye-level.
A long, messy room. Ornate box lantern light fixtures. Construction paper and Sharpie menus tacked to the wall. Beer posters.
Above our table, the image of Mao, on the beach, with his long black trenchcoat. Mao, on the beach at Beidaihe, the Communist Party's resort. Beidaihe, on the Hebei coast-- now, a sort of cute anachronism, abandoned by the cadres, who are in Paris buying luggage or in Macao for a "meeting" or in Vancouver to check on real estate....
You can hear the wind blowing across the beach, the waves, the flapping of the trenchcoat. In '54, when that famous picture was taken by Hou Bo, Mao's personal photographer... the Chairman wrote a poem:
A rainstorm sweeps down on the northern land,
White breakers leap to the sky.
No fishing boats off Qinhuangdao
Are seen on the boundless ocean.
Where are they gone?
Nearly two thousand years ago
Wielding his whip, the Emperor Weiwu
Rode eastward to Jieshi; his poem survives.
Today the autumn wind still sighs,
But the world has changed!
大雨落幽燕，
白浪滔天，
秦皇岛外打鱼船。
一片汪洋都不见，
知向谁边？
往事越千年，
魏武挥鞭，
东临碣石有遗篇。
萧瑟秋风今又是，
换了人间。
You hear the wind and the poem. The image, for me, is tied to the poem is tied to the image, "...the world has changed!"
Watching us eat, while he thinks up epic poetry.
Us: there's me, and Jacob... from Fuzhou, who speaks in a mixture of Mandarin, English, lots and lots of poker metaphors, Fujianese, Cantonese... and Bin... who is silent and serious but doesn't look silent or serious and who nobody realizes is silent or serious... and Yi Lan... from Anhui, like a meaner, harder Wang Fei, Chungking Express Wang Fei, skinny arms, high-and-tight haircut, listening to "California Dreamin'" and hooking up a chef salad for Tony Leung-- that's how I remember her, but it's only the haircut.
Jacob and Bin are chefs, and Yi Lan came to Canada with a family from Tianjin. She'd lived with them in Tianjin, since she was a kid. She cooked and cleaned and looked after kids and was repaid with room and board and a bit of money to send home. She was swept along to Canada, where she got her own room, again, and her own bit of money, again.
We don't look at the menu. The three of them have been here enough times.
The two waitresses arrive. Two in a team. They line up and launch into an unintentional xiàngsheng 相声 routine, a Vaudeville sketch of an introduction... great double act, the girl from up north acting comic foil and the girl from down south as the funny man. Southern girl: "I came to make sure she didn't screw up. She's a little bit dumb." Northern girl: cocked head, fluttering eyelashes. Hehe.
Jacob asks, "Fish head? Pig head?" All right, all right. And eel, too.
And an order of plain boiled noodles. A little routine with the tall, southern girl begins, as she asks how that should be written on her notepad. "Just write boiled noodles." "But do you want them with water?" "No, just on a plate." "Fried noodles, on a plate. Got it!" "No, not fried-- boiled." "But you said no water." Back and forth, back and forth. Until it's settled.
Jacob pulls a tall, clear bottle of èrguōtóu 二锅头 from somewhere and calls to girls to bring four glasses. Yi Lan: "Three. Just three."
The metal dish of eel and bacon comes out first, the straight man northern girl setting it on the table--what? Why doesn't stand it up? And the other girl rushing over. "She's a little bit dumb. I told you." And carefully setting up the little stand, the can of fuel to be set underneath it.
Sizzling.
The eel. Rolled up into inside-out tubes, with a rubbery flakey texture. The soft black skin floats off them like skin from the roof of your mouth after a sufficient burn from a sip of hot tea. A fishy sweetness. And the bacon, chewy fatty salty chopped up playing cards of pork. Milky stained glass fat. Stirred up in a crowd of dried chilies and sunburnt garlic and charred green onion. A chopsticked bundle of pork and eel on the tongue-- a sip of liquor and another mouthful and you're suddenly a supertaster: the sweetness of the eel and the salty smoke of the bacon magnified a hundred times against a head of distilled sorghum fumes.
Like good drinkers should, they drink without ceremony. Only the occasional tap of glasses or courtesy refilling. Down at one end of the table, Jacob and Bin talk about what men talk about while eating and drinking. "No matter how good you treat her, she'll never realize it. That's how women are. You can work yourself until you're dead and she'll never realize how good she has it." On and on. Pausing to ask Yi Lan for confirmation, "Isn't that right?" Blank expression.
The tall southern girl slips out again, chatty, while her straight man lurks behind her. It's late afternoon and the lunch crowd is gone and the dinner crowd hasn't arrived. She used to play basketball, at university or something. But gave it up to follow her husband to Canada. She's tall.
A ding, and the two waitresses jump back to the kitchen.
Come back with: a plate of pork face. Sliced up and braised up, so you aren't going to recognize the face. A seven layer cake of skin/fat/meat/fat/fat/fat-meat/fat, stirfried with garlic shoots.
And now.
A plate of fish head. Big ol' carp head. Split down the middle, one side red and the other side green. Two-tone. Side one: duòjiāo 剁椒, salted chilies, chopped up into bright red pepper dimes. Side two: jiàngjiāo 酱椒, pickled green chilies flavored with a bit of soy sauce.
And now.
A plate of boiled noodles.
The boys head out to smoke in the doorway, kicking around in front of the strip mall, while Yi Lan motherly/surgically scrapes the red and the green chilies mashed into the fish face and begins separating meat from bone. She digs into every canyon, crevice made by the soft fish head bones, stripping out soft white meat... grey brain matter... pearly eyeballs... unidentifiables, faintly luminescent like scar tissue.
Back.
We crash the noodles down on the plate and stir together meat and brain and pickled chilies into a crazy muddle. Everything glows with chili oil. The sound at the table is the little sucks of air everyone takes, breezing cool air over harassed tongues.
So hot. Rich with fatty fish head oil. Salty, rich.
And now.
A plate of pea shoots, stirfried for a second and heaped into a pyramid, floating in a shallow puddle of green soup.
A plate of blanched mustard greens, pressed tofu: the color and texture of Pecorino but the flavor of warm soymilk.
Tongues numb from heat.
Full.
Jacob lays his head down on Bin's belly, rubs it tenderly.
The tall girl calls from a booth at the back, "We're gonna eat now. Just call us if you need anything." And a murmur and then, "Oh, she's going to take a nap, but you can still call me."
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Back again...
牛肉拉面 Niúròu lāmiàn,
西安小吃 Xī'ān Xiǎochī
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng
Pulled noodles with beef
Xi'an Cuisine
Richmond Public Market
The end of the month, when the money's already spent.... That's how I've always been, scraping up change at the end of the month. It's always been the case that I'd rather spend now, worry later. I've almost come to enjoy that space at the end of the month (hopefully just the end of the month), when I'm scraping. Sometimes it's easier to enjoy things when the money's spent. Sometimes those meals at the end of the month are the best.
Always been like this. When I lived in Xuzhou, scraping like I've always scraped at the end of the month. I'd get a bowl of noodles, some place cheap. I had a few end-of-the-month go-to spots: the cart across from the library, where a lady sold bǎnmiàn 板面 with big flat noodles, spicy clumps of beef, chickpeas... or, the dàndànmiàn 担担面 place tucked into an old city alley (I remember eating there everyday for a week, meal after meal)... or, the seemingly identical Lánzhōu lāmiàn 兰州拉面 joints.
Lánzhōu 兰州 is a big, dusty city, way out west, further down the road from Xī'ān, another big, dusty city. It's famous for beef noodles. So, they've got the big sign that advertises Lánzhōu zhèngzōng niúròu lāmiàn 兰州正宗牛肉拉面, authentic Lanzhou-style pulled noodles with beef. Always the big blue sign with mosques and goats on it, two handy identifiers. They advertise: xīběi fēngwèi 西北风味, Northwestern flavor, mínzú tèsè 民族特色, ethnic style.
They look identical, just buzzing past them on the street. They're far from identical. They might say Lánzhōu lāmiàn on the sign, but the family running the place is just as likely to be from Qīnghǎi 青海 (even further west!) or from Xīnjiāng 新疆 (even further west!). Some are run y Huí 回, Chinese Muslims, ethnically Hàn 汉 Chinese, but Muslim, but lots are run by non-Hàn nationalities.
You can hear dozens of accents, languages in them. VCD players playing soppy homesick music, usually. On the walls, they might have respectful, sorta chaste Uighur pinup posters and pictures of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. On the walls, they might have huge panorama posters of Qinghai Lake, way up on the Tibetan Plateau.
There was a certain homesick outsider identification, too, in those places. The proprietors from Qīnghǎi or from Xīnjiāng or from Gānsù are Chinese, sure, but they'd be almost as out-of-place on a Chinese street as I was, speaking with the wrong accent and wearing the wrong clothes, whatever. Foreign faces.
Those places, they look identical but... you can order cumin beef at one place, and get something soupy, rich with tomato, peppers. And the place down the road--the storefront looks exactly the same--but the cumin beef is crispy, fried in a hot, dry pan with chilies and whole cumin.
The beef noodles, hundreds of ways of making them. The broth might be cloudy from lamb bones, or absolutely clear. It might be served with cilantro, or not, or green onions, or not, or a quick splash of vinegar and chili oil, or it might be left up to you to add those.
But the price is always the same.
Now, my end-of-the-month-broke-as-heck go-to place is the Richmond Public Market, a short walk down Granville, then up Buswell. A walk through the buzzing downstairs, market. A walk up the escalator and around the corner. I get the same thing, too, pulled noodles with beef.
It's always the Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃 slot in the Public Market, where I've eaten hundreds of meals, made small talk hundreds of times with whoever was at the counter, passed over hundreds of handfuls of change for hundreds of bowls of noodles.
I know how long it takes to make them, now, on a slow afternoon. The timer starts as soon as I make the order, and I wander around upstairs, peek in on some games of checkers--the call comes, NIúuuuuuuRRRòu lāaaaamiàn hǎoLLLIIiieeeee! 牛肉拉面好咧! The untranscribable call of Mr. Duan, behind the counter.
(Untranscribable. It's that Shǎnxī 陕西 accent, which adds the same rolling R as a Beijing growl but probably sounds closer to Northern Mandarin spoken with an Irish accent).
I grab my bowl, on its plastic tray. I drop a glug of black vinegar on top, from that same sticky bottle. I paint a line of chili oil across the top.
Like everything Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃, it's straight comfort food.
I think they have the best pulled noodles in the city. Or, they're my favorite, at least. Every strand is almost uniform, and then you'll come across one chewy little flat note strand in the mix. Perfect chew to it.
Broth, clear with a boney cloud flickered through it. The vinegar slips in and clouds it further. Pale flavor, which goes perfect with vinegar floating through it and chili oil resting on top.
End-of-the-month meal, savored like this: first, eat every leafy green-- second, eat each slice of beef in the bowl-- third, slowly work through the noodles-- fourth, long, slow sips of the broth, every drop.
It's the end of the month.
==
Previous visits to Xi'an Cuisine/Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃:
My usual, when I ate steamed pork with rice flour and preserved eggs.
Pork fat and white bread, when I ate ròujiāmó 肉夹馍.
西安小吃 Xī'ān Xiǎochī
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng
Pulled noodles with beef
Xi'an Cuisine
Richmond Public Market
The end of the month, when the money's already spent.... That's how I've always been, scraping up change at the end of the month. It's always been the case that I'd rather spend now, worry later. I've almost come to enjoy that space at the end of the month (hopefully just the end of the month), when I'm scraping. Sometimes it's easier to enjoy things when the money's spent. Sometimes those meals at the end of the month are the best.
Always been like this. When I lived in Xuzhou, scraping like I've always scraped at the end of the month. I'd get a bowl of noodles, some place cheap. I had a few end-of-the-month go-to spots: the cart across from the library, where a lady sold bǎnmiàn 板面 with big flat noodles, spicy clumps of beef, chickpeas... or, the dàndànmiàn 担担面 place tucked into an old city alley (I remember eating there everyday for a week, meal after meal)... or, the seemingly identical Lánzhōu lāmiàn 兰州拉面 joints.
Lánzhōu 兰州 is a big, dusty city, way out west, further down the road from Xī'ān, another big, dusty city. It's famous for beef noodles. So, they've got the big sign that advertises Lánzhōu zhèngzōng niúròu lāmiàn 兰州正宗牛肉拉面, authentic Lanzhou-style pulled noodles with beef. Always the big blue sign with mosques and goats on it, two handy identifiers. They advertise: xīběi fēngwèi 西北风味, Northwestern flavor, mínzú tèsè 民族特色, ethnic style.
They look identical, just buzzing past them on the street. They're far from identical. They might say Lánzhōu lāmiàn on the sign, but the family running the place is just as likely to be from Qīnghǎi 青海 (even further west!) or from Xīnjiāng 新疆 (even further west!). Some are run y Huí 回, Chinese Muslims, ethnically Hàn 汉 Chinese, but Muslim, but lots are run by non-Hàn nationalities.
You can hear dozens of accents, languages in them. VCD players playing soppy homesick music, usually. On the walls, they might have respectful, sorta chaste Uighur pinup posters and pictures of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. On the walls, they might have huge panorama posters of Qinghai Lake, way up on the Tibetan Plateau.
There was a certain homesick outsider identification, too, in those places. The proprietors from Qīnghǎi or from Xīnjiāng or from Gānsù are Chinese, sure, but they'd be almost as out-of-place on a Chinese street as I was, speaking with the wrong accent and wearing the wrong clothes, whatever. Foreign faces.
Those places, they look identical but... you can order cumin beef at one place, and get something soupy, rich with tomato, peppers. And the place down the road--the storefront looks exactly the same--but the cumin beef is crispy, fried in a hot, dry pan with chilies and whole cumin.
The beef noodles, hundreds of ways of making them. The broth might be cloudy from lamb bones, or absolutely clear. It might be served with cilantro, or not, or green onions, or not, or a quick splash of vinegar and chili oil, or it might be left up to you to add those.
But the price is always the same.
Now, my end-of-the-month-broke-as-heck go-to place is the Richmond Public Market, a short walk down Granville, then up Buswell. A walk through the buzzing downstairs, market. A walk up the escalator and around the corner. I get the same thing, too, pulled noodles with beef.
It's always the Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃 slot in the Public Market, where I've eaten hundreds of meals, made small talk hundreds of times with whoever was at the counter, passed over hundreds of handfuls of change for hundreds of bowls of noodles.
I know how long it takes to make them, now, on a slow afternoon. The timer starts as soon as I make the order, and I wander around upstairs, peek in on some games of checkers--the call comes, NIúuuuuuuRRRòu lāaaaamiàn hǎoLLLIIiieeeee! 牛肉拉面好咧! The untranscribable call of Mr. Duan, behind the counter.
(Untranscribable. It's that Shǎnxī 陕西 accent, which adds the same rolling R as a Beijing growl but probably sounds closer to Northern Mandarin spoken with an Irish accent).
I grab my bowl, on its plastic tray. I drop a glug of black vinegar on top, from that same sticky bottle. I paint a line of chili oil across the top.
Like everything Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃, it's straight comfort food.
I think they have the best pulled noodles in the city. Or, they're my favorite, at least. Every strand is almost uniform, and then you'll come across one chewy little flat note strand in the mix. Perfect chew to it.
Broth, clear with a boney cloud flickered through it. The vinegar slips in and clouds it further. Pale flavor, which goes perfect with vinegar floating through it and chili oil resting on top.
End-of-the-month meal, savored like this: first, eat every leafy green-- second, eat each slice of beef in the bowl-- third, slowly work through the noodles-- fourth, long, slow sips of the broth, every drop.
It's the end of the month.
==
Previous visits to Xi'an Cuisine/Xī'ān Xiǎochī 西安小吃:
My usual, when I ate steamed pork with rice flour and preserved eggs.
Pork fat and white bread, when I ate ròujiāmó 肉夹馍.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Brief notes on a Sichuan restaurant: restaurants vs. food courts / consistency / rabbit heads
葱香腰花, 歌乐山辣子鸡, 五香辣子兔头 Cōngxiāng yāohuā, Gēlèshān làzijī, wǔxiāng làzi tùtóu,
川香阁 Chuānxiāng Gé
Kidney "flowers" with green onion, Geleshan-style chicken with chilies, five-spice rabbit head with chilies,
Mascot Enterprises Inc./Chuanxiang Ge
8211 Westminster Highway, Richmond
Notes:
+++ As much time as I spend in restaurants, I rarely feel comfortable in them. It takes a lot for me to really settle into a place, feel comfortable, relax.
There's the atmosphere, the people, and then there's the food. I'll be honest: the food rarely does it for me like homecooked food, or rougher, streethearted food from a food court. It just doesn't hit the same notes.
That rougher, simple food is the solid, memorymaking stuff. This week, the best, best, best thing I ate was ice cold noodles with chili oil: homemade wheat noodles just dipped in boiling water, then left to cool and get all starchy and gummy; and bright red oil, infused with chili and cassia and anise and cardamom and black pepper and Sichuan peppercorn and sesame; a bit of fried garlic and green onion. Homemade stuff. Mu-Mu brought it to me--her dad made it--in a Yoplait container. She knows I never cook for myself. It was beautiful. It was simple.
The second best thing was tomato and egg noodles from Xi'an Cuisine in the Richmond Public Market. It wasn't homemade but close enough. It's a bowl of just cooked egg, soupy salty tomato, and pulled noodles. That's the food I love.
Restaurants--real sitdown joints, with bills and cash registers and waitresses--just rarely press those buttons, for me.
I find a lot of Chinese restaurants are stuck with an unnecessary formality. They've got white tablecloths but they don't need them. The waitresses are carefully uniformed, stiff, surly. It's not formal enough to feel formal and not informal enough to feel informal. I like Nine Dishes because of the atmosphere: you sit where you want, you chat with the table next to you, you meet people, it gets noisy.
Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, I always dug the food, but it was never a place I wanted to spend much time. Some nights it's all right. It can get a little noisier, things loosen up. But most of the time, the atmosphere is still a bit grim. After grinding through a few months of empty dining rooms, things seem to be picking up, but it can still be deathly silent.
+++ When you see the food coming out of the Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁 kitchen, you'll notice crazy swings between pale, bland stirfried dishes and glowing red, oiled out stuff. You can break it down into three types, 1) a mix of straight up Canadian west coast Sichuan food, like you'd see at Szechuan Chongqing or any of those lump-them-all-together northern Chinese restaurants; everything thick and shiny from cornstarch, 2) cleancut takes on Sichuan classics, everything in its right place, 3) real deal unpretty Sichuan streetstyle food that takes the good stuff and pushes it, oil and chili right at the point where it's almost too much.
I prefer the third category. Just personal preference, you know? But the trick is successfully ordering the one you want. You can ask for it, but it doesn't mean you'll get it.
+++
-- Cōngxiāng yāohuā 葱香腰花, a basic, canonical dish, with green onion heaped on pork kidney-- green onion meant to cover up the supposedly repellent odor of kidney (xīngsāo 腥臊-- would be the word to describe the smell). The kidney is crosshatched, sliced so that it opens--blossoms--as it cooks.
You're eating right next door to a butcher shop and the kidney is fresh. It's cooked so that it's got a bit of a bounce but a creamy texture as you get to the core. Everything is drenched in a hot bath of chili oil, which is hot enough to wilt and absorb the pyramid of green onion stacked on top.
-- Gēlèshān làzijī 歌乐山辣子鸡： like a lot of canonical Sichuan dishes, this is a recent invention that's based on a long tradition. And, like a lot recent inventions in Sichuanese food, it's from Chongqing.
It can be traced to one very specific place: Chongqing's Shāpíngbà Qū 沙坪坝区, Shapingba District, a town called Gēlèshān 歌乐山 and a restaurant near a scenic spot called Lín Yuán 林园 (there's a saying: 不游林园，不算到重庆-- if you've never been to Lin Garden, you've never been to Chongqing). The fame of this specific take on chicken with chilies was spread locally by taxi drivers ferrying people out to see the gardens and nearby Cíqìkǒu 磁器口, a semi-preserved old town/tourist trap.
Branding it with a specific time and place is part of the appeal. It's a dish with a history of only a couple decades, but clearly comes from a greater tradition. It's simple: chicken diced up into bitesize pieces and flashfried in the hottest oil possible, then fried again in a dry pan with a mountain of chilies, a bit of green onion, a bit of ginger, a bit of garlic.
At Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, the chicken has been puffed into crunchy, oily 1/10th size McNuggets and buried in a haystack of red chili. Spicy, full of bones, oily. The smokiness of the dry pan. The char on the chilies, which have been crisped until brittle, brick red. The chunks of garlic and ginger.
-- 五香辣子兔头 wǔxiāng làzi tùtóu, five spice rabbit head with chilies-- I remember reading the reviews of Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, all the homesick kids tripping on the lǔwèi tùtóu 卤味兔头, rabbit heads marinated/braised with dark soy sauce and anise. Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁 is located right beside a butcher shop, which sells rabbits and other slightly exotic meat, so it makes sense.
These are the same marinated rabbit heads, returned to a pan for a quick toss with a Big Gulp worth of oil, a maniac toss of chilies; and Sichuan peppercorn, ginger, garlic in there, too. A plate full of rattling rabbit skulls, draped with dark brown anise-scented ragged zombie flesh.
I remember, Xuzhou, the dog meat sellers near the train station set up their baskets of braised dog meat with a dog skull resting on top. To show that it's the real deal. Those rabbit heads, bobbing in chili oil, reminded me of those long, angular canine skulls, miniaturized-- nibbling little front teeth, instead of fangs.
When I chopstick one up--waitress is standing over me to make sure nothing goes wrong--and nibble away at the meat wrapping the cranium, nibbling away with my one two front rabbit teeth...--it's good, tender. But focusing on the flavor is missing the point: the grapple, the time-consuming exploration of the food.
The point is the complex deconstruction, gently teasing joints apart, cracking bones to get at soft innards, tearing it down. Part of the appeal of eating something like rabbit heads is you can't just pop them in your mouth. Like a crab, a fish head, it's something like a puzzle, a maze.
+++ Xinran and food rules: she once decided that we couldn't eat anywhere that employed staff. So, mom-and-pop places were okay. Immediate family was exempted from the staff category, so it was okay if they put a son or a cousin to work.
It sounds like a severe rule. But in practice, we rarely broke it. I still rarely break it. I eat in food courts, and my favorite restaurants still fit (i.e. Nine Dishes).
But Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁... it rewards dedication; you keep going until they know your face, until you've made small talk with them a dozen times. Then, you know, it's not the same experience as ordering off a counter, face-to-face with the cook, but it feels a bit warmer.
川香阁 Chuānxiāng Gé
Kidney "flowers" with green onion, Geleshan-style chicken with chilies, five-spice rabbit head with chilies,
Mascot Enterprises Inc./Chuanxiang Ge
8211 Westminster Highway, Richmond
Notes:
+++ As much time as I spend in restaurants, I rarely feel comfortable in them. It takes a lot for me to really settle into a place, feel comfortable, relax.
There's the atmosphere, the people, and then there's the food. I'll be honest: the food rarely does it for me like homecooked food, or rougher, streethearted food from a food court. It just doesn't hit the same notes.
That rougher, simple food is the solid, memorymaking stuff. This week, the best, best, best thing I ate was ice cold noodles with chili oil: homemade wheat noodles just dipped in boiling water, then left to cool and get all starchy and gummy; and bright red oil, infused with chili and cassia and anise and cardamom and black pepper and Sichuan peppercorn and sesame; a bit of fried garlic and green onion. Homemade stuff. Mu-Mu brought it to me--her dad made it--in a Yoplait container. She knows I never cook for myself. It was beautiful. It was simple.
The second best thing was tomato and egg noodles from Xi'an Cuisine in the Richmond Public Market. It wasn't homemade but close enough. It's a bowl of just cooked egg, soupy salty tomato, and pulled noodles. That's the food I love.
Restaurants--real sitdown joints, with bills and cash registers and waitresses--just rarely press those buttons, for me.
I find a lot of Chinese restaurants are stuck with an unnecessary formality. They've got white tablecloths but they don't need them. The waitresses are carefully uniformed, stiff, surly. It's not formal enough to feel formal and not informal enough to feel informal. I like Nine Dishes because of the atmosphere: you sit where you want, you chat with the table next to you, you meet people, it gets noisy.
Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, I always dug the food, but it was never a place I wanted to spend much time. Some nights it's all right. It can get a little noisier, things loosen up. But most of the time, the atmosphere is still a bit grim. After grinding through a few months of empty dining rooms, things seem to be picking up, but it can still be deathly silent.
+++ When you see the food coming out of the Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁 kitchen, you'll notice crazy swings between pale, bland stirfried dishes and glowing red, oiled out stuff. You can break it down into three types, 1) a mix of straight up Canadian west coast Sichuan food, like you'd see at Szechuan Chongqing or any of those lump-them-all-together northern Chinese restaurants; everything thick and shiny from cornstarch, 2) cleancut takes on Sichuan classics, everything in its right place, 3) real deal unpretty Sichuan streetstyle food that takes the good stuff and pushes it, oil and chili right at the point where it's almost too much.
I prefer the third category. Just personal preference, you know? But the trick is successfully ordering the one you want. You can ask for it, but it doesn't mean you'll get it.
+++
-- Cōngxiāng yāohuā 葱香腰花, a basic, canonical dish, with green onion heaped on pork kidney-- green onion meant to cover up the supposedly repellent odor of kidney (xīngsāo 腥臊-- would be the word to describe the smell). The kidney is crosshatched, sliced so that it opens--blossoms--as it cooks.
You're eating right next door to a butcher shop and the kidney is fresh. It's cooked so that it's got a bit of a bounce but a creamy texture as you get to the core. Everything is drenched in a hot bath of chili oil, which is hot enough to wilt and absorb the pyramid of green onion stacked on top.
-- Gēlèshān làzijī 歌乐山辣子鸡： like a lot of canonical Sichuan dishes, this is a recent invention that's based on a long tradition. And, like a lot recent inventions in Sichuanese food, it's from Chongqing.
It can be traced to one very specific place: Chongqing's Shāpíngbà Qū 沙坪坝区, Shapingba District, a town called Gēlèshān 歌乐山 and a restaurant near a scenic spot called Lín Yuán 林园 (there's a saying: 不游林园，不算到重庆-- if you've never been to Lin Garden, you've never been to Chongqing). The fame of this specific take on chicken with chilies was spread locally by taxi drivers ferrying people out to see the gardens and nearby Cíqìkǒu 磁器口, a semi-preserved old town/tourist trap.
Branding it with a specific time and place is part of the appeal. It's a dish with a history of only a couple decades, but clearly comes from a greater tradition. It's simple: chicken diced up into bitesize pieces and flashfried in the hottest oil possible, then fried again in a dry pan with a mountain of chilies, a bit of green onion, a bit of ginger, a bit of garlic.
At Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, the chicken has been puffed into crunchy, oily 1/10th size McNuggets and buried in a haystack of red chili. Spicy, full of bones, oily. The smokiness of the dry pan. The char on the chilies, which have been crisped until brittle, brick red. The chunks of garlic and ginger.
-- 五香辣子兔头 wǔxiāng làzi tùtóu, five spice rabbit head with chilies-- I remember reading the reviews of Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁, all the homesick kids tripping on the lǔwèi tùtóu 卤味兔头, rabbit heads marinated/braised with dark soy sauce and anise. Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁 is located right beside a butcher shop, which sells rabbits and other slightly exotic meat, so it makes sense.
These are the same marinated rabbit heads, returned to a pan for a quick toss with a Big Gulp worth of oil, a maniac toss of chilies; and Sichuan peppercorn, ginger, garlic in there, too. A plate full of rattling rabbit skulls, draped with dark brown anise-scented ragged zombie flesh.
I remember, Xuzhou, the dog meat sellers near the train station set up their baskets of braised dog meat with a dog skull resting on top. To show that it's the real deal. Those rabbit heads, bobbing in chili oil, reminded me of those long, angular canine skulls, miniaturized-- nibbling little front teeth, instead of fangs.
When I chopstick one up--waitress is standing over me to make sure nothing goes wrong--and nibble away at the meat wrapping the cranium, nibbling away with my one two front rabbit teeth...--it's good, tender. But focusing on the flavor is missing the point: the grapple, the time-consuming exploration of the food.
The point is the complex deconstruction, gently teasing joints apart, cracking bones to get at soft innards, tearing it down. Part of the appeal of eating something like rabbit heads is you can't just pop them in your mouth. Like a crab, a fish head, it's something like a puzzle, a maze.
+++ Xinran and food rules: she once decided that we couldn't eat anywhere that employed staff. So, mom-and-pop places were okay. Immediate family was exempted from the staff category, so it was okay if they put a son or a cousin to work.
It sounds like a severe rule. But in practice, we rarely broke it. I still rarely break it. I eat in food courts, and my favorite restaurants still fit (i.e. Nine Dishes).
But Chuānxiāng Gé 川香阁... it rewards dedication; you keep going until they know your face, until you've made small talk with them a dozen times. Then, you know, it's not the same experience as ordering off a counter, face-to-face with the cook, but it feels a bit warmer.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Authenticity, some old poems, then pork in bread.
肉夹馍 Ròujiāmó,
鹿鸣春 Lùmíngchūn
八佰伴中心， 列治文 Bābǎibàn Zhōngxīn, Lièzhìwén
Braised pork buns,
Lumingchun Food Company
Yaohan Centre
3700 Number Three Road, Richmond
Shoot, a lot of people talk about authenticity. I'm talking about food people. They might just throw out a word like "authentic," without seeming to mean much by it. I do it, too. With Chinese regional food, it can be too easy: there've often been deadly serious discussions of how a food should be made, how each ingredient should be prepared. And that holds true whether the origins of the dish are lost, or if it was invented by a Sichuan hotel chef in 1991.
Ròujiāmó 肉夹馍, despite being a very simple thing--bread, meat--is no exception. If you go back to what I said before, you'll see that it has history, rules. There are discussions about whether the bread can be baked over anything but charcoal, about exactly what spices can tossed in to stew with the meat. There are Biblical creation stories, describing the birth of ròujiāmó in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) capital of Cháng'ān 长安.
If you're in Xī'ān 西安 right now, you can go down the street and get a ròujiāmó that stays true to all the rules of the genre, a Tang Dynasty ròujiāmó! But what if you aren't in in Xī'ān 西安? What is the measure of authenticity as you move away from a Xī'ān 西安 side street?
When ròujiāmó took the train to Beijing, when people started selling it as a street snack there, when it got flipped in subtle ways... it wasn't an authentic ròujiāmó, according to the rules of Tang Dynasty legends and the guys selling ròujiāmó on the streets of Xī'ān 西安 but-- it became an authentic Beijing ròujiāmó. As you move further away from the source of the original object (in time and space), it becomes less authentic.
You know what I mean? I mean, in Beijing, a Beijing-style ròujiāmó became the authentic item. If someone in Beijing started making a ròujiāmó according to some traditional rules of ròujiāmó, it'd be self-conscious and inauthentic. The new item gains its own authenticity.
So, when you're across the Pacific, separated from the authentic by thousands of kilometers, thousands of years, is it worth using that as your authenticity yardstick? What do you even do? There are thousands of people making ròujiāmó out there, so how do you pick your one authentic ròujiāmó? Well, what I do is: I say, "Okay, I won't even mention authenticity, or what's authentic!" But what I really do is: I say, "I'll just do what everybody else does and, basically, come up with my own rules of authenticity and apply them to what I eat. I'll come up with justifications, after the fact."
Anyways, we've arrived at the food court.
Back on track.
In the back, back, tucked away side corner pocket of the Yaohan food court... beside a Korean place... beside a BBQ shop... its bright yellow sign, with the name Lumingchun Food Company, in English.
The name, first.
Lùmíngchūn 鹿鸣春. It could be literally translated as Deer Call Spring. It's sort of a stock restaurant name, at this point.
But it's deeper than that. It's from the Shījīng 诗经, the Book of Songs, a collection of Chinese popular songs and poems that goes back to around 1000 BC. It's an old collection of folk songs, stuff that was passed around via oral tradition and somebody decided to package it up.
The original goes:
呦呦鹿鳴、食野之苹。
我有嘉賓、鼓瑟吹笙。
吹笙鼓簧、承筐是將。
人之好我、示我周行。
And the dusty, Victorian translation goes:
With pleased sounds the deer call to one another,
Eating the celery of the fields.
I have here admirable guests;
The lutes are struck, and the organ is blown;
The organ is blown till its tongues are all moving.
The baskets of offerings are presented to them.
The men love me,
And will show me the perfect path.
But anyways, we've arrived at the counter.
Back on track.
The sign up top promises Xī'ān 西安 regional dishes, and they've got them, along with some typical up north stuff, a few Beijing things. Orders taken in strict, friendly Beijing accent growl.
Unlike Xi'an Cuisine in the Richmond Public Market, there are a few steps to ordering ròujiāmó. Do you want pork? Beef? Lamb? Oh, right, um... pork. Of course! And you like it spicy, right? Um... yeah, pretty spicy. Sure, I'll go with spicy.
The buns are baked up on the griddle, so they've got a hard, almost burnt outer crust, soft doughy guts. Almost like you'd get if you cooked them in an oil drum. That's the authentic way, to me, despite there being no oil drums in the Tang Dynasty.
This isn't the first time I've eaten ròujiāmó here... but I've been put off by a lack of consistency. Some days it's good, some days it isn't. It isn't like my Xi'an Cuisine version. I've eaten them for days and days in a row-- all identical. Also, unlike Xi'an Cuisine's version, which is almost subtle in its flavors (pork fat, anise), Lùmíngchūn 鹿鸣春 can be heavy on the dark soy sauce, overwhelmingly flavored.
But sometimes it's nearly perfect. The pork is braised and braised until falling apart, but still retains a chewy stringiness that is lubricated by intense pork fat. The cilantro is perfect. And there's a scatter of fresh, raw chilies in there, too.
鹿鸣春 Lùmíngchūn
八佰伴中心， 列治文 Bābǎibàn Zhōngxīn, Lièzhìwén
Braised pork buns,
Lumingchun Food Company
Yaohan Centre
3700 Number Three Road, Richmond
Shoot, a lot of people talk about authenticity. I'm talking about food people. They might just throw out a word like "authentic," without seeming to mean much by it. I do it, too. With Chinese regional food, it can be too easy: there've often been deadly serious discussions of how a food should be made, how each ingredient should be prepared. And that holds true whether the origins of the dish are lost, or if it was invented by a Sichuan hotel chef in 1991.
Ròujiāmó 肉夹馍, despite being a very simple thing--bread, meat--is no exception. If you go back to what I said before, you'll see that it has history, rules. There are discussions about whether the bread can be baked over anything but charcoal, about exactly what spices can tossed in to stew with the meat. There are Biblical creation stories, describing the birth of ròujiāmó in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) capital of Cháng'ān 长安.
If you're in Xī'ān 西安 right now, you can go down the street and get a ròujiāmó that stays true to all the rules of the genre, a Tang Dynasty ròujiāmó! But what if you aren't in in Xī'ān 西安? What is the measure of authenticity as you move away from a Xī'ān 西安 side street?
When ròujiāmó took the train to Beijing, when people started selling it as a street snack there, when it got flipped in subtle ways... it wasn't an authentic ròujiāmó, according to the rules of Tang Dynasty legends and the guys selling ròujiāmó on the streets of Xī'ān 西安 but-- it became an authentic Beijing ròujiāmó. As you move further away from the source of the original object (in time and space), it becomes less authentic.
You know what I mean? I mean, in Beijing, a Beijing-style ròujiāmó became the authentic item. If someone in Beijing started making a ròujiāmó according to some traditional rules of ròujiāmó, it'd be self-conscious and inauthentic. The new item gains its own authenticity.
So, when you're across the Pacific, separated from the authentic by thousands of kilometers, thousands of years, is it worth using that as your authenticity yardstick? What do you even do? There are thousands of people making ròujiāmó out there, so how do you pick your one authentic ròujiāmó? Well, what I do is: I say, "Okay, I won't even mention authenticity, or what's authentic!" But what I really do is: I say, "I'll just do what everybody else does and, basically, come up with my own rules of authenticity and apply them to what I eat. I'll come up with justifications, after the fact."
Anyways, we've arrived at the food court.
Back on track.
In the back, back, tucked away side corner pocket of the Yaohan food court... beside a Korean place... beside a BBQ shop... its bright yellow sign, with the name Lumingchun Food Company, in English.
The name, first.
Lùmíngchūn 鹿鸣春. It could be literally translated as Deer Call Spring. It's sort of a stock restaurant name, at this point.
But it's deeper than that. It's from the Shījīng 诗经, the Book of Songs, a collection of Chinese popular songs and poems that goes back to around 1000 BC. It's an old collection of folk songs, stuff that was passed around via oral tradition and somebody decided to package it up.
The original goes:
呦呦鹿鳴、食野之苹。
我有嘉賓、鼓瑟吹笙。
吹笙鼓簧、承筐是將。
人之好我、示我周行。
And the dusty, Victorian translation goes:
With pleased sounds the deer call to one another,
Eating the celery of the fields.
I have here admirable guests;
The lutes are struck, and the organ is blown;
The organ is blown till its tongues are all moving.
The baskets of offerings are presented to them.
The men love me,
And will show me the perfect path.
But anyways, we've arrived at the counter.
Back on track.
The sign up top promises Xī'ān 西安 regional dishes, and they've got them, along with some typical up north stuff, a few Beijing things. Orders taken in strict, friendly Beijing accent growl.
Unlike Xi'an Cuisine in the Richmond Public Market, there are a few steps to ordering ròujiāmó. Do you want pork? Beef? Lamb? Oh, right, um... pork. Of course! And you like it spicy, right? Um... yeah, pretty spicy. Sure, I'll go with spicy.
The buns are baked up on the griddle, so they've got a hard, almost burnt outer crust, soft doughy guts. Almost like you'd get if you cooked them in an oil drum. That's the authentic way, to me, despite there being no oil drums in the Tang Dynasty.
This isn't the first time I've eaten ròujiāmó here... but I've been put off by a lack of consistency. Some days it's good, some days it isn't. It isn't like my Xi'an Cuisine version. I've eaten them for days and days in a row-- all identical. Also, unlike Xi'an Cuisine's version, which is almost subtle in its flavors (pork fat, anise), Lùmíngchūn 鹿鸣春 can be heavy on the dark soy sauce, overwhelmingly flavored.
But sometimes it's nearly perfect. The pork is braised and braised until falling apart, but still retains a chewy stringiness that is lubricated by intense pork fat. The cilantro is perfect. And there's a scatter of fresh, raw chilies in there, too.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
卫嘴子... the mouths of Tianjin...
煎饼 Jiānbing,
天津味牛羊肉粉面 Tiānjīnwèi Niúyángròu Fěnmiàn
统一广场, 列治文 Tǒngyī Guǎngchǎng, Lièzhìwén
Tianjin pancakes,
O'Tray Noodle
President Plaza, Richmond
Jiānbing 煎饼 is a simple thing. In its most basic form, it's a griddle-fried crêpe. But, in my mind, it's something like a symbol of Chinese street-level culture, especially up north. It could be part of a trinity of, like, Zhōngnánhǎi 中南海 cigarettes and a tall green bottle of Èrguōtóu 二锅头. That's my trinity right there. In the morning, what's more perfect than having a jiānbing 煎饼 in one hand, bought on the street, from a rolling cart, for the change in your pocket.
Usually it's an older lady hustling them, with a good street corner staked out. She drops a splotch of batter on the griddle and, in one sweep of her wrist and, with a little zen garden rake, sweeps it into a perfect circle. An egg gets one-hand cracked on top. And then it's your call on what goes inside. You want it spicy? You want bean sprouts? Shredded kelp? Sliced up hot dogs? And then it gets wrapped around a yóutiáo 油条, a deepfried Chinese donut.
After it comes off the griddle, it gets bagged up in a flimsy, filmy plastic bag and passed across to you, exchanged for a handful of change.
It makes sense, O'Tray, a Tianjin place, being one of the few places in Vancouver to sell it. It's a northern thing, claimed by Tianjin.
Tianjin was a commercial crossroads, an urban neighbor of Beijing, and a constant rival. There's a saying: "Jīngyóuzi, Wèizuǐzi" / "京油子， 卫嘴子" (there's a missing third part, which says Bǎodìng gǒutuǐzi 保定狗腿子), "Beijing slickers, Tianjin mouths." Beijing-- it's the capital, where you need to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing; Beijingers have to stay slippery, so they can slip around and stay on the right side of things. Tianjin-- they're hustlers, so they talk a good game. But that zuǐ 嘴 also suggests that in Tianjin they know how to eat. Tianjin's thriving street-level food culture has always had an edge on Beijing.
The first person to sell jiānbing 煎饼 in Tianjin was--according to legend--a traveling merchant from Shāndōng 山东. Down there, they were cooking similar griddle cakes, but he came up to the city, where leftover yóutiáo 油条 were cheap. And, to further bolster the claim, people that study yóutiáo 油条 (or maybe they're just regular people who make bold claims about the historical or geographical development of yóutiáo 油条) have noted that the traditional Tianjin yóutiáo 油条 (or, guǒzi 馃子, as they sometimes get called up north) are a bit more like southern-style dough sticks than the northern style. But, really, who knows?
It's a northern thing but it's spread. It's a recent development, honestly. After the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Party Central Committee (this is the second crucial period in Chinese regional cuisine, after the late-1940s) and the Party unleashing market forces again, food started to slip around the country again. Jiānbing 煎饼 moved from Tianjin and into Beijing and that cluster of northern cities. It kept going. It's a northern thing, but it pops up pretty far south, too.
It's something I've eaten everywhere I've been in China. I've eaten it outside a shopping mall in Kaifeng, in the middle of Henan. I've eaten buckwheat flour and sesame paste jiānbing 煎饼 in Beijing. I've eaten it even further north, and down south, on the coast, random places.... These kinds of street foods are a barometer of local tastes, I think. You can taste what people in a city like to eat, what flavors they dig, by checking out those blank canvas street foods. Are they making it sweet, with lots of sweet yellow bean paste? Is it salty as hell? Are they dabbing in a line of chili oil? Sesame paste?
It's one of those things, everyone can dig it. But I think it must just be a little bit better if you've eaten one in the right place. The right place-- well, I guess it depends on the person, right, but for me, it's downtown, in some bustling messy alive city, somewhere up north. Must be just a little bit better, if you've bumped down crowded morning streets, with the road full and loud, cars grinding past, buses slithering by, people streaming to work and kids school-of-fishing down the sidewalk with backpacks slapping on their backs. And the school yards start to crackle with the opening horns of "March of the Volunteers."
But what's it like here?
It's a bit of a trip to see it nestled in that basket, black and white checked paper like you're 'bout to eat a grilled cheese at a '50s diner, a side of curly fries, some coleslaw, "Baby Love" on AM oldies radio.
They do it basic here. The batter is spread thin on the griddle, by the quick, efficient hands of the lady that holds down the counter, coming daily in her pinned back Louise Brooks style and apron.
Inside, an egg, a brush of bean paste. Instead of yóutiáo 油条, there's a crunchy piece of deepfried crispy dough. There's a great contrast between the soft wrapping and Captain Crunch texture of the interior. It's livened up with cilantro and crunchy green onion.
Sweating fragrant condensation out into the wax paper wrapper.
--
A previous trip to O'Tray, here: Brains in a bowl in a ghost town food court.
天津味牛羊肉粉面 Tiānjīnwèi Niúyángròu Fěnmiàn
统一广场, 列治文 Tǒngyī Guǎngchǎng, Lièzhìwén
Tianjin pancakes,
O'Tray Noodle
President Plaza, Richmond
Jiānbing 煎饼 is a simple thing. In its most basic form, it's a griddle-fried crêpe. But, in my mind, it's something like a symbol of Chinese street-level culture, especially up north. It could be part of a trinity of, like, Zhōngnánhǎi 中南海 cigarettes and a tall green bottle of Èrguōtóu 二锅头. That's my trinity right there. In the morning, what's more perfect than having a jiānbing 煎饼 in one hand, bought on the street, from a rolling cart, for the change in your pocket.
Usually it's an older lady hustling them, with a good street corner staked out. She drops a splotch of batter on the griddle and, in one sweep of her wrist and, with a little zen garden rake, sweeps it into a perfect circle. An egg gets one-hand cracked on top. And then it's your call on what goes inside. You want it spicy? You want bean sprouts? Shredded kelp? Sliced up hot dogs? And then it gets wrapped around a yóutiáo 油条, a deepfried Chinese donut.
After it comes off the griddle, it gets bagged up in a flimsy, filmy plastic bag and passed across to you, exchanged for a handful of change.
It makes sense, O'Tray, a Tianjin place, being one of the few places in Vancouver to sell it. It's a northern thing, claimed by Tianjin.
Tianjin was a commercial crossroads, an urban neighbor of Beijing, and a constant rival. There's a saying: "Jīngyóuzi, Wèizuǐzi" / "京油子， 卫嘴子" (there's a missing third part, which says Bǎodìng gǒutuǐzi 保定狗腿子), "Beijing slickers, Tianjin mouths." Beijing-- it's the capital, where you need to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing; Beijingers have to stay slippery, so they can slip around and stay on the right side of things. Tianjin-- they're hustlers, so they talk a good game. But that zuǐ 嘴 also suggests that in Tianjin they know how to eat. Tianjin's thriving street-level food culture has always had an edge on Beijing.
The first person to sell jiānbing 煎饼 in Tianjin was--according to legend--a traveling merchant from Shāndōng 山东. Down there, they were cooking similar griddle cakes, but he came up to the city, where leftover yóutiáo 油条 were cheap. And, to further bolster the claim, people that study yóutiáo 油条 (or maybe they're just regular people who make bold claims about the historical or geographical development of yóutiáo 油条) have noted that the traditional Tianjin yóutiáo 油条 (or, guǒzi 馃子, as they sometimes get called up north) are a bit more like southern-style dough sticks than the northern style. But, really, who knows?
It's a northern thing but it's spread. It's a recent development, honestly. After the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Party Central Committee (this is the second crucial period in Chinese regional cuisine, after the late-1940s) and the Party unleashing market forces again, food started to slip around the country again. Jiānbing 煎饼 moved from Tianjin and into Beijing and that cluster of northern cities. It kept going. It's a northern thing, but it pops up pretty far south, too.
It's something I've eaten everywhere I've been in China. I've eaten it outside a shopping mall in Kaifeng, in the middle of Henan. I've eaten buckwheat flour and sesame paste jiānbing 煎饼 in Beijing. I've eaten it even further north, and down south, on the coast, random places.... These kinds of street foods are a barometer of local tastes, I think. You can taste what people in a city like to eat, what flavors they dig, by checking out those blank canvas street foods. Are they making it sweet, with lots of sweet yellow bean paste? Is it salty as hell? Are they dabbing in a line of chili oil? Sesame paste?
It's one of those things, everyone can dig it. But I think it must just be a little bit better if you've eaten one in the right place. The right place-- well, I guess it depends on the person, right, but for me, it's downtown, in some bustling messy alive city, somewhere up north. Must be just a little bit better, if you've bumped down crowded morning streets, with the road full and loud, cars grinding past, buses slithering by, people streaming to work and kids school-of-fishing down the sidewalk with backpacks slapping on their backs. And the school yards start to crackle with the opening horns of "March of the Volunteers."
But what's it like here?
It's a bit of a trip to see it nestled in that basket, black and white checked paper like you're 'bout to eat a grilled cheese at a '50s diner, a side of curly fries, some coleslaw, "Baby Love" on AM oldies radio.
They do it basic here. The batter is spread thin on the griddle, by the quick, efficient hands of the lady that holds down the counter, coming daily in her pinned back Louise Brooks style and apron.
Inside, an egg, a brush of bean paste. Instead of yóutiáo 油条, there's a crunchy piece of deepfried crispy dough. There's a great contrast between the soft wrapping and Captain Crunch texture of the interior. It's livened up with cilantro and crunchy green onion.
Sweating fragrant condensation out into the wax paper wrapper.
--
A previous trip to O'Tray, here: Brains in a bowl in a ghost town food court.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Torched.
夫妻肺片，炒腰，羊肉串儿，鸡肉串儿， 四川香肠，等等…… Fūqī fèipiàn, chǎo yāo, yángròuchuàn'r, jīròuchuàn'r, Sìchuān xiāngcháng...
九道 Jiǔ Dào
Beef tripe in chili sauce, stirfried kidney, lamb skewers, chicken skewers, Sichuan-style sausage, etc.
Nine Dishes Restaurant
960 Kingsway Drive, Vancouver
Nine Dishes-- because they've only got nine dishes.
Now, it goes like this: they might switch stuff around and call it a different name. You know? They might have a few different noodles, but that gets counted as one dish. In the end, all added up, you've got nine dishes.
It's a modest place, on the last stretch of Kingsway before it's all bánh mì and phở joints. In the front door, a fish tank inherited from the Vietnamese restaurant that previously claimed the location.
I'd seen the sign outside, talking about Chongqing hot pot or water-boiled fish, Sichuan dishes. All right, Sichuan place. I'm cool with that. But when I stepped inside the hyped up cat flitting from table to table was speaking with a grumbling, burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring northern accent. The accent that clips words and replaces them with growling rrrrrrrrrs: Jiù'ì zhè yàngr.
The man that runs the place is a slim, swoopy character, in his (maybe) mid-40s, who introduces himself as If. Run that by you again: If. The place has been open a month and a bit now, and he proudly proclaims his lack of business acumen, which endears me to him instantly. His goals for the business are twofold: serve good food and make friends, especially female ones.
He says, "Most people make money off beer, but I sell it at cost."
His next lesson, "Other restaurant make money off rice or whatever, but I give it away."
He confirms that he's from up north (born in Tianjin and raised in Beijing). We ask why he opened a Sichuan restaurant, when he's from way up north. He says he just likes the food. He lived in Chongqing for a minute, too. Another thing he tells us: Chongqing has the prettiest girls in all of China. (Dude at another table interjects: "Nah, man, all the pretty ones came over here.") We ask, "So, is the chef from Sichuan," and he says, "You're looking at the chef." Bringing swagger back to the dining room.
He hitchhiked to Tibet in the late-'80s, which was the 1980s Beijing kid equivalent of going to Woodstock. He reminds me of a lot of other Beijing hipsters of a certain generation, bonafide duuuuudes that I associate with Wang Shuo and liúmáng 流氓 (think "hoodlum," but in a positive sense) literature. These were guys that came of age in the bright little time in the 1980s, when shit was going down the right road for most of the country. The remnants of the good stuff from collectivization were being worked out and there was a mood of optimism, a thoughtful atmosphere. It all got crushed and torn to pieces when Yang Shangkun sided with Deng Xiaoping and declared martial law.
He runs the room and the kitchen, flying back and forth between them, managing orders off a menu that might only have nine items but is spread between three booklets, a sprawling heavy metal concept album of a menu.
The emphasis is on Sichuanese basics. But up north dishes slip in too. They're mostly childhood nostalgia trips, like dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 and a lamb meat porridge (about that dish, he says, "So far, only one person has ordered it"). The north-south combination makes perfect sense, when you're sitting there. It reminds me of the best drinking spot joints, places I spent a lot of time. The chef cooks simple things that he likes.
The fūqī fèipiàn 夫妻肺片 is good-- surprisingly, as good as most Sichuanese restaurants can pull off. It's perfect for the simple reason that he doesn't screw around. There's no Chongqing hotel chef slumming it in the back, trying to put his twist on things. The dish is the basic list of ingredients (you know, chili oil, various tripe, liver), put together simply.
For the chǎo yāo 炒腰, stirfried kidneys, there's no attempt at aping the Sichuan style, where the kidneys are intricately sliced and garnished. It's just a plain, ungarnished dish of kidney, cooked perfectly. I've eaten enough kidney that tasted like licking a men's room floor that I was hesitant to ever bother again, but this is what it's supposed to taste like: rich, almost creamy; and a texture that's straight satisfying, a little push back as you bite through it.
The dishes flip back and forth between north and south. A bite of the Sichuan-style sausage, like a Chongqing chorizo: fatty and chewy, perfect drinking food. They're flavored with handfuls of Sichuan peppercorn, that have infused into the filling, giving it a nearly floral aroma. And then, the skewers are definitely northern, dipped in crushed chili and cumin.
By this point, one end of our table is filling up with bottles of Yanjing (another northern touch: Beijing's official beer). Available space on the table is filling up with empty skewers, metal and wooden.
The rest of the tables in the place go unbussed, piling up with dishes. When people enter the door, they're met with shouts, "Anywhere! Anywhere! Over there, okay?"
We sit there another four, five hours, ordering our way through the menu. A round of skewers to match every round of beer. This round is pickled green chili with pork, and the next round is grilled pork intestine and the next round is lamb and the next round is chicken. On and on. We flip through the menu, ordering most of it.
The table behind us starts chattin' and together, we get a big bowl of suāntāng 酸汤: some two percent milk-looking soup, floated full of slices of poached fish, and simultaneously SOURSPICYNUMBINGSALTY in each spoonful. We pass around tiny bowls of it, eat it with freshly deepfried sandwiches of lotus root and pork.
About four hours later, at around midnight, the blinds are pulled down. Conversations and the music get louder. Most tables are ordering beer by the six pack and skewers by the dozen. The boss works the room, going table-to-table to tell the most complex dirty jokes I've ever heard.
It was one of those nights, where you don't want to leave the place. You can't bear to walk out and end the night, because you're digging the food and the jokes and the banter and the beer and you wonder if you'll be able to recreate it again. The night is just about perfect and you don't want to walk out and not be able to walk in again.
This is my new favorite restaurant.
九道 Jiǔ Dào
Beef tripe in chili sauce, stirfried kidney, lamb skewers, chicken skewers, Sichuan-style sausage, etc.
Nine Dishes Restaurant
960 Kingsway Drive, Vancouver
Nine Dishes-- because they've only got nine dishes.
Now, it goes like this: they might switch stuff around and call it a different name. You know? They might have a few different noodles, but that gets counted as one dish. In the end, all added up, you've got nine dishes.
It's a modest place, on the last stretch of Kingsway before it's all bánh mì and phở joints. In the front door, a fish tank inherited from the Vietnamese restaurant that previously claimed the location.
I'd seen the sign outside, talking about Chongqing hot pot or water-boiled fish, Sichuan dishes. All right, Sichuan place. I'm cool with that. But when I stepped inside the hyped up cat flitting from table to table was speaking with a grumbling, burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring northern accent. The accent that clips words and replaces them with growling rrrrrrrrrs: Jiù'ì zhè yàngr.
The man that runs the place is a slim, swoopy character, in his (maybe) mid-40s, who introduces himself as If. Run that by you again: If. The place has been open a month and a bit now, and he proudly proclaims his lack of business acumen, which endears me to him instantly. His goals for the business are twofold: serve good food and make friends, especially female ones.
He says, "Most people make money off beer, but I sell it at cost."
His next lesson, "Other restaurant make money off rice or whatever, but I give it away."
He confirms that he's from up north (born in Tianjin and raised in Beijing). We ask why he opened a Sichuan restaurant, when he's from way up north. He says he just likes the food. He lived in Chongqing for a minute, too. Another thing he tells us: Chongqing has the prettiest girls in all of China. (Dude at another table interjects: "Nah, man, all the pretty ones came over here.") We ask, "So, is the chef from Sichuan," and he says, "You're looking at the chef." Bringing swagger back to the dining room.
He hitchhiked to Tibet in the late-'80s, which was the 1980s Beijing kid equivalent of going to Woodstock. He reminds me of a lot of other Beijing hipsters of a certain generation, bonafide duuuuudes that I associate with Wang Shuo and liúmáng 流氓 (think "hoodlum," but in a positive sense) literature. These were guys that came of age in the bright little time in the 1980s, when shit was going down the right road for most of the country. The remnants of the good stuff from collectivization were being worked out and there was a mood of optimism, a thoughtful atmosphere. It all got crushed and torn to pieces when Yang Shangkun sided with Deng Xiaoping and declared martial law.
He runs the room and the kitchen, flying back and forth between them, managing orders off a menu that might only have nine items but is spread between three booklets, a sprawling heavy metal concept album of a menu.
The emphasis is on Sichuanese basics. But up north dishes slip in too. They're mostly childhood nostalgia trips, like dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 and a lamb meat porridge (about that dish, he says, "So far, only one person has ordered it"). The north-south combination makes perfect sense, when you're sitting there. It reminds me of the best drinking spot joints, places I spent a lot of time. The chef cooks simple things that he likes.
The fūqī fèipiàn 夫妻肺片 is good-- surprisingly, as good as most Sichuanese restaurants can pull off. It's perfect for the simple reason that he doesn't screw around. There's no Chongqing hotel chef slumming it in the back, trying to put his twist on things. The dish is the basic list of ingredients (you know, chili oil, various tripe, liver), put together simply.
For the chǎo yāo 炒腰, stirfried kidneys, there's no attempt at aping the Sichuan style, where the kidneys are intricately sliced and garnished. It's just a plain, ungarnished dish of kidney, cooked perfectly. I've eaten enough kidney that tasted like licking a men's room floor that I was hesitant to ever bother again, but this is what it's supposed to taste like: rich, almost creamy; and a texture that's straight satisfying, a little push back as you bite through it.
The dishes flip back and forth between north and south. A bite of the Sichuan-style sausage, like a Chongqing chorizo: fatty and chewy, perfect drinking food. They're flavored with handfuls of Sichuan peppercorn, that have infused into the filling, giving it a nearly floral aroma. And then, the skewers are definitely northern, dipped in crushed chili and cumin.
By this point, one end of our table is filling up with bottles of Yanjing (another northern touch: Beijing's official beer). Available space on the table is filling up with empty skewers, metal and wooden.
The rest of the tables in the place go unbussed, piling up with dishes. When people enter the door, they're met with shouts, "Anywhere! Anywhere! Over there, okay?"
We sit there another four, five hours, ordering our way through the menu. A round of skewers to match every round of beer. This round is pickled green chili with pork, and the next round is grilled pork intestine and the next round is lamb and the next round is chicken. On and on. We flip through the menu, ordering most of it.
The table behind us starts chattin' and together, we get a big bowl of suāntāng 酸汤: some two percent milk-looking soup, floated full of slices of poached fish, and simultaneously SOURSPICYNUMBINGSALTY in each spoonful. We pass around tiny bowls of it, eat it with freshly deepfried sandwiches of lotus root and pork.
About four hours later, at around midnight, the blinds are pulled down. Conversations and the music get louder. Most tables are ordering beer by the six pack and skewers by the dozen. The boss works the room, going table-to-table to tell the most complex dirty jokes I've ever heard.
It was one of those nights, where you don't want to leave the place. You can't bear to walk out and end the night, because you're digging the food and the jokes and the banter and the beer and you wonder if you'll be able to recreate it again. The night is just about perfect and you don't want to walk out and not be able to walk in again.
This is my new favorite restaurant.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Shanghai comfort food, three places:
1.
炸酱面 Zhájiàngmiàn,
上海亭美食 Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí
帝国中心, 列治文 Dìguó Zhōngxīn, Lièzhìwén
Fried sauce noodles,
Shanghai Ting
Empire Centre
4600 Number Three Road, Richmond
This is only my own flimsy theory, which I just came up with a second ago: Regional Chinese cuisine was forever changed on August 15th, 1945, when Japan officially announced its surrender, and Taiwan once again came into play. In a radio broadcast (the "Jewel-Voice Broadcast" / "玉音放送," Gyokuon-hōsō in Japanese and Yùyīn fàngsòng in Chinese), Hirohito accepted the Potsdam Declaration, which had been issued by Truman, Churchill and China's Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 (aka Chiang Kai-shek). They'd previously agreed that Taiwan would be the Republic of China's, after Japan got shut down.
Moving back in time a couple hundred years, Taiwan had been politically and militarily in play since about the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when both Japan and the Ming Empire decided it might be nice to have. By the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), things had heated up after years of skirmishes. But the Qing wasn't in any position to start regulating Japanese imperialist expansion. Qing China was rotting from the inside and being assaulted from the outside.
Massive portions of Qing China fell out of the control of the capital in Beijing. And the so-called Century of Humiliation (Bǎinián Guóchǐ 百年国耻) at the hands of imperialist Westerners and Japanese was well underway. Taiwan fell under Japanese control beginning in 1895. The Qing Empire fell fifteen or so years later, to be replaced by the Republic of China.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, the island of Taiwan was returned to the control of the Republic of China, headed by Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石. A few months after the surrender, Chinese soldiers, who were pretty messed up from fighting the Japanese (and the Communists, too) on the Mainland for almost a decade landed in Taiwan, ferried over by the Americans.
While China was going to shit real fast, Taiwan still looked pretty good to the Republicans. There were some people already there and the Guómíndǎng 国民党 cadres were kinda worried that most were speaking Japanese or weird Chinese coastal dialects or language that weren't Sinitic at all. But it looked like a good fall back plan. So, when Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 saw which way the wind was blowing in '49, he took a last flight from Nánjīng 南京 to Táiběi 台北.
Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 vowed to fight back to the Mainland to liberate it from Communism, but he never did. He died without ever once returning home.
Among the Mainland elites in Taiwan, who had retreated from the Mainland, there was a deep sense of nostalgia. There was lots of rhetoric about fighting back to the Mainland, but there was also a sense among many that they'd never get home again. Mainland-born authors like Bái Xiānyǒng 白先勇 wrote nostalgic, heartbreaking odes to life in the old capital of Nanjing. Lín Hǎiyīn 林海音, who was born in Japan but grew up in Beijing and ended up in Taiwan in '48, wrote about the back alleys of the city that nobody in Taiwan thought they'd after have a chance to walk down again.
What'd those nostalgic sadsack Mainland Chinese want to eat?
Luckily, they brought their chefs with them.
Those chefs included the best of the best, chefs like the famous Peng Chángguì 彭长贵, who Fuschia Dunlop wrote about in The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They set about recreating Chinese Mainland cuisine for the Guómíndǎng 国民党 generals and cadres, who were faced with never going home again.
And the same thing was happening in Hong Kong in the late-'40s and early-'50s, although on a less intense scale, with Mainland chefs suddenly in demand to feed refugees of the Chinese Civil War.
Taiwan (and HK, to a lesser extent) became the jumping off point, and the filter, for Mainland Chinese cuisines. While Mainland China was cut off from most of the world, Taiwanese had it a little easier (not in the immediate post-war years, though, with Taiwan under martial law and straight up racist Western immigration laws, but... later). Mainland immigrants who settled in Taiwan and HK brought food with them, and then, eventually it made its way over here. But, in the process, the food changed a bit.
Like, say, Hunan food, since Peng Chángguì 彭长贵 reminded me of it. A similar but separate tradition of Hunan cuisine developed in Taiwan. It was heavily influenced by the cooking of chefs like Peng Chángguì 彭长贵. The chefs in Taiwan were classically trained, used to cooking lavish meals for generals, and kept cooking that way in Taiwan. And they had to adapt flavors to appeal to non-local palates: turning classical Hunan or Sichuan or Anhui dishes into something anyone (even HK locals or those Japanese or Hakka-speaking Taiwan natives) could dig.
Like Hunan cuisine, a tradition of Shanghai cuisine developed independent of what was taking place on the Mainland. A Shanghai restaurant in Hong Kong or Taibei (or Tokyo or San Francisco, even) in the 1960s or the 1970s or the 1980s would definitely have a good amount of Shanghainese dishes on the menu, but that term "Shanghai" would also be expanded to encompass a whole bunch of other "Northern" dishes. "Shanghai" became a wide, wide term.
"Northern" being northern to most of the people running the Guómíndǎng 国民党, which was dominated by southern Chinese. And northern to HKers and many Mainland immigrants to HK. And northern to most Chinese living overseas, who had usually emigrated from the provinces of southern, coastal China (Guangdong, Fujian).
In China, "Shanghai cuisine" is not a particular important phrase on the Mainland. It can almost be reduced to a not particularly sophisticated branch of Jiangsu cuisine, or even a branch of one of the branches of Jiangsu cuisine. It's become a bit like "Taiwanese cuisine" on the Mainland, referring to a certain hip charm and a chilled out way of cooking dishes that are basically very, very familiar.
I notice it in Vancouver, where there've been Shanghai restaurants longer than most places. Whether they are run by Shanghainese with roots in Taiwan or HK or by an older generation of Shanghainese, they tend to serve food that's a bit different from a traditional Shanghai restaurant in Shanghai might serve (although, now, that kind of distinction is kinda blurry, since the influence flows both ways).
Most times that I peek into a Vancouver Shanghai restaurant, it's serving a style of food that takes the basics of "Northern" cuisine as its focus. Shanghai restaurants (and Taiwanese ones, too) would have been the first places offering Mainland regional dishes on the west coast, right?
In Vancouver, "Shanghai cuisine" seems to be synonymous with "northern cuisine." It's the reason I've heard Vancouverites suggesting that dàndàn miàn 担担面 and zīrán yángròu 孜然羊肉 are Shanghainese dishes (it'd be hard to find a Shanghainese restaurant in Shanghai that had dàndàn miàn 担担面 or zīrán yángròu 孜然羊肉), or that northern Chinese restaurants are a great place to get xiǎolóngbāo 小笼包 (you can find soup dumplings anywhere in China but not many menus outside of Shanghai, or its orbiting cities, are going to have the words xiǎolóngbāo 小笼包).
So, it's not really a surprise to see zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面 on the menu of Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí 上海亭美食 in the Empire Centre Food Court.
Zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面 is a dish usually claimed by Beijing, but you could probably just call it a northern dish (north of the Yangtze, I mean). It's most typically made with fatty pork, fermented soybean paste. Vegetables are thrown on top to balance everything out: usually cucumber, but bean sprouts, green soybeans, jiǔcài 韭菜, Chinese chives, xiāngchūn, and 香椿, Chinese toon, are also cool.
I ate a relatively conventional version recently at Countryside Northeast Chinese Restaurant in Burnaby. I'd also recommended the version at Beijing Noodle House in Richmond (190-6451 Buswell Street).
At Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí 上海亭美食, it's not really conventional but close enough.
It's a definitely southern take on a northern dish, a simplified version, with the oil and the fat turned down; maybe it's got a bit of a Westernized vibe to it, something from the always international Shanghai or something Vancouver, hard to say. It's a bit like Spaghetti alla Bolognese, kinda like my mom would make. Thin, chewy noodles. Sauce is dark and rich, thick bean paste flavor but not oily. Ground beef.
It's warm and satisfying. The cat behind the counter is friendly.
I eat it at a food court table, reading a free newspaper that the person that was sitting there before left, stare down the hallway at the toilet boutique, the knot of people in front of the used book place, strollers stopping to read the whiteboard prices in front of the travel agency.
2.
红烧牛肉面 Hóngshāo niúròu miàn,
锦江上海菜 Jǐn Jiāng Shànghǎicài
Braised beef noodles,
Shanghai JJ Restaurant
6610 Number Three Road, Richmond
The big red sign keeps flashing while the other stripmall tenants are shut down. I stare at it everyday, while I wait for my 410 bus to come down Number Three.
But I've never checked it out.
Outside of the Public Market, I've never really found a local in Richmond, a fully comfortable place, where I can sit for hours. But, maybe this is it.
Couple days ago, the Sharpied sign on the sidewalk caught my attention:
Lunch specials: shepherd's purse and fish soup, braised beef noodles, sticky rice dumplings. Not bad, not bad.
Inside, it looks exactly like I think a restaurant should look: worn to perfection, everything rubbed shiny, homey.
One wall is wallpapered with a ten foot-long panorama, looking out over the Bund and Pudong, across the Huangpu at Pudong and the Oriental Pearl tower.
The other wall is wallpapered with pictures of food. It's mostly pictures of Shanghai dishes, or dishes that originated in Suzhou or Yangzhou or other cities in Jiangsu and have since fallen into the Shanghai canon (lion's head meatball, Wuxi spareribs, you know).
At a table in the center of the room, a family of ten, getting started on a serious meal. Their conversation is in Cantonese. They speak to the waitress in Mandarin. And she talks to the kitchen in Shanghainese.
As the dishes come out, they stick to the pattern of the wallpapered photos. They're Shanghai dishes (or close enough) but missing a certain color, a certain smell I know from eating them in Shanghai or places in town that stick to a more authentic approach. The dishes look a bit subdued.
One of the dishes is a version of sōngshǔyú 松鼠鱼. It's a dish that's done by small family restaurants and serious hotel dining rooms alike, in various forms, but is usually some variation on a whole fish (often a guìyú 鳜鱼, a Mandarin fish, a type of freshwater perch), carefully sliced up, deep fried, covered in a sweet, fishy sauce, and reassembled on the plate. Here, it comes out of the kitchen a blinding candy apple red, dotted with tinned grapes and red pepper.
But... I order my bowl of braised beef noodle, and it comes out looking exactly like it should, as if it came out of a different kitchen. It's a bit subdued, but in a homey kinda way that I can dig.
-- A curled up bundle of perfectly uniform noodles.
-- Lots of spinach, a bit of green onion.
-- A ziggurat of beef smudged with translucent Nutella-brown gravy. First bite is sweet, with a cute anise-y flavor, a bit like Coke Zero. The beef is dense and it's tender. It's lean meat with some tendon and fatty slabs hidden away in the center of the pyramid.
The atmosphere, the noodles.... I slurp and slurp and then sit with the empty bowl in front of me, reading the Globe and Mail, pouring myself cup after cup of tea, the family dinner clattering away beside me.
The lady running the front room comes over, after a while, with a tiny bowl of sticky rice porridge. It's sweet, flavored with a bit of chrysanthemum, I think. She was passing them out to the family, as they finished their dinner and brought one over for me, too. The family dinner came to a slow end and everyone slipped out, letting in puffs of cold air. And I went out, too, paying my bill while the kitchen staff emerged from the back, carrying out the staff meal, settling in.
3.
雪菜肉丝面 Xuěcài ròusī miàn,
宁波坊 Nìngbō Fāng
统一广场, 列治文 Tǒngyī Guǎngchǎng, Lièzhìwén
Noodles with pork strips and mustard leaves,
Ningbo Fang
President Plaza
3320-8181 Cambie Road, Richmond
Outside, down the corridor between President Plaza and Aberdeen, A6s and E-Classes and 7-Series convoy through. Kids pose in herds up and down the street. Girls come down from the Skytrain, dragging pink Holt bags big enough to climb right inside. People dig through the cardboard boxes of produce outside T&T. It's a busy, buzzy street.
But, up in the President Plaza food court, it's kind of a ghost town. Dead as a doornail most of the time. Deserted except for food court stall proprietors hunkered gloomily behind their counters.
But it's one of my favorite places in the city to eat.
The President Plaza food court is a perfect place for comfort food. A lot of the people slumped behind bowls of noodles or plates of dumplings are eating something they grew up with. Just like those Mainland refugees in Taiwan in the '40s.
I'm thinking of the jiānbing 煎饼 and dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 breakfasts and brunches at O'Tray, or the paper plates of super simple Shandong-style dumplings around the corner. And maybe you can add Nìngbō Fāng 宁波坊 to the list.
Nìngbō Fāng 宁波坊 is named for the city across the bay from Shanghai: Nìngbō, in Zhèjiāng 浙江 province. I ask the girl behind the counter, "So... are you from Ningbo or...?" And she says, "Nononono," and answers in the one sentence in Shanghainese that most Mandarin speakers know, "阿拉上海宁!" which sounds a bit like, "Ala Sanghei ning!" "We're Shanghainese!"
The menu, like a lot of food court places, is long-- actually, "long" doesn't really describe it. The word is "scattered." There are dozens of items spread across a sheaf of laminated sheets of paper, tacked up and taped up all over the place. They're written in English, Chinese, with lots of overlap, but some Chinese-only thangs. The menu reminds me of family-run noodle shops in Shanghai (one of the few fast food styles that Shanghai really does well).
I notice a few nice touches. Like, the rice cooker simmering a clutch of cháyèdàn 茶叶蛋, tea eggs (alias: lǔdàn 卤蛋), and pressed tofu.
The trick is to ignore all the complex things on the menu and order the simplest things, treat it like a family run noodle place.
You need to order something like xuěcài ròusī miàn 雪菜肉丝面.
It's a soupy bowl of noodles flavored with pickled mustard leaves, threaded with strips of pork. It's one of those dishes like the dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 at O'Tray, so simple that I wonder if you can appreciate it if you don't associate it with warm kitchens and people you love cooking it for you, or raw market meals, or a certain time and place.
It's chewy noodles... pickled mustard leaves, a flavor that's half dill pickle and half something else, almost a rough, tobacco-, smell like a drag on a Canadian Classic... pork, just cut into strips, cooked through in the broth, pale as Stryofoam, broadcasting fat bubbles up to the surface of the soup....
And-- a triangle of pressed tofu, dòugān 豆干, braised and simmered until a deep deep brown in soy sauce and anise and cassia and chili and everything else that tastes good; and a tea egg fished out of the rice cooker and served on a floral dish beside the noodles. They only rest there a second before I drop them on top of my noodles.
And-- it's one of those inconsequential things that add up to something: this is the best tea egg in the city. A minor thing, a tea egg. It sounds easy to get right: right broth, right timing. But a really good example stands out. It tastes like it's been simmered for weeks, infused with a rich, salty flavor. But the texture of the white is still sproingy, protecting the sponge cake yolk inside.
The soup, the partners are simple. Comfort food, with all the simple things done carefully.
炸酱面 Zhájiàngmiàn,
上海亭美食 Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí
帝国中心, 列治文 Dìguó Zhōngxīn, Lièzhìwén
Fried sauce noodles,
Shanghai Ting
Empire Centre
4600 Number Three Road, Richmond
This is only my own flimsy theory, which I just came up with a second ago: Regional Chinese cuisine was forever changed on August 15th, 1945, when Japan officially announced its surrender, and Taiwan once again came into play. In a radio broadcast (the "Jewel-Voice Broadcast" / "玉音放送," Gyokuon-hōsō in Japanese and Yùyīn fàngsòng in Chinese), Hirohito accepted the Potsdam Declaration, which had been issued by Truman, Churchill and China's Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 (aka Chiang Kai-shek). They'd previously agreed that Taiwan would be the Republic of China's, after Japan got shut down.
Moving back in time a couple hundred years, Taiwan had been politically and militarily in play since about the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when both Japan and the Ming Empire decided it might be nice to have. By the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), things had heated up after years of skirmishes. But the Qing wasn't in any position to start regulating Japanese imperialist expansion. Qing China was rotting from the inside and being assaulted from the outside.
Massive portions of Qing China fell out of the control of the capital in Beijing. And the so-called Century of Humiliation (Bǎinián Guóchǐ 百年国耻) at the hands of imperialist Westerners and Japanese was well underway. Taiwan fell under Japanese control beginning in 1895. The Qing Empire fell fifteen or so years later, to be replaced by the Republic of China.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, the island of Taiwan was returned to the control of the Republic of China, headed by Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石. A few months after the surrender, Chinese soldiers, who were pretty messed up from fighting the Japanese (and the Communists, too) on the Mainland for almost a decade landed in Taiwan, ferried over by the Americans.
While China was going to shit real fast, Taiwan still looked pretty good to the Republicans. There were some people already there and the Guómíndǎng 国民党 cadres were kinda worried that most were speaking Japanese or weird Chinese coastal dialects or language that weren't Sinitic at all. But it looked like a good fall back plan. So, when Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 saw which way the wind was blowing in '49, he took a last flight from Nánjīng 南京 to Táiběi 台北.
Jiǎng Jièshí 蒋介石 vowed to fight back to the Mainland to liberate it from Communism, but he never did. He died without ever once returning home.
Among the Mainland elites in Taiwan, who had retreated from the Mainland, there was a deep sense of nostalgia. There was lots of rhetoric about fighting back to the Mainland, but there was also a sense among many that they'd never get home again. Mainland-born authors like Bái Xiānyǒng 白先勇 wrote nostalgic, heartbreaking odes to life in the old capital of Nanjing. Lín Hǎiyīn 林海音, who was born in Japan but grew up in Beijing and ended up in Taiwan in '48, wrote about the back alleys of the city that nobody in Taiwan thought they'd after have a chance to walk down again.
What'd those nostalgic sadsack Mainland Chinese want to eat?
Luckily, they brought their chefs with them.
Those chefs included the best of the best, chefs like the famous Peng Chángguì 彭长贵, who Fuschia Dunlop wrote about in The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They set about recreating Chinese Mainland cuisine for the Guómíndǎng 国民党 generals and cadres, who were faced with never going home again.
And the same thing was happening in Hong Kong in the late-'40s and early-'50s, although on a less intense scale, with Mainland chefs suddenly in demand to feed refugees of the Chinese Civil War.
Taiwan (and HK, to a lesser extent) became the jumping off point, and the filter, for Mainland Chinese cuisines. While Mainland China was cut off from most of the world, Taiwanese had it a little easier (not in the immediate post-war years, though, with Taiwan under martial law and straight up racist Western immigration laws, but... later). Mainland immigrants who settled in Taiwan and HK brought food with them, and then, eventually it made its way over here. But, in the process, the food changed a bit.
Like, say, Hunan food, since Peng Chángguì 彭长贵 reminded me of it. A similar but separate tradition of Hunan cuisine developed in Taiwan. It was heavily influenced by the cooking of chefs like Peng Chángguì 彭长贵. The chefs in Taiwan were classically trained, used to cooking lavish meals for generals, and kept cooking that way in Taiwan. And they had to adapt flavors to appeal to non-local palates: turning classical Hunan or Sichuan or Anhui dishes into something anyone (even HK locals or those Japanese or Hakka-speaking Taiwan natives) could dig.
Like Hunan cuisine, a tradition of Shanghai cuisine developed independent of what was taking place on the Mainland. A Shanghai restaurant in Hong Kong or Taibei (or Tokyo or San Francisco, even) in the 1960s or the 1970s or the 1980s would definitely have a good amount of Shanghainese dishes on the menu, but that term "Shanghai" would also be expanded to encompass a whole bunch of other "Northern" dishes. "Shanghai" became a wide, wide term.
"Northern" being northern to most of the people running the Guómíndǎng 国民党, which was dominated by southern Chinese. And northern to HKers and many Mainland immigrants to HK. And northern to most Chinese living overseas, who had usually emigrated from the provinces of southern, coastal China (Guangdong, Fujian).
In China, "Shanghai cuisine" is not a particular important phrase on the Mainland. It can almost be reduced to a not particularly sophisticated branch of Jiangsu cuisine, or even a branch of one of the branches of Jiangsu cuisine. It's become a bit like "Taiwanese cuisine" on the Mainland, referring to a certain hip charm and a chilled out way of cooking dishes that are basically very, very familiar.
I notice it in Vancouver, where there've been Shanghai restaurants longer than most places. Whether they are run by Shanghainese with roots in Taiwan or HK or by an older generation of Shanghainese, they tend to serve food that's a bit different from a traditional Shanghai restaurant in Shanghai might serve (although, now, that kind of distinction is kinda blurry, since the influence flows both ways).
Most times that I peek into a Vancouver Shanghai restaurant, it's serving a style of food that takes the basics of "Northern" cuisine as its focus. Shanghai restaurants (and Taiwanese ones, too) would have been the first places offering Mainland regional dishes on the west coast, right?
In Vancouver, "Shanghai cuisine" seems to be synonymous with "northern cuisine." It's the reason I've heard Vancouverites suggesting that dàndàn miàn 担担面 and zīrán yángròu 孜然羊肉 are Shanghainese dishes (it'd be hard to find a Shanghainese restaurant in Shanghai that had dàndàn miàn 担担面 or zīrán yángròu 孜然羊肉), or that northern Chinese restaurants are a great place to get xiǎolóngbāo 小笼包 (you can find soup dumplings anywhere in China but not many menus outside of Shanghai, or its orbiting cities, are going to have the words xiǎolóngbāo 小笼包).
So, it's not really a surprise to see zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面 on the menu of Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí 上海亭美食 in the Empire Centre Food Court.
Zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面 is a dish usually claimed by Beijing, but you could probably just call it a northern dish (north of the Yangtze, I mean). It's most typically made with fatty pork, fermented soybean paste. Vegetables are thrown on top to balance everything out: usually cucumber, but bean sprouts, green soybeans, jiǔcài 韭菜, Chinese chives, xiāngchūn, and 香椿, Chinese toon, are also cool.
I ate a relatively conventional version recently at Countryside Northeast Chinese Restaurant in Burnaby. I'd also recommended the version at Beijing Noodle House in Richmond (190-6451 Buswell Street).
At Shànghǎi Tíng Měishí 上海亭美食, it's not really conventional but close enough.
It's a definitely southern take on a northern dish, a simplified version, with the oil and the fat turned down; maybe it's got a bit of a Westernized vibe to it, something from the always international Shanghai or something Vancouver, hard to say. It's a bit like Spaghetti alla Bolognese, kinda like my mom would make. Thin, chewy noodles. Sauce is dark and rich, thick bean paste flavor but not oily. Ground beef.
It's warm and satisfying. The cat behind the counter is friendly.
I eat it at a food court table, reading a free newspaper that the person that was sitting there before left, stare down the hallway at the toilet boutique, the knot of people in front of the used book place, strollers stopping to read the whiteboard prices in front of the travel agency.
2.
红烧牛肉面 Hóngshāo niúròu miàn,
锦江上海菜 Jǐn Jiāng Shànghǎicài
Braised beef noodles,
Shanghai JJ Restaurant
6610 Number Three Road, Richmond
The big red sign keeps flashing while the other stripmall tenants are shut down. I stare at it everyday, while I wait for my 410 bus to come down Number Three.
But I've never checked it out.
Outside of the Public Market, I've never really found a local in Richmond, a fully comfortable place, where I can sit for hours. But, maybe this is it.
Couple days ago, the Sharpied sign on the sidewalk caught my attention:
Lunch specials: shepherd's purse and fish soup, braised beef noodles, sticky rice dumplings. Not bad, not bad.
Inside, it looks exactly like I think a restaurant should look: worn to perfection, everything rubbed shiny, homey.
One wall is wallpapered with a ten foot-long panorama, looking out over the Bund and Pudong, across the Huangpu at Pudong and the Oriental Pearl tower.
The other wall is wallpapered with pictures of food. It's mostly pictures of Shanghai dishes, or dishes that originated in Suzhou or Yangzhou or other cities in Jiangsu and have since fallen into the Shanghai canon (lion's head meatball, Wuxi spareribs, you know).
At a table in the center of the room, a family of ten, getting started on a serious meal. Their conversation is in Cantonese. They speak to the waitress in Mandarin. And she talks to the kitchen in Shanghainese.
As the dishes come out, they stick to the pattern of the wallpapered photos. They're Shanghai dishes (or close enough) but missing a certain color, a certain smell I know from eating them in Shanghai or places in town that stick to a more authentic approach. The dishes look a bit subdued.
One of the dishes is a version of sōngshǔyú 松鼠鱼. It's a dish that's done by small family restaurants and serious hotel dining rooms alike, in various forms, but is usually some variation on a whole fish (often a guìyú 鳜鱼, a Mandarin fish, a type of freshwater perch), carefully sliced up, deep fried, covered in a sweet, fishy sauce, and reassembled on the plate. Here, it comes out of the kitchen a blinding candy apple red, dotted with tinned grapes and red pepper.
But... I order my bowl of braised beef noodle, and it comes out looking exactly like it should, as if it came out of a different kitchen. It's a bit subdued, but in a homey kinda way that I can dig.
-- A curled up bundle of perfectly uniform noodles.
-- Lots of spinach, a bit of green onion.
-- A ziggurat of beef smudged with translucent Nutella-brown gravy. First bite is sweet, with a cute anise-y flavor, a bit like Coke Zero. The beef is dense and it's tender. It's lean meat with some tendon and fatty slabs hidden away in the center of the pyramid.
The atmosphere, the noodles.... I slurp and slurp and then sit with the empty bowl in front of me, reading the Globe and Mail, pouring myself cup after cup of tea, the family dinner clattering away beside me.
The lady running the front room comes over, after a while, with a tiny bowl of sticky rice porridge. It's sweet, flavored with a bit of chrysanthemum, I think. She was passing them out to the family, as they finished their dinner and brought one over for me, too. The family dinner came to a slow end and everyone slipped out, letting in puffs of cold air. And I went out, too, paying my bill while the kitchen staff emerged from the back, carrying out the staff meal, settling in.
3.
雪菜肉丝面 Xuěcài ròusī miàn,
宁波坊 Nìngbō Fāng
统一广场, 列治文 Tǒngyī Guǎngchǎng, Lièzhìwén
Noodles with pork strips and mustard leaves,
Ningbo Fang
President Plaza
3320-8181 Cambie Road, Richmond
Outside, down the corridor between President Plaza and Aberdeen, A6s and E-Classes and 7-Series convoy through. Kids pose in herds up and down the street. Girls come down from the Skytrain, dragging pink Holt bags big enough to climb right inside. People dig through the cardboard boxes of produce outside T&T. It's a busy, buzzy street.
But, up in the President Plaza food court, it's kind of a ghost town. Dead as a doornail most of the time. Deserted except for food court stall proprietors hunkered gloomily behind their counters.
But it's one of my favorite places in the city to eat.
The President Plaza food court is a perfect place for comfort food. A lot of the people slumped behind bowls of noodles or plates of dumplings are eating something they grew up with. Just like those Mainland refugees in Taiwan in the '40s.
I'm thinking of the jiānbing 煎饼 and dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 breakfasts and brunches at O'Tray, or the paper plates of super simple Shandong-style dumplings around the corner. And maybe you can add Nìngbō Fāng 宁波坊 to the list.
Nìngbō Fāng 宁波坊 is named for the city across the bay from Shanghai: Nìngbō, in Zhèjiāng 浙江 province. I ask the girl behind the counter, "So... are you from Ningbo or...?" And she says, "Nononono," and answers in the one sentence in Shanghainese that most Mandarin speakers know, "阿拉上海宁!" which sounds a bit like, "Ala Sanghei ning!" "We're Shanghainese!"
The menu, like a lot of food court places, is long-- actually, "long" doesn't really describe it. The word is "scattered." There are dozens of items spread across a sheaf of laminated sheets of paper, tacked up and taped up all over the place. They're written in English, Chinese, with lots of overlap, but some Chinese-only thangs. The menu reminds me of family-run noodle shops in Shanghai (one of the few fast food styles that Shanghai really does well).
I notice a few nice touches. Like, the rice cooker simmering a clutch of cháyèdàn 茶叶蛋, tea eggs (alias: lǔdàn 卤蛋), and pressed tofu.
The trick is to ignore all the complex things on the menu and order the simplest things, treat it like a family run noodle place.
You need to order something like xuěcài ròusī miàn 雪菜肉丝面.
It's a soupy bowl of noodles flavored with pickled mustard leaves, threaded with strips of pork. It's one of those dishes like the dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 at O'Tray, so simple that I wonder if you can appreciate it if you don't associate it with warm kitchens and people you love cooking it for you, or raw market meals, or a certain time and place.
It's chewy noodles... pickled mustard leaves, a flavor that's half dill pickle and half something else, almost a rough, tobacco-, smell like a drag on a Canadian Classic... pork, just cut into strips, cooked through in the broth, pale as Stryofoam, broadcasting fat bubbles up to the surface of the soup....
And-- a triangle of pressed tofu, dòugān 豆干, braised and simmered until a deep deep brown in soy sauce and anise and cassia and chili and everything else that tastes good; and a tea egg fished out of the rice cooker and served on a floral dish beside the noodles. They only rest there a second before I drop them on top of my noodles.
And-- it's one of those inconsequential things that add up to something: this is the best tea egg in the city. A minor thing, a tea egg. It sounds easy to get right: right broth, right timing. But a really good example stands out. It tastes like it's been simmered for weeks, infused with a rich, salty flavor. But the texture of the white is still sproingy, protecting the sponge cake yolk inside.
The soup, the partners are simple. Comfort food, with all the simple things done carefully.
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