chinese food, the suburbs, vancouver

Eel and bacon.

2010-05-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

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."

Back again...

2010-05-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Brief notes on a Sichuan restaurant: restaurants vs. food courts / consistency / rabbit heads

2010-05-19T17:18:00.001-07:00

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.

Authenticity, some old poems, then pork in bread.

2010-05-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

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.

卫嘴子... the mouths of Tianjin...

2010-05-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Torched.

2010-05-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Shanghai comfort food, three places:

2010-05-06T01:05:00.001-07:00

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.

X-ray noodles.

2010-05-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

榨菜肉丝炒面 Zhàcài ròusī chǎomiàn,
山东拉面 Shāndōng Lāmiàn
丽晶广场，本拿比 Lìjīng Guǎngchǎng, Běnnábǐ

Pickled mustard and pork fried noodles,
Northern Meixi Fast Food
Crystal Mall, Burnaby

We can start with where it is, what's around:

all those pretty Minnie Mouses cutting past,
Minnie Mouses with a Birkin bag and short shorts,
and their aunties with shopping bags fulla báicài;
and a perpetual smell that evokes memories of another place:
a slight nose wrinkling
smell of cooking oil and radish and soy sauce and
a galaxy of smell molecules in the air up there;
a little Sim City of food stalls and
the seashell sound of chatter bouncing off the tables and walls.

Enjoying the smiles and placing the accents of my target stall, Northern Meixi Fast Food-- what a name! That great accent behind the counter, an accent that covers most of central China, where Mandarin is often delivered with a stiff-tongued slur and ten words can be compacted into five.

The lady in front of me orders-- they don't have the fried dumplings anymore today! And the man behind the counter apologizes with four syllables, "Bùhǎo yìsi!" which are, in fact, jammed into two syllables: "B'ào yì's'!" She answers back, in a matching accent: "Áh! Zǎ méila?"

Ah, I can write about that all day. But when it gets right down to it.

When I have the food in front of me. A plate of noodles. What do I do? What's there to say?

There are all those intangible things in life that seem impossible to write about. They don't feel intangible to the writer, when they're still caught up in the brain. But they somehow defy writing down.

That's one of the reasons I read literature, poetry, to catch those moments, when somebody has ZAP ZAP ZAP snapped a moment, a thought, a feeling, a texture, a taste. There's that Jorie Graham line, "...I want it, / another, thicker, kind of sight." I imagine it as some kind of poetic X-ray vision, which permits grinding away to the quarks and leptons, the elementary particles of daily life.

Like, a plate of noodles.

How do I talk about that plate of noodles?

I can flip back to my notebook, to recall the basics of what went into it and what it looked like. But, to go further and try to communicate all those intangible things, a thought, a feeling, a texture, a taste....

I can flip to my notebook, reconstruct things from memory:

1. The smell steaming up to my nostrils as I carried it from the counter to my table. The way those darts of warmth slip up my nose, hit the olfactory bulb, and play tricks on my mind, trigger a View-Master picture show.

Just the smell of soy sauce and cooking oil, alone -----> A million flipbook images of kitchens, restaurants. The smell of a billion meals and the smell that's stuck in my own clothes after making dinner. That soy sauce and cooking oil smell might be the basic smell of food, to me. It's the smell of my kitchen.

And, each memory cascades whooooosh down into another and another. One or two stick.

An image attached to the smell of pickled mustard -----> Xinran and I sitting crosslegged in our tiny apartment, back when we lived in Regina. That one room apartment we spent a couple weeks in, sleeping on a fold up camp bed. We had to lay on top of each other. The floor was carpeted with the Globe and Mail and prairiedog. I remember watching an Ozu film, a slow, almost immobile Ozu film, on the tiny HP laptop screen. Xinran and I, sitting with our knees touching, eating steamed Calrose rice out of tin bowls from the Dollar Store, with a plastic bag of pickled mustard balanced between us.

Or, the smell of green onion -----> I might catch a taste/scent-glimpse of green onion wrapped in chewy flat bread, làobǐng 烙饼 -- or, even more diagonally, a scent-memory of my sister and I, when we were about five and seven years old, in the Bahnhof yard in Lahr, finding a patch of wild green onion and grinding them between two rocks, into green mud between flat rocks. The smell of green onion was crazy thick. Whenever I bite into green onion or get a whiff of it, that memory is always subliminally percolating.

2. The textures of...

...the slimery coagulation of sunflower oil and pork fat and bean paste and starch. It begins on top of the noodles but, by the end, it has slid down to the plate, and separated like salad dressing, into layers. On the tongue, you can imagine it pooling in the crevices, oozing into the cracks.

...the noodles. The noodles, which emerged from that ball of flour. Noodles, stretched and compressed and pulled and pushed and dragged out into irregular thicknesses, irregular textures. A sticky noodle that sticks to your teeth, almost like toffee. Muscular noodles that compress under your teeth and then snap in half. Soft noodles that part, split open, with barely a touch of your molar edge.

...and the soft crunch of the pickled mustard tuber, and the pork, the pop of crunched fat and the stringy grind of the lean meat, and the crunch of green onion.

3. The hazy or distinct pleasures involved with eating a plate of noodles.

Like, the way it looks, the way it looks in a big twisted heap on the plate. Mounded up with a thick sauce of bean paste and oil. A knotted wig of blonde dreadlocks.

Like, the grapple. Chopsticking a bundle of the warm noodles into your mouth, and slurping them up, while you continue pulling the bundle up to your mouth until all that's left is the trailing strands, and the exercise in proprioception that is the hunting down and pinching of those trailing strands. There's the constant quest to somehow mix all the ingredients in each bite: the balancing of pickled mustard and pork and green onion and cilantro in one mouthful. There's the strategic preparatory stacking of ingredients before packaging everything up for the chopstick bundling.

Like, the warmth. The heat, preserved in the oil and the sauce and in the noodles. It gathers in your mouth and heats up the roof of your mouth. It makes your nose run clear snot. And then that warm sticks to the sides of your esophagus as the noodles go down. It heats up your chest.

Like, just sucking on the flavor: the deep deep pungent salt of bean paste vs. the sweet and sour of pickled mustard vs. the threads of black vinegar, which I carefully drizzled over the top vs. soap-grass winks of cilantro vs. a whimper of chili oil heat, a sandpaper rub of chili seeds.

But, in the end, there isn't much you can say.

Go get some noodles.

Brains in a bowl in a ghost town food court.

2010-04-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

豆腐脑儿 Dòufunǎor,
天津味牛羊肉粉面 Tiānjīnwèi Niúyángròu Fěnmiàn
统一广场, 列治文 Tǒngyī Guǎngchǎng, Lièzhìwén

Tofu pudding / tofu brains,
O'Tray Noodle
President Plaza, Richmond

Notes on dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 in the past and present:

1.

Dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿, another dish I ate for the first time with Xinran, at a wet market up the road from her house, where she'd been dragged by her mom to shop for vegetables for forever, eaten bowls of dòufunǎo for forever-- she'd call it dòunǎor 豆脑儿, though.

My first bowl to my two hundred and twentieth bowl: blue and white China pattern bowl, wrapped in a crinkly plastic bag-- silken tofu, soft so that it's barely hanging together, so that it wants to split apart into a thousand shreds-- so it looks like the soft wobbly brains it's named after-- floated in a clingy, sticky broth of grey, gooey chicken broth, fortified with monosodium glutamate and a spit of soy sauce, sesame oil, a hard splash of chili oil on top-- eaten with a tiny stainless steel spoon-- in the middle of the market, one of a hundred thousand similar pot-and-bowls operations all over the towns and cities north of the Yangtze.

Purely comfort food. Something like a plate of scrambled eggs, I think. Workaday meal. Often a breakfast, alongside cōngyóubǐng 葱油饼, green onion pancake, or jiānbing 煎饼, thin pancakes stuffed with soybean paste and fried dough or a few sticks of yóutiáo 油条. Cheap as hell. Made, in my mind, for single diners, bent down low over a bowl.

2.

O'Tray, a name diagonally derived from the Chinese double-surname Ōuyáng 欧阳. Slotted into a corner of a ghost town food court. Run by a couple from Tianjin, the counter usually held down by the wife, chirpy, with her hair done up something like Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. She slides jiānbing 煎饼 batter across the round griddle, takes orders.

And my order is: "Yīwǎn dòufunǎor" "一碗豆腐脑儿."

They make the tofu there. Maybe that's one of the secrets. Soft. But not too soft: hanging in the bowl, a Styrofoam-white brick of tofu, and one swash of the plastic spoon down the middle cleaves it in half-- another swash: split down the middle, split along invisible fault lines.

The tofu, and a few lobes of chewy, black wood ear mushroom, are floated in a soup of sesame sauce, a bit of chili oil (a request), a bit of cilantro, and a ladleful of broth dipped from one of the pots simmering in the back.

It's delicious.

Here, maybe, the atmosphere is different than the atmosphere in which I ate my first couple hundred bowls. Here, in the present, in a Richmond mall, above a T&T Supermarket, and, maybe a different function.

Here, a comfort food for liúxuéshēng 留学生, overseas students, wrapped in A|X, speaking northern-accented Mandarin.

Like the Irish pub that the name suggests, those homesick outposts that crop up in Shanghai, Bangkok, Berlin, wherever, a place like O'Tray seems tied to recreating or recalling a certain experience-- perhaps rather than creating or suggesting its own, individual or authentic experience.

A bowl of dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 at O'Tray seems to be designed for people looking for a taste of a certain nostalgic experience. It's an insider experience, for people who understand what is taking place. The location itself, in a Chinese mall, Chinese food court, doesn't make it exclusive to insiders, but an all-Chinese menu definitely lends a certain exclusivity to the food, a suggestion that it's made for insiders. You must be able to find the place--or, more likely, hear about it from friends--and read those three crucial Chinese characters and know what they mean.

And.

It makes me wonder about writing about this food, recommending a bowl of dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 to someone that hasn't had the experience of eating it in a wet market, for twenty cents a bowl. Honestly, I wonder: Does it work? Does a bowl of dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿 work by itself?

For most of the people ordering it at O'Tray, the bowl of dòufunǎor 豆腐脑儿, doesn't come by itself. It comes with memories of eating it in times and places in the past, memories.

It reminds me of the newspaper article about Xi'an Cuisine 西安小吃 in the Richmond Public Market 列治文公众市场, which the boss has tucked under the counter. The headline says something like, "One bite and you won't miss Xi'an anymore." The headline isn't, you know, a literal statement, and, I guess the most basic meaning is that the food is authentic. But I wonder.

Does a bowl of pulled noodles work if you don't miss Xi'an, or miss experiencing Xi'an food at another time, in another place? Does that bowl of pulled noodles and lamb broth taste the same without the attendant memories and associations? Does a place like O'Tray work quite as well if you are cut off from associations and experiences that the people eating beside you are digging?

Elegy for a food stall.

2010-04-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

菜干猪骨粥 Càigān zhūgǔ zhōu,
古早味台湾美食 Gǔzǎowèi Táiwān Měishí
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng

Dried vegetable and pork bone broth rice porridge,
Classical Taiwanese Cuisine
Richmond Public Market

I'm at the Public Market a lot. It's right down the road, right on my way into the city, right on the way to school.

I got to know the guy who sells his poems and calligraphy at the Richmond Public Market. He'd set up a narrow table in front of the bookstore downstairs, where there was a steady stream of ladies dragging canvas grocery bags and a steady stream of foam front trucker hat kids sucking lychee pearl green tea slushes.

He'd set up his table, with two red paper and black ink streamers blowing overhead each time a breeze swept through. A slate ink tablet, a stick of black ink, a box of brushes, a yogurt tub of grey water, a yogurt tub of clear water, a yogurt tub of black water, wood blocks, folded grey paper, folded yellow paper, folded red paper. He'd be surrounded by wire racks of fashion magazines, cook books.

He's a tall guy, wears a beat up tweed suit jacket. I imagine him as a classic literary figure, the failed poet-- not failed by my standards, or by his own, but.... It reminds me of the Wang Wei poem, the failed official returning home...

下马饮君酒，问君何所之。
君言不得意，归卧南山陲。
但去莫复问，白云无尽时。

Dismounting, I offer you wine
And ask, "Where are you bound?"
You say, "I've found no fame or favors;
"I must return to rest in the South Mountain."
You leave, and I ask no more—
White clouds drift on and on.

He hustles his poems downstairs, turning his poetry into performance art huckterism, big sweeping strokes of black ink on red paper. But, when it's quiet, he walks upstairs, up the cement steps, pausing to check in on the games of checkers played by men in tan slacks, beneath the TVs showing HK soap operas, and then head out to the grey, cement deck, looking out over the Saba and Buswell intersection, the Canada Geese in the fountain, the pear blossoms, the Falun Gong ladies handing out fliers.

When we talk, he writes notes for me, stuff he mentions. He'll say, Do you know this saying? This poem? This book? And he'll ink his brush and carefully write out the characters for me in my notebook, a spare page at the back of whatever I'm reading, or on Post-it notes. The last time we talked, he wrote another Wang Wei poem for me:

木末芙蓉花,
山中发红萼。
涧户寂无人,
纷纷开且落。

High on the treetops, the hibiscus,
Set forth red calyces in the hill.
A quiet stream hut, with no one around.
They bloom and fall, of their own accord.

I had the notebook with me, when I went there that morning, for breakfast. One of those mornings, when I'd been up all night.

明朝有封事,
數問夜如何

I have a petition to present in the morning,
All night I ask what time it is.

Up all night, the only time I ever go out for breakfast....

Only two places were open for breakfast upstairs, the Hong Kong snack place, tucked in the corner, and the Taiwanese place....

Written on a whiteboard, in neat, tight traditional characters, 菜幹豬骨粥....

I ordered a bowl.

Plastic bowl, plastic spoon, bamboo chopsticks wrapped in flimsy plastic.

Porridge. Resting on a rice starch cream,

just split grains of rice, not yet broken fully down.

The broth grey-green, the least appetizing most comforting color possible.

Grey from:

...pearl white rice starch soup stained by pork bone blood. Pork bones: boiled and boiled and boiled. The bones from yesterday's soup, probably, tossed in and boiled some more, until they can be crunched up into wet chalk in your mouth and spit out onto the red plastic tray. Random shapes of pink-grey pork, hanging together on the still functioning network of tendon, tubes, and fat.

Green from:

...dried Chinese cabbage, still green, those tight bundles of tea-green and grey-white vegetables, dried to nothing. I've heard they're a Fujianese thing, and I've also heard are a Hakka thing, but are--at the very least--definitely a southern thing. The vegetable flavor concentrated, sucked down into dried up leaves. An acrid flavor, almost a tobacco scent.

I had my notebook and jotted something, something like the above, beside Wang Wei's hibiscuses and huts, and copied down the name off the whiteboard. The poem had a fifth line added to it: 菜幹豬骨粥.

I said: next week. Come back.

And the next week, I somersaulted out of bed, slid into shoes and pants and stiff-leg stumbled to the bus stop, caught the 402 to the Public Market, went upstairs and it was gone.

An empty slot. Signs gone, the white board gone, nobody there.

纷纷开且落.

They bloom and fall, of their own accord

Burnaby? Jeez. Might as well just go to Shenyang.

2010-04-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

炸酱面，猪头肉拌黄瓜，牛肉水饺，猪肉白菜水饺 Zhájiàngmiàn, zhūtóuròu bàn huánggua, niúròu shuǐjiǎo, zhūròu báicài shuǐjiǎo,
田园东北人家 Tiányuán Dōngběirén Jiā

Fried sauce noodles, pork head meat with cucumber, beef dumpling, pork and cabbage dumpling,
Countryside Northeast Chinese Restaurant
7506 Edmonds Street, Burnaby

New to Vancouver, when I hit a new place in the city, I can only guess at what happened before to make it look the way it does. Like, hit a stretch of road and there are suddenly Vietnamese grocery stores, a Vietnamese butcher, a bánh mì place. How come? When you order your bánh mì, you can ask and usually somebody will be able to sketch a quick history of the neighborhood-- and not necessarily the neighborhood, but the block, or a few blocks.

Some places are easy to figure out. At least you know who lives there: you can check the signs on the stores, the faces in the street. But, especially as an outsider, on a first time stroll through a neighborhood, you can only guess. Today, in Burnaby, walking up Edmonds, past the intersection with Kingsway...

...the boxes and circles of Han'gŭl 한글 and the swish and sweep of Hànzì 汉字 that make up most of the foreign language signs in Burnaby are replaced, briefly, with signs in Arabic, and even Amharic, written in Ge'ez script ግዕዝ... Halal butchers, Eastern Euro butchers instead of Chinese butchers... and, you know, girls, right? Good demographic tool... suddenly cutting down the street, African girl in shiny khimār and skinny jeans, fine Latin 'Merican girl, even wearing a Che shirt... and the language on the street is-- well, I can make out Arabic or Amharic or French but I'm only guessing at the rest... the Gordon Presbyterian Church, where you can attend services in Korean, Spanish....

And, keep going up the road, maybe another piece of the demographic puzzle, the Countryside Northeast Chinese restaurant.

Occupying half of a stripmall, set just back from the street.

Big sign, only Chinese.

A folding sign set up by the sidewalk, advertising a four ninety five lunch menu.

A tiny dining room, painted light light light pistachio green. The windows covered with bars and red decals and dusty curtains. Locked in. A handful of tables with white cloth tablecloths, covered in plastic wrap, then topped with Plexiglass.

Over the entrance to the kitchen, the countryside theme: a plywood barn set up over the bar, with plastic ears of corn. Soundtrack of folk songs in an easy listening singalong style.

The menu is a confusion of styles, sweet and sour pork beside Singapore noodles, with authentic Northeastern Chinese dishes stuck in at random.

(A one-side overheard conversation between the waitress and someone calling for takeout: "Lemon... chicken? Lemon? No no no no. Oh, almond chicken... we don't have that anymore.")

I order a bowl of zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面, yellow chewy noodles boiled until tender, then topped with fried fatty pork belly and fried huángjiàng 黄酱, yellow bean paste.

The texture and flavor of the zhájiàngmiàn 炸酱面 sauce seems to change as you go south, from sweet and snotty as you get south of Tianjin, but oily and salty up north. Here, it's that northern style, oily and sticky, with fermented soybeans and pork sediment floated through it, an index-middle finger-thumb pinch of julienned cucumber laid on top.

Next comes: two plates of dumplings.

Pork, with cabbage.

Beef.

Tough, chewy skins.

And next: the top entry on the cardboard and Sharpie menu set up in a corner, zhūtóuròu bàn huánggua 猪头肉拌黄瓜, pork head meat with cucumber.

The meat is cooked and then left to cool, set, and is then sliced thin. It's mostly fat and cartilage, a textural mix of slimy, sticky, snappy.

The fat doesn't have the vanilla ice cream meltiness of braised pork. It has a cold snap to it, only a bit softer than the crunchy cartilage.

The dish is hot, but without any chili heat: raw garlic, juice squeeeeeezed from ginger, vinegar but not too much, black pepper, and, on top of everything, mustard oil. The mustard oil slips across the tongue almost without flavor, but blooms on the back of your tongue, up into your nostrils.

Can't close your mouth when you eat it. The mustard heat has to be exhaled, vented as you chew. It's a heat almost like the heat from liquor, a heat in your throat, a cloud of heat in the roof of your mouth, filling your nasal cavity. Tears in your eyes, if you get the right amount.

It's matched with raw cucumber, which isn't cut as much as it's smashed. CLANG, with a cleaver and it splits open.

This is another dish that has nostalgic connections, for me. Like a lot of food, right?

It's one of those things I eat it in the present, but there are always links from it, back to flavors and textures from my memory.

Brief flavors, like eating zhūtóuròu 猪头肉 from street stall vendors in China, where they sold it beside roast pork, beef tongue, marinated bean curd skin. Always ate it with strong liquor.

Our friend Lao Yu used to make a variation on this dish for us, when we him in Moose Jaw. He and his wife lived above a Chinese restaurant, on Main Street. They were both from Haerbin. We'd take trips into Regina, to the butcher shop in the one block Chinatown, and come back with beef tendon or pork tendon.

Lao Yu made it the same way, cucumber smashed up, roughly chopped, mixed up with pork stomach, then drenched in yellow mustard oil, covered in raw garlic. Perfect match for the dumplings he'd made the day before, and a case of Kokanee. The middle of Saskatchewan seemed like the perfect place for someone from Haerbin to live.

On the way out.

Chat with the woman that runs the place.

I said I lived in Richmond but a friend had told me about the place. She was impressed, that I'd come that far, just to eat, by bus, train, and bus, and sucked her teeth and shook her head ruefully and said, 唉，这样从列治文到本拿比，真不容易... Ai, coming all the way from Richmond to Burnaby like that, what a pain.

Remembering Nanjing

2010-04-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

盐水鸭，莲藕排骨汤，汤包 yánshuǐyā, lián'ǒu páigǔ tāng, tāngbāo,
忆江南 Yì Jiāngnán

Brined duck, lotus root and pork sparerib soup, soup dumplings,
Shanghai Village
3250 Cambie Street

Thirty years ago no bridge crossed the river at all. Even today the Yangtze redefines the country with a subtle absoluteness. It marks the immemorial divide between a soldierly, bureaucratic north and the suave, entrepreneurial south. Men dwindle in size and integrity as they go south (say the northerners) and the clear-cut Mandarin of Beijing becomes a slushy caress. The dust of the wheat and millet-bearing plains dissolves to the monsoons of paddy fields and tea plantation. The staple of noodles becomes a diet of rice, and the low cottages and symmetrical northern streets twist and steepen into labyrinths of whitewashed brick.

At the confluence of these worlds lies Nanjing.

Colin Thubron, from Behind the Wall, 1987.

The name of the restaurant in Chinese is Yì Jiāngnán 憶江南, remembering Jiangnan, that slice of land south of the Yangtze, that encompasses southern Jiāngsū 江苏, Zhèjiāng 浙江, Shànghǎi 上海, part of Ānhuī 安徽, even. There is "the immemorial divide between a soldierly, bureaucratic north and the suave, entrepreneurial south," and then there is the real, deep south beyond that. Jiangnan is in the middle. And Nanjing is in the middle of that middle.

Nanjing is where the languages begins to shift from Northern Jiangsu's tilted Mandarin to a language closer to Wu, a language mutually unintelligible with the language of the north and the deep southern dialects.

Nanjing is where the food changes, as the plains of northern Jiangsu and Shandong give way to a deep green landscape, where rice is easy to grow and pigs and ducks are easy to raise. Food is green, fresh. It's salty. It's full of wriggling, slimy things from the rice paddies and the creeks and streams.

That's the hazy view out of my Nanjing window. Looking out across the alley, people lining up at a butcher shop... a store selling the local specialty, duck blood and vermicelli, yāxuè fěnsī 鸭血粉丝.

I've been known to say Nanjing is the most beautiful city in the world.

It still has the "tunnels of sycamores" that Colin Thubron wrote about elsewhere in his travelogue. The streets are lined with them. The summers are long and hot, but the constant sycamore shade makes them bearable.

It looks nothing like the stretch of Cambie that Shanghai Village sits on, that tidy stretch of Vancouver street life dominated by four lanes of rumbling honking grinding traffic, no trees in sight.

The sign says: Yì Jiāngnán 憶江南, (忆 is the simplified form of 憶, but I prefer the traditional form).

Yì Nánjīng 憶南京 might be more appropriate.

I'd heard that the chef was from Nanjing. But I wasn't sure if that was the case or not. I wasn't even sure I'd find any hints on the menu, in the restaurant.

It's a big, plain room, a Chinese restaurant, with a bigscreen TV and and the stereo system broadcasting country music videos. Tim McGraw.

When I walked in, I thought the waitress had a slight Nanjing accent. Subtle, but you know it, if you've heard it before.

And the first entry on the menu is: Nanjing-style brined duck, probably the best known Nanjing dish.

The waitress, with her slight Nanjing accent (example: Nánjīng is pronounced Lánjīng...), asks, "So, you've probably eaten Nanjing's salted duck before, right?" And I say, "Sure, sure." And I admit that I have and even specify the restaurant that has the best. And her eyes get wide and we reminisce and bullshit about Nanjing, about the weeks in the summer, when restaurants boil big pots of bright red crayfish in big tubs, right on the sidewalk... about the best place to get yāxuè fěnsī 鸭血粉丝... about the chicken burger place near the Nanjing Normal University gate, which is constantly full of Korean exchange students.

Long sigh.

I asked about the individual pots that I'd seen the chef stacking up, when I came in.

In China, it's not unusual for the kitchen to be at the front of the restaurant, or visible from the street. A fancy place known for cold appetizers might have a glassed in station, where chefs work on cold dishes, slicing meat and stacking strawberries. Or, if the place is known for soup, there could be individual pots simmering away, or stacked up. Here, it's all in the back.

Each day, they prepare four different kinds of soup. They range from expensive, exotic (think they had an eel and pork lung soup on special, today), but I get the most basic: lotus root and sparerib soup, lián'ǒu páigǔ tāng 莲藕排骨汤.

And, she said, we're giving away free soup dumplings, tāngbāo 汤包.

Ah, 盐水鸭 yánshuǐyā...

The result of a process of cooking, brining, pressing that was originally for preservation. It's cleavered up, served ice cold, ungarnished, no sauce on the side.

Almost looks raw, no hint of color. And the flavor is salt. Brine. The fat has mostly evaporated, rendered out, salted out. The meat is pressed, compressed. The meat is tough, each layer and string in it presents a challenge as you bite through it.

The flavor of duck--rather than the flavor of duck fat, which you get in a bundle of Beijing roast duck, with its layer of roasted skin and gooey fat--is what comes through the salt. The only two flavors present are duck and salt.

The best thing in the world is to eat it with strong, warm Chinese liquor. You drain your glass, seal your throat, throw a chunk of salted duck onto your tongue, unclench your throat, and bite. Boozey heat and brine come together on the back of your tongue, a heavy taste of duck.

But today I'm drinking it with something milder, lotus root and sparerib soup, lián'ǒu páigǔ tāng 莲藕排骨汤.

It's been boiled for a long time, but still clear, clean.

The hard bones in the pork have been boiled to a point where they barely stick together, where one bite cracks through the outer crust and you get a mouthful of cooked marrow, into which the soup has penetrated.

The soft white bones still have a quick snap in them, but crunch up with a sound that echoes the slight crunch of the lotus root.

And, tāngbāo 汤包...

...carefully constructed, pleated, with a tiny chimney on top to get a suck of soup before biting in. The skin, thin as you can make it, chewy, al dente. The soup fills it, splashes into your mouth, and doesn't have that heavy, sweet thickness of other soup dumplings. The soup is rich but it is a bland richness.

It reminded me, more than anything else, of the soup dumplings I ate in Nanjing.

Pork fat and white bread

2010-04-19T02:51:00.000-07:00

肉夹馍 Ròujiāmó,
西安小吃 Xī'ān Xiǎochī
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng

Braised pork buns
Xi'an Cuisine
Richmond Public Market

My personal guide to Shaanxi xiǎochī 小吃 is a series of articles by Jia Pingwa 贾平凹, collected under the title "Notes on Shaanxi Xiaochi" ("陕西小吃小识录" / "Shǎnxī Xiǎochī Xiǎoshílù"). China has had a long history of writing on food, but it wasn't always like Jia Pingwa does it.

There are many of examples of literati writing on food and drink, detailed and poetic writing, writing by educated, usually wealthy men, with lots of time to be distracted by diversions such as cockfighting, pretty girls, poetry, and good food. The focus of the writing was usually pretty sophisticated: the finest food, the finest wine. Less street food, more banquets. Less dumplings, more autumnal crabs with jade-cream juices.

Jia Pingwa uses the same literary, poetic mode, writing in cod-classical language, but he writing about the everyday food of his native Shaanxi. He writes poetry about meals that you can only find on the unpaved streets of Shaanxi's rural townships, and if you're lucky, and Xi'an.

Jia Pingwa writes in the final essay of the series: In ancient times, people said: Gentlemen seek enlightenment, common people seek a meal. Several times, while jotting notes about street food, I was momentarily struck by how ridiculous this must seem. But it's quite natural, to write about this kind of food. Human beings can't live without food. No one can seek enlightenment without food in their belly. Even Confucius sometimes had to slip out for a bite to eat.

The food he writes about is rough and ready food, meat and potatoes fare: noodles, meat, bread. He writes about cold noodles, about bread crumbled up in lamb soup, fried lamb's blood, donkey meat.

And, of course, ròujiāmó.

Ròujiāmó is two things: meat and bread.

Meat... the meat should be should be làzhīròu 腊汁肉.

Jia Pingwa writes: Làzhīròu 腊肉is completely different from làròu 腊汁肉, which is cured with salt. This is made from boiling in a broth. They say that the broth gets better, richer, deeper with age, and some have been going for years, for generations. The broth is flavored with rice wine, salt, rock sugar, the white part of the green onion, chunks of ginger, anise, cassia, and cardamom. The meat is put in the broth with the skin side facing up, boiled for a while, then left to simmer with a low flame.

Jia Pingwa notes that you can eat the stewed meat by itself, or you can crack a bottle of strong rice wine, strong sorghum wine, and eat it while you drink. But, the best way to eat it is to stuff it into freshly-baked bread.

The bread... the bread should be báijímó 白吉馍, flat white buns baked, traditionally, in a clay oven or, nowadays, in an oil drum oven. The combination of làzhīròu 腊汁肉 and báijímó 白吉馍 gives us ròujiāmó 肉夹馍.

(The name itself is vaguely awkward and ungrammatical, according to the grammar of modern Mandarin. It has a sort of classical flavor to it, or, hey, maybe it's just ungrammatical. Jia Pingwa says: Really, it's "buns stuffed with meat" (mó jiā le ròu), yet it's called "meat stuffed into buns" (ròu jiā le mó). When you see the bread overflowing with beautiful meat, grammar goes out the window.)

The first time I came across ròujiāmó was in a back street in　Xuzhou　(徐州). It was an unnamed alley near the intersection of Huai Hai Road West (淮海西路) and Zhongshan Road South (中山南路) (between Huai Hai Road and Zhongshu Street [中枢街]). And I'm giving these detailed directions, because they still sell ròujiāmó there. Who knows when you'll be in town and craving ròujiāmó?

In that back alley, they sold it with nothing but a pot, an oil drum stove, and a cutting board. A hunk of pork got fished out of the pot, cleavered up into rough chunks. Slices of fat are mixed up with chunks of lean. The sandwich goes into a plastic bag, with a few slices of raw green pepper slotted in on both sides.

Xinran and I would buy them, wrapped in plastic and walk up the alley to the big intersection, where we'd sit in McDonald's, order banana milkshakes, chill in the A/C and watch the hipster kids in the square breakdancing to "Umbrella."

It's a flavor I love, the anise-y braised pork with the baked bread, a Chinese-style pulled pork sandwich.

There are a few places to get them in Vancouver.

Ròujiāmó has become a standard northern-style street food, and there are some Beijingers selling them at various places in the city (like... Lumingchun 鹿鸣春 in Yaohan 八佰伴中心 [pretty good version], Beijing 北京 in Crystal Mall 丽晶市场 [they put iceberg lettuce in it the last time I was there]).

My favorite place is at Xi'an Cuisine, in the Richmond Public Market.

The bread is soft, fluffy in the middle but with a baked crust. Nothing like an oil drum-baked bun, but it'll do (everyone else is waiting for Italian wood-fired pizza ovens, but, hey, how about a Chinese backstreet oil drum oven?). The stuffed in meat is texturally sound, lots of fat. Not much going on, right?

The appeal, for me, is in the simplicity of the flavor. There are versions of ròujiāmó that splice in cilantro or fresh chilies, precisely to cut through the thick blandness, spread something across the white canvas of pork and white bread.

If the flavor of pork fat and bread is the canvas, little things show up in an exaggerated, precise way against it, like, uh, a Rauschenberg white-on-white canvas. Every extra thing is magnified: the feeling of crunching through the outer crust, into the fluffy white bread, the texture of each thread of lean pork, the way the fat slurgs across your tongue, the slightest black licorice pong in the background.

This is one of those things I could become a nerdy connoisseur of, finding the perfect bun, the perfect braised pork.

But right now, I dig this one.

My usual

2010-04-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

粉蒸肉，松花皮蛋 Fěnzhēngròu, sōnghuā pídàn,
西安小吃 Xī'ān Xiǎochī
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng

Steamed pork with rice flour, preserved eggs,
Xi'an Cuisine
Richmond Public Market

I'm a person with an incredible capacity for sameness. I worry that I'm less interested in discovering new things than I am in exploring variations on old ones, or simply repeating an experience over and over again. On some level, I want to get to the heart of the thing, to understand every side of the thing, but there's also the comfort thing: comfort in sameness.

Xi'an Cuisine is where I ate every day, all winter, and I usually ate the same thing. Over and over again.

It was usually when I was coming back from UBC, after grinding down Broadway on the 99 B-Line, mashed between five o'clock commuters. I'd mash myself, again, into the Skytrain and roll south to Richmond. At the announcement of "the next station is... TERMINUS STATION... Richhhhmond-Briiiiighouse," when even the voice on the automatic announcement seems to breathe a sigh of relief, I'd flip down the escalator, head around the corner to the Public Market.

The Public Market, my favorite place in Richmond. Maybe my favorite place in the city.

It's a nest of cement and iron and a twee agricultural theme that doesn't fit with the atmosphere.

The basement is taken up by vegetable markets, wet markets, built out of cement floors, cement walls, with pyramids of radish and tomatoes and big bags of greens.

But then you've got a sudden DVD store built of snow fencing and glossy posters. A used furniture store that's built its walls out of pale blue mattresses. The butcher shop that has a noodle stand attached. A computer repair place that's a mass of red, blue and white tarps, held up with extension cords.

Before I go upstairs, I flip through the stacks of magazines and inspect the towers of paperbacks at the bookstore downstairs, an unlikely literary outpost with its own resident poet and calligrapher, who sets up a table on weekends and sells his poems.

Upstairs, in the food court, the TVs blare Cantonese soap operas, the sound echoing through the concrete emptiness of the place. Men play checkers and drink tea. The agricultural theme continues, with animatronic crowing roosters and tractor seat benches.

The shops are arranged (very roughly-- or maybe it's just my imagination) geographically, east from the Taiwan snack stalls and HK cafes to Fujian noodle joint, then up north to Tianjin and Beijing, and way out west to a Xinjiang place, and in the middle is Xi'an Xiaochi. My place.

All winter I'd order the same thing: "一份儿肉夹馍，一份儿皮蛋" / "Yífè'r ròujiāmó, yífè'r pídàn," braised pork stuffed into baked bread, with an order of of shiny black preserved egg doused in vinegar and chili oil. Everyday. Everyday.

I liked it. And I liked that I built up a "I-know-him-to-say-hello"-relationship with the boss, Mr. Duan. He'd ask me what was up, how my girl was, if it was still raining, you know?

I'd go on the weekends, too, when there were specials on the menu. The menu's huge, but a good portion of it is rarely available. It's stuff that's easy to make, but nobody's ordering it.

Chinese restaurants and Chinese menus are one way to chart the demographics of who's in Vancouver. 陕西 Shǎnxī is still not producing a wave of immigrants, like the coastal south, like, say, Fujian, where there's always been a culture of going out into the world to make some paper. Or Beijing/Tianjin, where money grows on trees. 西安人 Xī'ān rén aren't plentiful enough to make it worth it for Mr. Duan to make up a batch of something like 油茶 yóuchá, a rice flour gruel, everyday.

Something like 粉蒸肉 fěnzhēngròu, pork steamed with rice flour, is usually only available on the weekends.

It's pork shoulder, pork leg, whatever, cleavered up and mashed up with ground up rice meal, left on the steamer all day. It comes out soft, coated in rice mush, served alongside three steamed bun, fat puffy steamed buns that look like goose down pillows.

I drizzle mine with chili oil, and usually ask for extra raw green onion-- just the white part. Then it gets chopsticked in bundles into the fluffy bread, a homemade sandwich.

On the side, I have my order of 松花皮蛋 sōnghuā pídàn, preserved eggs, with the snow flake pattern etched on the transparent black skin. Here, they douse the eggs in dark vinegar and chili oil. It's the perfect, pungent match for the steamed pork sandwiches.

2010-04-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

猪肉蒸饺，卤大肠 Zhūròu zhēngjiǎo, lǔ dàcháng,
一室香饺子王 Yíshìxiāng Jiǎozi Wáng

Pork steamed dumplings, marinated intestine,
Joyce Jiaozi
5171 Joyce Street Vancouver

Joyce Jiaozi, a Northeastern Chinese restaurant, right under the Joyce Skytrain station, tucked in among the Filipino shops, past the new lechon place, past the doorway always manned by two dudes quietly selling Filipino steamed rice flour cakes from a Safeway bag.

When I roll up, the door is locked, but a man leaps up to open the door. I ask if they're closed and he answers in a 东北 Dōngběi accent, Nope, come on in. At a table near the front, the couple that runs the place look to have been locked in a conference with two men, cigarettes tucked behind their ears, Cantonese accents, who seem to be interested in buying the place.

I sit down, order dumplings and a plate of pork guts.

What it looks like:

The room is spare. White walls, a few paintings of gold fish-- the Chinese restaurant equivalent of velvet paintings. A few handwritten signs warning people against smoking and drinking and breaking the law.

On the far wall, in the margins of a brush and ink painting of gold fish, is written a poem:

老夫桌间忙
弱妻厨中烹
堂内客满座，
后门犬吠声。

Lǎofū zhuōjiān máng
Ruòqī chúzhōng pēng
Tángnèi kè mǎnzuò,
Hòumén quǎn fèishēng.

I know, you can't really convey the flavor, the brevity, the weight of each character as it sits in the poem itself. It's a beautiful, simple little dedication to the couple that run the place, and the big German Shepherd that haunts the back alley and accompanies the boss out on delivery runs

The old fellow is hustling between the tables
The wife is at work in the kitchen
The dining room is full again,
A dog barks at the back door.

My dumplings come out in a steamer, on a layer of cabbage. They're good. They're chewy. They're porky, not too much filler. Each one is packed with a mouthful of rich soup. They come with a plate of black vinegar and garlic.

And the guts. It's a texture I love. Like a melted balloon, I've said before, but here, the texture is even creamier. Like a lot of other good things, it's a balance of fat and flesh.

The fat has been stewed to cream, so it disappears in a creamy puddle on your tongue, like vanilla ice cream. And the chewiness has been braised out, too, so there's only the briefest snap before it gives away and your molars grind through it.

The flavor is one that I remember recoiling from the first time I tasted it. Xinran and I used to go to a clay pot (砂锅 shāguō) restaurant, where the specialty was a pot of pork intestine and stinky tofu (臭豆腐 chòudòufu). I never managed to appreciate that dish, but I've tried them and tried them and eventually I realized that I dig them. There are nice ways to describe the taste of pork intestines, but is it even worth it?

At Joyce Jiaozi, they're marinated in dark soy sauce, anise, and mixed up with shredded raw ginger. I dunk them in my dish of vinegar and raw garlic-- and I'm getting hungry writing about them.

Joyce Jiaozi reminds me of places in China, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, but it also reminds me of places I'd go for lunch in Moose Jaw. Like, say, Larry's Lunch, which was in a renovated car wash. The menu was written on hubcabs and hung on the walls. It was run by another place run by one industrious couple and a dog.

For a while, Xinran had a rule that we couldn't eat at any restaurants that employed people (family doesn't count as employees). It actually wasn't a hard rule to follow.

My favorite kind of restaurant.

汉化 / Sinification:

2010-04-14T16:41:00.000-07:00

辣子鸡饭 Làzijī fàn
新疆美食 Xīnjiāng Měishí
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng

Chicken and chilies on rice,
Xinjiang Delicious Food
Richmond Public Market

Xinjiang was always vaguely on the Chinese radar. It was the gateway to Central Asia and the various peoples that passed through it. The Han dynasty sent their crew in to have a look. The Tang dynasty literati and elites were fascinated by it and fads in Central Asian music and dress swept through Chang'an. The Mongols cut deals with the Uighur khans.

The Qing dynasty, the Manchu dynasty, China's final dynasty, went into Xinjiang and killed enough people to control parts of it, but as their empire fell apart, Xinjiang went the way of the rest of China and was mostly controlled by warlords.

After the Qing fell, Xinjiang became a pawn in a miniature Great Game, with Russia and Republic China competing to hold onto it. The USSR built ties with Xinjiang but relinquished them following the 1949 revolution.

When the Communists took over, they retained the borders that the Qing Dynasty had drawn around Xinjiang, and ignored the reality of who was actually holding the territory. They carried out land reform, collectivization, and began filling up Xinjiang's cities with Han Chinese settlers.

When my father-in-law was sixteen years old, he took the train to Xinjiang. Nowadays, the trip from the coast, at Lianyungang, to Urumqi, famous for being the world's furthest city from the sea, takes about two and a half days. Back when he took it, it was quite a bit slower. But here's the thing: it was free.

Beginning in 1966, as part of the great revolutionary link-up, 革命大串联 gémìng dàchuànlián, train travel was free. Perfect time to take a long ride out to Xinjiang. He lived and worked in Xinjiang for a few years, before eventually returning home.

But the majority of the settlers stayed there, working on the project of Sinifying (汉化 Hànhuà) the Wild West. A new Xinjiang-Han culture developed.

The food at Richmond Public Market's Xinjiang Delicious Food (新疆美食 Xīnjiāng Měishí) is the result of the cultural collision between frontier culture and Han Chinese culture. It's the food of Han Chinese in Xinjiang, heavily influenced by the Central Asian culture of the region but with a distinctly Chinese flavor.

辣子鸡 làzijī (辣子鸡饭 làzijī fàn, in this case-- served on rice, a one-plate meal) is certainly a Chinese dish, something you'd find in a Sichuan joint, a Hunan joint, anywhere. It's usually made quite simply: chicken, on the bone, with dried and/or fresh chilies.

The 辣子鸡 làzijī at Xinjiang Delicious Food is a different deal. The dominant flavor is cumin, even edging out the chili-- with a splash of dark soy sauce following it.
The second thing about this 辣子鸡 làzijī: it's smokey, everything cooked to a point just before charring, a flavor that's a bit like the charcoal smokiness that's roasted into the lamb skewers. There are fresh peppers, those long green ones, and a bit of onion, cooked until just browned.

Xinjiang-Han dishes, they might be classics of Central Asia or the Chinese heartland, but they take on influences of both places. So, you get heavy cumin, along with soy sauce, a flavor profile that isn't exactly "native" to Chinese cuisine or "native" to Central Asian cuisine.

羊肉夹于馍中，两种， Lamb in bread, two ways:

2010-04-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

1.

孜然羊肉夹馍 zīrán yángròu jiā mó,
旺旺麻辣烫 Wàngwàng Málà Tàng
丽晶广场 Lìjīng Guǎngchǎng

Cumin lamb in bread,
Want Want Spicy Food
Crystal Mall

In the Crystal Mall, behind Metrotown, overlooked by the Skytrain's concrete pillars, concrete parking garages, concrete institutional buildings, grocery hangars... in the low ceiling tunnels... up to the food court, swirling with Taiwanese girls and country cousin Mainland girl copycats in uniforms of foam front trucker hat with a ponytail stuck thru the back, Roots sweatpants, Ugg boots, Marc Jacobs bag (Louis white damier, Louis monogram, Gucci, etc. for the Mainland girls), families with kids scattering to the bubble tea stalls, serious men in grey suits sweating over bowls of noodles, a great big mess of people.

The foodcourt slots compete with neon lights and menu boards and food on display. Want Want Spicy Food is down on the left, doing a steady business in bowls of 麻辣烫 málà tàng: you fill a metal tray with crab sticks and lettuce or beef balls and spinach, lotus root, mushrooms, pork... and it goes into the back, where it's tossed in a glowing red broth that's fifty-fifty chili oil and pork fat. But, now wait, if you look back behind there, on a menu board over the chef's porthole, they advertise 孜然羊肉夹馍 zīrán yángròu jiā mó, lamb with cumin, stuffed in bread.

The cumin lamb at Want Want is barbecued over a little grill in the back, to order. The bread has a handful of cumin and salt and chili mushed and mashed into the outside and gets a quick grill, too.

The flavor of lamb and cumin and roasted bread brings me back to hundreds of meals in Xuzhou, the exact point in China where, when you head west from the coast, you start to get people eating lamb with any seriousness. It's the beginning of the West, the point where you leave bountiful Jiangsu and Shandong, and get into the barrenness of the West.

Xuzhou is a city where the default meal is a BBQ joint. The bosses set up in empty lots left by demolished buildings, staying there until a construction crew moves in or the cops chase them out. You toss out a low table and some stools, plastic cups of local beer (in Xuzhou, it's 彭城啤酒 Péngchéng Beer). Each table gets a metal box of glowing red coals, and then a couple trays of roasted peppers and eggplant, doused in strong black vinegar. And then metal skewers of lamb, lamb, lamb. Every single piece, fat, tendon, liver, kidney, from the balls to the eye balls.

In Xuzhou, you might wrap everything up in 馍馍 mómo, a word that refers to lots of different breads in lots of places but in Xuzhou refers to a thin flour tortilla, or you might wrap everything up in 烤饼 kǎobǐng, baked bread.

I could tell a dozen stories set in Xuzhou barbecue joints. The Want Want 孜然羊肉夹馍 zīrán yángròu jiā mó is like a parcel of nostalgia for those late night meals in construction yards and side streets. The same mixture of cumin seeds and ground dried chili and salt stuck to my fingers. I can hear the crinkling of the flimsy plastic cups. I can hear the boss singing as he roasts green peppers up front, his wife calling out orders to him. I can hear the local dialect. Smell the cumin. Taste the lamb.

2.

孜然羊肉夹馕 Zīrán yángròu jiā náng,
新疆美食 Xīnjiāng Měishí
列治文公众市场 Lièzhìwén Gōngzhòng Shìchǎng

Cumin lamb in nan,
Xinjiang Delicious Food
Richmond Public Market

Sorry to keep reminiscing, but... the good lamb restaurants in Xuzhou, whether they sell lamb meat soup or lamb skewers or plates of cumin lamb on rice, whether they're new jacks or one of those old neighborhood places that only took a break from the lamb business during the height of the years of rectification, collectivization, slogan painting and general mayhem... they should have a lamb hanging out front.

Dog meat restaurants do this, too, hanging the next day's carcass out front, the hair already burned off-- and the ghetto street stalls usually use an actual dog skull and crossbones as a sign. It's an advertisement of the main feature.

Lots of people rap about pigs, pork fat, and you've heard that bit about how the Chinese character for "house" 家 jiā is made up of 宀 mián, a roof, and 豕 shǐ, an archaic character for pig. In Chinese, meat is pork. But the dominance of lamb starts in Western China, heading out into Central Asia, and further West.

There's a poetic phrase in Chinese, which compares the color of fine white jade to lamb fat, 羊脂白玉 yángzhī báiyù, and maybe you could flip it around and compare lamb fat to white jade instead. There's a ton of it stuffed into the nan bread at Xinjiang Delicious Food.

Pearly, translucent lamb fat, stuffed into chewy baked bread.