Chinese food porn.
Sep. 26th, 2003 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaBen is here visiting for a few days (squeal!!! Ben!!!). He arrived just before dinner last night, so we took him out to one of our new favorite restaurants: Chinatown Cafe. It's located five blocks south of our house on our own street, on a two-block strip that apparently used to be the business district of Baltimore's Chinatown and is now a run-down, boarded-up, wino-frequented area with faded Chinese characters painted on the windows of various abandoned businesses and an extremely ordinary-looking restaurant with no street-level windows.
When you step into the entry, the first thing you see are the fishtanks. One tank of shellfish, one tank of tilapia and striper, a third tank with something I can't remember, plus a pile of hand nets. It's a good sign. The next thing you see, as you move into the main part of the restaurant, is that almost all of the diners are Asian. (On a weeknight, this always seems to be true. Weekends at lunchtime, a lot of white people go there for Dim Sum.) And the place smells amazing.
The manager was pleased to see us there in person, because we usually get takeout. She gave us their main menu and supplementary menus, but then stood over us making suggestions and talking about different styles of Chinese cooking. They specialize in Hong Kong dishes, but judging by the length of the menu, you can get every Chinese dish in the known universe. They even gave us a Dim Sum menu, although I'd been under the impression that it's usually a weekend thing. "Are you doing Dim Sum, then?" Ben asked. "Even if we weren't, we'd do it for you," the manager said cheerfully.
After much consultation - and she was not shy about vetoing our suggestions - we wound up with the following menu:
Tea: One pot of jasmine tea, one pot of chrysanthemum tea. The chrysanthemum tea came with a little dish of hard light-brown sugar lumps, which I didn't investigate. Ben said that the Russian thing to do is hold the sugar lump in your mouth and sip the tea - who knows if that's also the Chinese thing to do.
Appetizers: We got four Dim Sum items as appetizers. Steamed shrimp dumplings, steamed shark fin dumplings (because I wanted to try something really unusual), taro cakes with plum sauce, and curry cuttlefish. The shrimp dumplings were by far the best - I liked the more delicate flavor of the shark fin dumplings, but didn't come away with a very strong impression of what shark fin itself actually tastes like. The taro cakes were a little bit strange in texture, sort of soft and creamy, with diced bits of taro in them. (I'd been expecting something more like latkes, but made with taro instead of potatoes.) I thought they were passably interesting, but I didn't want more than half of one. The curry cuttlefish was pretty chewy, but I loved the mild, nutty curry sauce.
Main Course: Singapore rice noodles with shrimp and pork. Snow pea greens stir-fried with garlic. Mixed seafood pineapple boat, which was half a pineapple hollowed out and filled with shrimp, scallops, squid, abalone, pineapple chunks, and a few vegetables. I loved everything. Especially the greens - they brought us an enormous heap of them, and Ben and I scoured the plate clean between us. I'd never knowingly eaten snow pea greens before, but they were just the sort of greens I like: slightly crisp, garlicky, and with just a tiny tinge of bitterness under the green flavor. They made a refreshing complement to the enormous piles of food we were eating.
Dessert: Something has to have been lost in the translation, because she assured us that the sweet, starchy, thick, lemon-yellow liquid that appeared without us ordering it was "peeled green bean dessert soup." It had a very strange texture and a sweet bland flavor, and I wasn't crazy about it, but it was an interesting thing to try. Fortune cookies.
The bill: Forty-five dollars. Forty-five dollars for all the vast quantity of incredible food we consumed, plus enough Singapore noodles left over for someone's lunch today. We had another pleasant conversation with the manager as we paid. She was encouraging us to get a big group of friends together and come in for a banquet - they do set banquets at, for example, $138 for ten people, and that way we'd get a chance to sample the entire breadth of the menu. We were not hard to convince. I made a comment about wanting to try some of the more unusual menu items, and she put in a plug for the frog legs in XO sauce. (I'm being phonetic here. It might be something like "exhow sauce," I suppose.) Then she said, "You go to most Chinatowns, you will never see these items because they are only on the Chinese menu and they will give you an American menu. I think everyone should try these things, so I translate into English."
Yes. Everyone should try these things. Anyone want to come to Baltimore for a banquet?
When you step into the entry, the first thing you see are the fishtanks. One tank of shellfish, one tank of tilapia and striper, a third tank with something I can't remember, plus a pile of hand nets. It's a good sign. The next thing you see, as you move into the main part of the restaurant, is that almost all of the diners are Asian. (On a weeknight, this always seems to be true. Weekends at lunchtime, a lot of white people go there for Dim Sum.) And the place smells amazing.
The manager was pleased to see us there in person, because we usually get takeout. She gave us their main menu and supplementary menus, but then stood over us making suggestions and talking about different styles of Chinese cooking. They specialize in Hong Kong dishes, but judging by the length of the menu, you can get every Chinese dish in the known universe. They even gave us a Dim Sum menu, although I'd been under the impression that it's usually a weekend thing. "Are you doing Dim Sum, then?" Ben asked. "Even if we weren't, we'd do it for you," the manager said cheerfully.
After much consultation - and she was not shy about vetoing our suggestions - we wound up with the following menu:
Tea: One pot of jasmine tea, one pot of chrysanthemum tea. The chrysanthemum tea came with a little dish of hard light-brown sugar lumps, which I didn't investigate. Ben said that the Russian thing to do is hold the sugar lump in your mouth and sip the tea - who knows if that's also the Chinese thing to do.
Appetizers: We got four Dim Sum items as appetizers. Steamed shrimp dumplings, steamed shark fin dumplings (because I wanted to try something really unusual), taro cakes with plum sauce, and curry cuttlefish. The shrimp dumplings were by far the best - I liked the more delicate flavor of the shark fin dumplings, but didn't come away with a very strong impression of what shark fin itself actually tastes like. The taro cakes were a little bit strange in texture, sort of soft and creamy, with diced bits of taro in them. (I'd been expecting something more like latkes, but made with taro instead of potatoes.) I thought they were passably interesting, but I didn't want more than half of one. The curry cuttlefish was pretty chewy, but I loved the mild, nutty curry sauce.
Main Course: Singapore rice noodles with shrimp and pork. Snow pea greens stir-fried with garlic. Mixed seafood pineapple boat, which was half a pineapple hollowed out and filled with shrimp, scallops, squid, abalone, pineapple chunks, and a few vegetables. I loved everything. Especially the greens - they brought us an enormous heap of them, and Ben and I scoured the plate clean between us. I'd never knowingly eaten snow pea greens before, but they were just the sort of greens I like: slightly crisp, garlicky, and with just a tiny tinge of bitterness under the green flavor. They made a refreshing complement to the enormous piles of food we were eating.
Dessert: Something has to have been lost in the translation, because she assured us that the sweet, starchy, thick, lemon-yellow liquid that appeared without us ordering it was "peeled green bean dessert soup." It had a very strange texture and a sweet bland flavor, and I wasn't crazy about it, but it was an interesting thing to try. Fortune cookies.
The bill: Forty-five dollars. Forty-five dollars for all the vast quantity of incredible food we consumed, plus enough Singapore noodles left over for someone's lunch today. We had another pleasant conversation with the manager as we paid. She was encouraging us to get a big group of friends together and come in for a banquet - they do set banquets at, for example, $138 for ten people, and that way we'd get a chance to sample the entire breadth of the menu. We were not hard to convince. I made a comment about wanting to try some of the more unusual menu items, and she put in a plug for the frog legs in XO sauce. (I'm being phonetic here. It might be something like "exhow sauce," I suppose.) Then she said, "You go to most Chinatowns, you will never see these items because they are only on the Chinese menu and they will give you an American menu. I think everyone should try these things, so I translate into English."
Yes. Everyone should try these things. Anyone want to come to Baltimore for a banquet?
