ABSOLUTE MADNESS

I just can't get enough of Chinese deserts! We actually went here just after the da pai dong from the last post but I felt the experience needed its own spotlight. Going out to a Chinese desert place is closer to a drug experience than a dining experience. This is the kind of food that Jerry Garcia would eat on Mars. Where else can you say "I'd like the coconut ice cream over corn soup with tofu, extra peanuts. And instead of the black bitter gelatinous cubes, could I get the pink exploding balls?"
I'm telling you...

Look at this menu! It's a straight up hallucination. And this blurry little cell phone picture isn't even doing it justice. I've been to restaurants PAPERED in this stuff.

Before I get into the real wild stuff I want to take a minute to discuss my roommate Lucky's shameful cake addiction. Seriously I think this guy's tape worm has cancer or something. He's so skinny and wasting away before our very eyes but, as far as I can tell, he spends his days in a semi-somnolent stupor pounding more cake than Marie Antoinette. He's the one in the restaurant ordering a large slice of cheese cake with a side of tiramisu or drunkenly asking a taxi driver at 4am in broken Cantonese where he can score some profiteroles. Anyway this is a picture of the tiramisu he ordered to accompany his iced milk-coffee ice cream float...

This is the float.


This is what Rainbow Ryder ordered. Its an iced coffee (?) with red beans, tapioca balls and a scoop of coconut ice cream all topped with creamy coconut milk.

This hot black sludge is what Piano ordered. It looks just like what fills the sky in Disney movies when things are just starting to go bad.It's black sesame porridge and its actually one of my favorite Chinese deserts. That said, one time our drain backed up when I was living in Africa and this looks EXACTLY like what came out.


This flamboyant plate of Mardi Gras is what I ordered: pink blueberry shaved ice with powdered almonds, chocolate sauce and tapioca balls. I decided to forgo the usual sweet corn kernel topping in favor of the pink exploding balls because... well it seemed like an obvious call. Anyone who has ever had a 'gusher' is familiar with the exploding candy with a liquid center thing but these little guys take it to a whole other level. They are so springy and resilient that at first you think they're just tart gummy candies but just when you think they're a hoax and really bite down on them they explode with vigor showering your teeth and tongue with pink, tart, wildly artificial tasting juice. Madness.

Da Pai Dong, or Why I Moved to Hong Kong

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of being taken out to eat by some of my favorite people. They chose the place and I made my way out to the New Territories just as it was getting dark. The spot they chose was a da pai dong in the Tai Po Market Cooked Food Center. Oh they know me so well. Da pai dongs may be my favorite single thing about Hong Kong cuisine. Da pai dongs technically are outdoor food stands but since the whole SARS business a lot of them have been moved in doors to these huge cooked food centers. Basically da pai dongs serve incredibly yummy simple dishes in a wildly casual atmosphere. Think big crowds,piles of bones and shrimp bits all over the place, plastic chairs, and disposable plastic wrap table cloths that the waitresses replace for every knew group of diners. Also there are buckets of icey beer, the food comes out hot and fast and the old women yell a lot. Perfect.

I was with Rainbow, Piano and Lucky and we pretty much just let Rainbow (with some help from Piano I'm sure) order. My only request was one organ dish and one seafood dish, and Lucky wanted a chicken. Anyway, he did a REALLY good job and this is what happened.

First up was a big heaping plate of lovely succulent looking pissing shrimp. They were cooked perfectly and topped with sweet deep fried garlic. I love these little bastards. I remember getting them when I was like eleven when I was in Hong Kong with my parents at the Temple Street market and the flavor brings me back every time. Also they might be the perfect beer food of all time. Well, them and the deep fried intestines but we'll get to them later. Usually, as you may know, I eat the shell and everything but for these shrimps the shell is just too hard and painful so I have to dig in and peel 'em. Peeling these fellows is a real bitch and I still haven't quite gotten the hang of it. I met a guy the other night who has a wild technique of inserting his chopstick under the exo-skeleton in such a way that the naked shrimp just zips right out but I, for the life of me, cannot figure out how he does it. Lucky actually stabbed himself while peeling one the other night and got a nasty wound on his finger. My current approach is to first bite just bite the face off(by far my favorite bite cause of the nice crunch, the way all the garlic toppings get caught in the face and all the yummy brainy bits,) then one by one de-armor them by hand. I wish there was a way just to order their heads...

Next up where these little guys, spicy clams. These were very fresh and quite good. They were served in that typical brown Chinese sauce you find at a lot of American-Chinese restaurants but this version had a lot of heat. The sauce was really peppery and very nice. I love spicy and its not easy to find spicy food in Hong Kong so I was really happy to see this dish arrive.

God I love China. Two dishes in and out of nowhere comes this huge plate of pudgy chicken. Chicken is one of those things that the simpler it is the better. I want my chicken to taste chickeny. Why fuck around? And this it one of the simplest and most Delicious ways of serving a chicken out there, just steamed until the meat is nice and juicy and the fat has taken on that beautiful creamy opaque lemon-meringuey look. This was served simply with a sauce made from pouring scalding oil over a bowl of minced garlic. The chicken was pretty close to perfection and there was enough sauce left over that I could soak my rice in it.

Next to arrive was my good old friend, Fish fragranced Eggplant. I've talked about this delicious dish of stewed eggplant, ground pork and preserved fishies a lot on this blog. Suffice it to say that this was a really great version of this dish. Nice fresh chunks of eggplant, not overly cooked or too gooey/ sticky. Very nice.

Damn my shaky hands! This was maybe my favorite dish of the night and I couldn't get a good picture of it to save my life. Deep fried pig intestine served over pickled vegetables with a sweet sauce. Ok, maybe this is my favorite beer food. Crunchy, chewy, porky, fatty, the greasiness perfectly offset by the sweet sauce and the pickled veggies. I can't think of any food that tastes quite as uniquely unhealthy as this dish (and this coming from a man that is basically living on goose fat and milk tea). With every delicous bite your body just seems to scream NO. Also you really can't eat too many of these guys in a row to quickly or else they start tasting a little fecal. There I said it. Anyway, love them.

Next up were the old standard of razor clams with sweet garlic and vermicelli. This dish always tastes Thai to me but I'm assured it is as authentically Cantonese as they come. I never really eat razor clams at home but I love em here. They are just so meaty and satisfying compared to their non-razor cousin. The vermicelli looks like a garnish but it is actually incredibly important for soaking up all of that sweet vinegar garlic sauce. I think this dish is replacing "with preserved black beans" as my favorite preparation of razor clams and scallops too for that matter...

The damage done.

i-Eat pt.1

So, they just opened a huge mall near my apartment (this might not be true, it could be the mall was there all along and I just moved here) called i-Square. Lucky and I always discuss getting dinner there but it's just too daunting. There must be close to one hundred restaurants in the mall ranging from the super fancy to Duke's Deli: home of the third best hot dog in Hong Kong. Anyway, yesterday I had an idea: how about we start at the top and eat at every single restaurant in the mall and it will be a running feature on my blog. I like the idea of not having to think too much or travel too far and I also like the idea of how huge and diverse the experience will prove to be. It kind of gets at what I love about Hong Kong. Everything is so much more vertical than horizontal here, there are lots of examples of buildings that if you wished you would never have to leave, apartments, discos, restaurants, spas, salons, grocery stores, tailors and electronic shops just an elevator ride away from each other.

Last night we decided to start at the top and took the elevator to the 31st floor. Unfortunately that floor's restaurant's cheapest appetizer was about $100 US, so we sheepishly took the elevator down to the 30th. Maybe I'll check out the 31st for my birthday or something.

The 30th is home to Nanhai No. 1 and the attached Eye Bar. I was invited to the opening of Eye Bar the other week and enjoyed myself but somehow managed to miss the presence of the entire restaurant and the view. I must have been seriously distracted because the whole two floor open space is surrounded with floor to ceiling windows allowing an unobstructed view of the city across the harbour. Quite impressive.

The restaurant itself sells the usual selection of Guangdong dishes, of which I am obviously quite fond. Before I get into the food I just wanted to say, I looked up this place on Open Rice (the Hong Kong yelp) just now and saw a bunch of people complaining about the service; well when we came the restaurant was pretty full and they seated us promptly right by the window and for the rest of the meal we were surrounded by smiling server-youth communicating with each other on walkie talkies. The service was really great, super friendly and navy seal efficient. Also, before dinner I ordered a dirty gin martini and was pretty disappointed...somehow even the olives didn't taste like olives. Will someone please tell me a place to get a good martini in this city?

We started our meal with some cold dishes. I was going for something a little refreshing and uplifting to wake us up a little after work and I think we did pretty good.

First we ordered the Marinated Baby Pig Legs in Yellow Wine. Basically these were piglet trotters soaked in scrumptious booze made in the same style as drunken pigeon and the like. I usually love this preparation but have had bad luck as of late with these kind of dishes in Hong Kong as they've either had no wine flavor or WAY too much. These broke that bad streak and were really great, although I'm not sure if Lucky though so. Just enough lovely wine and the trotters cooked to perfection with lots of crunchy cartilage,lip smacking collegian, crunchable baby bones and slick boozy skin.And they were served with an amazing light chili vinegrette! I think I pretty much ate the whole plate.

Next up was Fungus in Preserved Vinegar. I didn't get a great picture of this but it was maybe my favorite dish of the night. Nice black little flappy mushrooms with shredded veggies and tart bangin vinegar. The tiny mushroom caps would fill with vinegar and almost take on the mouth feel of little pickled berries. Very very good. Would somebody please explain what "preserved vinegar" is to me? I see it on menus all over the place here. Isn't all vinegar preserved? I'm just sayin...

Next up was the stewed Spare Ribs in Sweet Dark Sauce with Fried Mantou. This was really nice but so heavy I didn't know if I could handle it. The sauce was sweet but it was nicely complex compared to the cha chaan teng versions of this dish. It was served with pineapple thinly sliced on top. And of course there was the fried man tou! Mantou is Chinese steamed bread. Its kind of the Chinese equivalent of deep frying white-bread and just as delicious. I think your getting the picture by now, super fatty falling-apart-tender beef chunks covered in a sweet sticky sauce, with glazed pineapple and fried dough. Yeah, intense. This dish was pretty damn Gwai Lo but then again I am one so I suppose there's no shame in it. I guess the jury is still out on this dish. It was certainly yummy but too...much.

Now time for another rich and sticky sweet stewed dish! The Three Cup Chicken came right on the tail of the spare ribs. This is one of by back in the day cha chaan teng favorites. The Chinese for this dish is three cup chicken but it was on this menu as Taiwanese stewed chicken. Basically the dish is big chunks of chicken stewed with a sweet and sticky sauce served with mushrooms and garlic cloves and assorted vegetables in a sizzling clay bowl. This version was really good. The chicken chunks were huge and really tender and I liked that they were served with whole garlic cloves and pearl onions. The onions were especially nice as they acted as little sauce sponges. The garlic cloves were yummy but too underdone, a little too crunchy and green tasting. Again, this dish was good but just too heavy it was over-kill and I was starting to feel food-stupid.

Ah ha! Tofu with olive leaves and diced pork. This was really really nice. I barely noticed the diced pork all though it was infused with that nice glistening meatiness that tells you pork is somewhere on the scene. I'd never eaten anything with olive leaves and they where bangin', giving the dish a savory almost herby (but not at all) flavor and added a nice subtle crunchiness to the whole thing. They kind of reminded me texturally of the way they use fried basil in some Thai dishes. The texture of the tofu was really nice too, pan fried skin with a shockingly soft almost liquid center. This was a great dish for eating over rice. Really good.

Next I foolishly and indulgently ordered desert. Well, we split two deserts and desert wine and coffee...

We ordered Asti, the super sweet Italian sparkling wine. My only experience with this stuff before was when I used to buy it at the corner store because it was cheaper than Andre and I was always disappointed because it is just so god damned sweet but this time we ordered the profiteroles with ginger/ vanilla ice cream, banana and warm chocolate sauce and I thought the two might go perfectly. I also ordered my favorite Chinese desert, warm almond cream. I was right that the desert wine went really nicely with everything but to be honest the desert was really the disappointment of the meal. The profiteroles especially were way below standard. The pastry was oddly dry and crispy, instead of soft and flaky. The ice cream was fine but too icy and not creamy enough and the sauce might have once been warm but by the time it made it to our table was cold and hard.

The first taste of almond cream was amazing. It was the richest almond cream I had ever had, frothy, creamy and super sweet but that richness actually sabotaged it as within about one minute of arriving at our table it had congealed into a thick puddly kind of almond pudding. It had nothing on the best almond cream I've ever had from Sun Tung Lok. We didn't finish it.

All in all I'll probably come back to this restaurant. With the view and the ambiance and the reasonable price it would be a great date restaurant. The food really was pretty good and I'm excited to try some of their less white person oriented dishes. Also I hear they serve dim sum...

So, one out of thirty one floors down. I'll keep you posted.


And another thing, before the food they served these amazing little shrimp crackers that tasted like a mix between shrimp crackers and pork rinds, god bless 'em.

COW FACE COW FACE

I’ve been hearing about this place since the first night I landed in Hong Kong. Cow Face. Even the name makes me hungry. Unfortunately it’s way out in Tai Po Market, only opens at one and tends to sell out of most of the good stuff (the face) in a couple of hours. So, it’s been tough actually getting out there to try it. Well, last weekend we made it and I’m already planning my next trip back. Rainbow Ryder, Lucky, Nickie and I arrived just before opening time and already the line stretched down the street.

Luckily there’s a fresh juice place next store so we had something to sip while we waited. Basically cow face is a beef soup noodle place. They are famous for their rich broth and their cow face soup which is basically stewed beef cheek and all those good facey bits. The beef stock is diluted to make the soup broth but you can order a side of beef that is served in the unadulterated super-rich pure cow face stock and add as much as you like (a lot) to the soup.

I ordered a cow face soup with thin egg noodles and a side of butterfly beef. The butterfly cut is something you really only ever see old heads in Hong Kong eating. At least I think it’s called butterfly beef... I can’t find the website I learned about it from now. Anyway it is SUPER FATTY. We’re talking at least sixty percent fat to forty percent meat and that’s the low end; most of my bites were ninety percent fat at least. In the picture all of that stuff that looks like cabbage or something is cow fat. See what I’m sayin’?

Now just think how amazing a piece of beef fat stewing all day long would be but...

the cow face was even better! A cow’s cheek is pretty much all connective tissue so you can imagine the magic that occurs after a day spent stewing. The meat gets so soft and all of the connective tissue completely dissolves and the fat becomes almost custard like so that you can literally swish the whole bite of beef and fat through your teeth, which by the way is my new test for beef tenderness. And if you think the beef sounds good just imagine what all of that fat does to the broth! Jesus! I want to put that thick beefy broth on everything: pancakes, salad, vanilla ice cream...

Now obviously I was partial to the meat but, you won’t believe this, the noodles were actually my favourite. I’m in the land of noodles and these were the best I’ve had so far. I ordered the e min, which Rainbow told is actually pretty rare these days. E min is a medium thin egg noodle which is often lightly fried. These noodles really got me going. They were very eggy and rich but also managed to really soak up the broth so that they had this real decadent eggy-beefy thing going on. Also, I insist this is true although my dining companions say I was crazy, they had this super subtle almost acidic bite to them that really did it for me. That, and they were cooked perfectly: fully cooked but you could still really sink your teeth into them and munch. Nothing soggy or slimy about these guys.

We also ordered the obligatory greens with oyster sauce which at first I thought was kind of a joke. Actually the oyster sauce proved the perfect foil to the rich soup and really helped cut the grease. Also I think the vitamins in the veggies might have saved my life, as I was starting to lose feeling in my extremities...

Sunday Snackies

I’m starting to feel real guilty about this blog. I was so excited about it, still am in fact, but I’ve started working (gasp) and this has seriously cut down on my time to go out and try random restaurants. This is especially frustrating because I work at a food magazine, so I spend all day looking at all of the snackies I could be eating. The job has also shown me how little I really know about the Hong Kong food scene. I started making a list of places I have to try from noodle shops to Michelin starred fancy pants spots but the list is already like sixty spots deep and I haven’t gotten to try even one of them. I have had the opportunity to interview some of the chefs at some of the swankier spots so that’s been fun and maybe soon I’ll start to actually eat a little professionally and that would be pretty tight.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I haven’t really touched on dim sum. And that’s a shame because dim sum makes me really extraordinarily happy. Pretty much every Sunday, if we wake up before dinner, Lucky and I switch off between getting a fat sushi brunch or an equally fat dim sum brunch. This Sunday was dim sum. We went to the neighborhood spot just down the street. This spot is especially bangin because it is 24hrs and often I will go twice in a day, once for dinner and again at like one or two in the morning. This restaurant isn’t amazing or anything. It’s typical of a thousand other teashops around the city but that’s just the thing, if it were in NYC or San Francisco it would be BY FAR the best around. I just can’t believe how much cheaper and better the dim sum is here than in the states. Although, truth be told the very best single bite of dim sum I’ve ever eaten was a steamed jade shrimp dumpling in Millbrae California at the now deceased Fook Yuen. But that was just a fluke. This shit here beats all the rest by a mile.

This is the restaurant. Notice the fat stacks of steamer baskets out front. You can alway order to go dim sum if you want but seeing as how the food gets to your table within thirty seconds of ordering it I always just kick it. Also that way I can have a milk tea and watch the cooking shows on the tv. That reminds me! The TV here is wild. I'm pretty sure its all about food in someway. Even the soap operas have scenes of people eating or cooking or talking about food. There are basic cooking shows, restaurant review shows, food game shows, a show where they make models with no cooking experience prepare really complicated dishes then laugh at them and there's my favorite show in which around ten super attractive friends go to wild restaurants, order a thousand different dishes then spend half an hour stuffing their faces and looking pleased. The first week I got here there was what seemed to be a really important press conference on the big screen tv at the neighborhood mall. It was zoomed in on two really serious looking Chinese businessmen's faces, one had a little Hong Kong flag lapel pin and one had a little Mainland Chinese lapel pin. When the camera zoomed out you could see they were both holding the same over-sized golden carving knife, then a roast pig was wheeled out and the men sliced it in half pausing for a photo opp. Perfect.



Anyway, so this was the first dim sum I ordered. Its a meatball. They are so good. The meatballs are held together with tofu skin and very heavily spiced. They're big too, about the size of the palm of my hand and I can usually only eat one or two because they are so juicy (greasy). Seriously they spray and squirt juice everywhere. Sometimes in a concentrated scalding stream, sometimes in a fragrant grease colored mist.



These little guys are wild. I'd never seen these before coming here. I can't remember what's in them... I think its pork but what really makes them special is that there is a hard boiled quail egg stuffed in each one. Damn Hong Kong knows how to push the health envelope. Nothing goes better with pork fat than rich quail yoke.



These are actually my favorite dim sum. No funny business, just plane old steamed shrimp dumplings. Man when these things are done right it's on a whole other level. I wake up most mornings craving these. When their perfect they have skin thats so thin its see-thru but strong enough to get roughed up with my chop sticks without ever breaking. They should never get stuck to the paper in the basket but should have a slight tackiness in the mouth. Inside one medium sized, recently deceased shrimp, quietly curled and just barely steamed to firm, crunchy perfection. A little soy sauce and holy god.



These are another favorite. You can't see in the picture but the rolled up rice noodles contain cha siu pork, the famous Cantonese sweet bbq'd pork. They're always swimming in a really mellow, not too salty soy sauce that when combined with the sweet pork really gets going.



Here it is. The reason I can no longer walk up stairs without taking a rese. Look at the beautiful chunk of roast piggy. Portioned perfectly so every bite contains equel amounts of pink salty flesh and creamy fat, all topped off with a crunchy porky bit of roasted skin. The photo can't convey the crunchiness of this skin; the sound you make eating this sis the same one you make when you eat corn chips. On man, you take one of these little guys, drag it through the green onion infused oil, then a good long thorough bath in the fiery yellow mustard, and its worth the inevitable coronary episode.

Ok, I'll leave you with that. I'm actually too hungry to keep this up right now. Much love.

Happy New Year!

Eyo. Eyo. Sorry I haven't been updating more recently but this last weekend was Chinese New Years and I've been running around all over the place. Luckily, by "running around all over the place" I mean I've been stuffing my pudgy face to the point that I'm starting to sweat stock. I love the food in China. I love the street stalls, the tea houses, the restaurants and the banquet halls but nothing can even come close to a home cooked family feast. I'm thrilled that my friends here are some of the sweetest folks around and I was honored to be invited to meet their lovely families and gorge myself irresponsibly on their Mommies' home made snackies. I'll get to the details in a moment but first just a quick thought about the quantities. Do Chinese mothers ever sleep? The amount of food prepared for these meals was staggering! I swear to god they must have started cooking over Thanksgiving. The first home cooked NYE meal I had was at my friend Rainbow Ryder's house. Rainbow, his parents, brother (lil' Ryder), his girlfriend Piano, Lucky and I all sat down around eight and I dunno what time we left (somebody must have carried me to the Taxi) but I'm sure it was late. It all started innocently enough with a soup. Cantonese soups are world famous. Rightly so. I went into some detail about bangin broth earlier on this site but I had heard Rainbow's mom is especially slick with the soup and god damn. This was a light but flavorful fish broth with big chunks of carrot, squid, geoduck and fatty fish belly. This fish belly was just amazing. As soon as you put it in your mouth it was gone leaving only a memory of intense fishy satisfaction.


Let's see what else was there... My god there were so many. Oh yeah, big chunks of soft yam in a thick sauce flavored with big chunks of salty pork and spring onions (and maybe oysters? I should write this stuff down...)

There was a big bowl of this absolutely wild dish that I had never seen before (although would see more of before the weekend was over). In Cantonese the name of the dish is a homophone for Happy New Year so it's a popular holiday snackie. It's made of tender vegetables, spring onions, pork, sea cucumber, mushrooms, more fish tummy and HUGE oysters. All of the ingredients are stewed together with... well with whatever that is. I thought it was sea weed but was assured it was a kind of grass that only grew in the desert. I can't remember the Chinese name except that it had the character for "hair" in it. On its own the grass brought more texture to the table than flavor, but all together the grass was integral in bringing all of the disperate ingredients together into one rich and delicious dish. Sorry about the photograph; this might me the most difficult dish to photograph in the world.

Next came, well not really next as everything pretty much came at once, one of my favorites. A large plate of fresh steamed shrimp with a simple sauce made by adding scalding oil to a dish of soy, sugar and pepper. I love these little guys and would have happily eaten the whole plate of them. The family made fun of me for the way I ate them, leaving the shells, heads and appendages in tact, but let me say loud and proud that my way is better! The shells add a nice little crunch, I'm sure it's good for your skin or something and by not peeling every single one you can stuff you gullet more efficiently.

Now it was time for the WHOLE STEAMED CHICKEN. Oh man I love simple steamed chicken. Chicken at home just doesn't taste chickeny enough. This bird was steamed beautifully and served with a thick condiment of ginger, scallions, garlic, soy and scalding oil. Just look at this beautiful bird! See those dark bits on top? Those are the gizzards and assorted offal and they were unbelievably delicious when loaded up with ginger and garlic. Yum!

Now peep Lucky being a fat beast!

I feel like I'm not even doing this meal justice. I'm forgetting so much. Just look at these gorgeous greens!

Oh yeah and look at this! This was actually one of my favorite dishes of the night, assorted vegetables with slices of fish and pork meatloaf and chinese sausage. Anyone who knows me will know that it was the sausage that really did it for me. This stuff is just amazing. It is made with Bai Jiu (a strong sorgram liquor) and the booze perfectly cut through the greasiness of the cured pork fat and lent the whole thing a kind of sweet, warming alcoholy flavor.

Oh wait! Let's not forget the whole steamed fish! The Cantonese sure know how to rock a fish. This one was steamed simply in soy with spring onions and strips of ginger. Every ingredient (all three or so of them) carefully selected to highlight the fish's natural flavor. I usually have a problem with Chinese fish (which is a shame because they might just be the best fish in the world) because of all the bones but this one wasn't to boney at all, just fleshy and succulent. Also, because I was a guest Rainbow's Mom offered me the fishy's plump little cheek. What a wonderful woman...

I was really starting to slow down at this point. Surely we were almost done... but wait! Save room for the whole steamed crabs. Full of garlic and spring onion and so fresh they still tasted of the sea. Unbelievable.

Now it was time for what I was assured would be the last dish. A yummy simple soup of a light barely-there broth enveloping lovely little tender silky smooth dumplings. I'm sorry to say I could only eat one or two but they were delicious.

Now, only forty eight hours later I headed out to my other friend, Killer's family's house for another New Years Eve feast. I forgot my camera but this was another off-the-rails meal. This time it was hot pot. We started with blueberry cheesecake (always a good sign) then gathered around a caldron of boiling water. Ingredients were scattered all around the large table and as people laughed, chatted and drank we all threw them in with abandon. There were fish balls, meat balls, little sausage nuggets, fat mushrooms, skinny mushrooms, tomato slices, yam chunks, lettuce, bok choi, fatty pork, thinly sliced lean beef, and paper thin sheep. Served with everything were heaping platters of the best god damned kimchee I have ever put in my mouth and a dipping sauce of garlic, ginger, spring onion, Thai chili paste and fragrant fish soy sauce. Just as the meal was winding down his mother brought out a heaped bowl of bou zai fan (rice cooked in a pot, see my previous post). This particular bou zai fan was topped with minced pork and salt cured fish and was the best I have ever eaten. Even my Hong Kong freinds agreed it was the best they'd ever eaten. The fish, which Killer's aunt brought from the fishing village where she lives, was especially incredible.

Then a quick bite of left over "Desert Hair Grass New Years Dish" and after dinner, fresh oranges and pomello slices. Life is good.

Now I can hardly convey how amazing these meals were or how gracious the family Rainbow and the family Killer were for sharing them with me. Thank you so much and happy new year to all!!

Shanghai, final snackies

I had planned on staying in Shanghai for a few days to visit friends, then take the sleeper train to Kowloon. Unfortunately, because of the spring festival, all of the train tickets for the entire month of July were sold out and the cheapest plane ticket available left the day after my job ended. That meant I had about twelve hours to eat all of the food and see all of the people I had planned to, so I winnowed my friend list down to one and my food list down to just two places.

One of my favorite food bloggers, Sandy Ley, writes a blog out of Shanghai and had recently discussed her "top five must eats in Shanghai" in an interview for chinatravel.net. The two things she listed that interested me the most were the Xiao Long Bao at fer her favorite xlb place, Ling Long Fang, and the complimentary nut mix at the famous expat watering hole el Coctel. I've been following her blog avidly for months and was excited to finally try some of her recommendations.

First off, Ling Long Fang was bangin. Just as Sandy describes it: sticky table tops, gruff service, delicious pork soup snackies. That said, I must admit I still prefer De Long Guan. Ling Long Fang was yummy but De Long Guan was even gruffer and stickier and served up some sort of crazy magic.

Next up on the list was el Coctel. I met up with my friend and Shanghai expat John and headed out for a bevie and some of those famous free nuts. This was my first time at el Coctel and it was really pretty awesome. The bar is based on trendy Tokyo style bars (I forget what they're called but I went to a really similar one in NYC a few years ago), dark, intimate, upstairs and a little jazzy. The cocktails we had were pricey but simple, impeccably made and delicious. And the nuts? Well the nuts were insane. I must admit that when I first read that the nuts were included on Sandy's top five eats in Shanghai I balked. The selection spanked of trying too hard to be hip, certainly some bar nuts couldn't be that great. But man oh man was I wrong. Most of the nuts weren't even nuts, I don't know what they were. It was like some non-sugary cracker jack or something. I couldn't stop eating them and after a few cocktails I wouldn't shut up about how good they would taste over milk. I'm telling you, next time I go to el Coctel I'm bringing some cold milk. Those nuts would make the best cereal in the world.

Well, goodbye Shanghai! Next blog post will be from Hong Kong, famous snackie paradise and my new home!

Ling Long Fan

10 Jian GuoDong Lu

Shanghai

Tel:86-21-6386-7021

el Coctel

2F, 47 Yongfu Lu at Fuxing Lu

On the Farm

For one of the days with the students we went out to a suburb of Shang Hai to, among other things, investigate organic farming. Our first visit was to Auntie Fu's. Auntie Fu is getting kind of famous I guess; from what I could tell she runs an organic farm in Jin Shan (outside of Shang Hai) and also a factory that makes things like her famous red bean paste peach buns. Auntie Fu herself is about four and a half feet tall and all energy. She smiles with so much enthusiasm you're scared she's gonna pull something and is always purple-faced, sweating, enveloped in steam and carrying an oversized plate of hot snacks. On the day we met her we were actually supposed to eat lunch somewhere else so Auntie Fu was told not to prepare any food and just answer some questions about organic farming. Thank god she couldn't help herself and ended up preparing a small feast of seasonal winter snacks. She brought out simple roasted root vegetables, steamed pumpkin, picked beets, small gluttonous rice flower snacks filled with brown sugar, boiled pork dumplings, mixed seasoned nuts and the piece de resistance, a towering platter of steaming whole water chestnuts. I had never seen water chestnuts like these. The were huge, all about the sie of a baby's fist and each chestnut was covered with a paper thin layer of ink black skin. The pepperiness of the skin mixed with the sweetness of the chestnut to create one truly incredible bite. Now, like I said, we only stayed a minute and didn't get to eat much but Auntie Fu kept saying her most famous dishes were fresh chicken with handpicked mushrooms and slow roasted duck. I personally met some of those chicken and ducks and they looked fat and happy (i.e. delicious) so I can't wait to get back and try some of her real dishes. I highly recommend if anyone is headed to the the Shang Hai area drop her an email. It'll be a trip.

Auntie Fu's
Jin Shan (outside of Shang Hai)
email:FYNJL1067@126.com

I Burned My Face

Shang Hai

So. I finally arrived in China on New Years Day to begin my week helping to chaperone sixty high school junior girls around Shang Hai with the aim of investigating women’s rolls in China. The food on these trips is one of the job's greatest perks but to be honest it is kind of a mixed blessing. All of the meals are huge, lavish and free but most are in the banquet style, often in restaurants oriented towards tourists. Couple this with the natural inclinations of Shang Hainese cuisine (not my favorite of China’s food traditions) and you end up with a lot of fried and sticky sweet dishes, the vegetables very oily and sauces very thick. That said one of my favorite dishes of all time is one of the sweetest, and stickiest Shang Hai has to offer, Hong Shao Rou or red cooked pork. Large cubes of fatty pork are slow stewed in a broth of soy sauce which turns them a dark red. When prepared to perfection the meat should shred easily in the teeth and flake apart under even the lightest pressure. The fat, which is sometimes as much as half an inch thick, should take on the the color and texture of a whipped custard and immediately melt to coat the mouth in that way only pork fat can. I had a few different Hong Shao Rou experiences on this trip and although none were incredible, even mediocre Hong Shao Rou is a welcome treat and nearly impossible to find in the States.

I did manage to have a couple truly exceptional dining experiences with the kids in Shang Hai. The first was the Xiao Long Bao I had for my second meal in China. Xiao Long Bao (xlb) are Shang Hai’s most famous food item. They are soup dumplings made with pork and sometimes crab. The small thin rice flour wrappers contain a perfect mouthful of searingly hot, rich pork broth. Quickly dipped in vinegar and sometimes ginger, these little pleasure packets are some of the best cold weather comfort bites on the planet. A great xlb is transcendent and a bad one is about as bad as an overly thick cold noodle filled with hot pork grease can be. People in Shang Hai are incredibly loyal to their favorite xlb restaurant/ stall and xlbs in Shang Hai assume the roll that the burrito plays in the bay area. I had done my xlb research before leaving for Shang Hai , so I was surprised when the best xlb I had ever had came from a small place I had never heard of before.

On the first day we took the kids to Fudan University to meet their new college buddies who were then supposed to take them out to a typical college student lunch. The girls guiding our group led us into a cramped and noisy little street side restaurant just a few steps from the east gate of Fu Dan University called De Long Restaurant (德笼馆). We ordered normal pork xlb, crab roe xlb, Cha Siu xlb (which the girls described as filled with honey bbq pork) and spicy xlb, along with two bowls of spicy beef curry noodle soup. This was way off from my usual xlb order. I am usually a xlb purist sticking to the old favorites of crab roe and pork. I tend to regard spicy xlb the same way I regard spicy tuna roll, made for people who don’t know what they’re doing, the spiciness mostly used to cover up sub-par ingredients. I had never heard of Cha Siu xlb before and so was a little suspicious (although it is difficult to go wrong with bbq pork) and I don’t usually like East Asian curry dishes at all. Anyway, I was wrong on all counts. The spicy bao were scorchingly hot, the broth filled with chilies and a hefty portion of mouth numbing Sichuan peppercorns. Two dumplings in and I was covered in sweat and couldn’t feel my face. The normal pork xlb were absolutely flawless, the meat ground to perfection, the broth rich, bracing and hot. The Cha Siu dumplings had more firm dense pork slices providing a lot of nice tooth resistance, with a deep golden rich broth that filled your head with an almost overpowering scent of honey. Crab roe xlb are always good but these were amazing- filled with rich salty crab broth and the roe itself hit me like an ocean wave in the face almost like a bite of fresh Uni. Even the curry soup was great. Hot spicy broth, nice globs of fat, perfect noodles and tender slices of beef falling apart between your chopsticks. Bangin. Now I have not tried enough places to say this but I think I’ve found my Xiao Long Bao place. De Long Guan I’m all yours.

德笼馆, 复旦大学东门

De Long Restaurant,

Fu Dan University East Gate