Shanghai Gate

For most of my life I was content -- happy, even -- to slurp down the thick, sugary sauces of American Chinese food. Was it authentic? Uh-uh. Was it more exciting than American American food? Uh-huh.

Then I discovered Sichuan cuisine and everything changed. The tongue numbing and transit time-speeding sensations of Sichuan peppercorns paired with chilis was a world of flavor I couldn't have imagined while still eating at places with names like Happy Garden (you'll know the worst of them by the overexposed photos of dishes hanging over the counter).

But then I realized that Sichuan Chinese food was perhaps only better than American Chinese food because it was true to region and therefore less corrupted by those diabetes-inducing creations like Orange Chicken that more resemble a deep fried Twinkie than whatever they started as.



Enter Shanghai Gate. Gone are the fireworks of Sichuan cooking but with no compromise in flavor, texture, or options for eating offal (above: pig kidney with ginger and scallion). Instead you'll find subtle flavors as humble as the modestly atired women depicted in the restaurant's logo.

At (through?) the Gate you can sample dishes you may have read about in Fuschia Dunlop's excellent books on Chinese eating. Dishes like Lion's Head Casserole: a slow cooked, sweet and anise-heavy ball of beef and rice, tender enough to eat with one of those shovel-tipped straws that come with Slurpees.

The Globe once wrote that "What you get at Shanghai Gate plain and simple is a chef who really knows how to cook." Luckily, you also get that chef's food. And you get to eat it.

Another Feast at China Road

Last week I found myself in Syracuse and of course made time to feast at China Road. Or rather I went to Syracuse in part because I knew it would mean going to China Road.

The menu included cold spicy cucumbers, soup dumplings (the adult version of Gushers), turnip cakes (pictured above, though not quite as good as those at the International Buddhist Society in Cambridge - mmm!), a "sausage" hot pot, sautéed pea greens (perhaps my favorite veg), and the best ma po tofu I've ever had.

It was a sensible menu for two raging omnivores and a vegan, but it really got good when, still hungry, us omni's ordered the spare ribs with rice powder, for dessert, and ate it with our hands.

China Road was my first introduction to real Chinese food, and it is very good, but I'm amazed to now have something even better right in my own backyard: Sichuan Gourmet II in Framingham.

While Grace Garden is still the tops, the S.G.2 is so good that, weeks later, I can't stop thinking about my last meal there: two kinds of equally porky and garlicky dumplings, cold sesame noodles, dan dan noodles, yu xiang eggplant, twice cooked bacon, fresh bamboo with spicy wonder sauce (the "wonder" was Sichuan peppercorn oil), and cumin flavored dry beef with chili sauce.

Still, I love China Road and will eat there anytime I'm in the neighborhood. At the very least it's always better than the only other meal I've had in Syracuse: a horrible, fatty lasagna I once ate while waiting for a locksmith to let me back into my car.

Sichuan Gourmet in Framingham

Anyone who has meticulously scoured Chowhound for the best Chinese restaurants in Boston (guilty!) has surely heard of Sichuan Gourmet in Framingham. Anyone who hasn't just did, and everyone should go there.

Pictured above is what I couldn't finish from my leftover smoky hot shredded chicken with cayenne. I loved it, but no one who grew up on "barbarian pepper" could ever eat (or digest, I should say) equal parts chili and chicken, which is how the dish is served at S.G.

Zoe's in Somerville is still my top pick for one stop shopping Chinese food (range, price, location, jellyfish), but at Sichuan Gourmet I tasted the single best Chinese dish I've ever had within 416 miles of Boston (the distance to Grace Garden, the best Chinese food within 7,000 miles, the distance to China). That dish was Dan Dan noodles.

The chef had expertly combined sesame, garlic, and chili, all present, none overpowering. The noodles were dressed with the perfect amount of sauce then topped with crispy ground pork, and for the first time I understood why Fuchsia Dunlop is so crazy about them.

While I haven't made a completely exhaustive search of Chinatown, so far I generally agree with the notion that the best Chinese food in Boston lies in the burbs. But if you're like me and Ezra Klein (favorite political blogger!), and you really like Sichuan cooking, go to Framingham.

If you can't make it there, the stuff in Chengdu is probably good too.

Accidental, Occidental Fried Rice

For most of us, fried rice means Chinese style fried rice. I used to love the stuff as a kid (and before my 14 years of not eating un-kosher animals), and would pick out the red bits of pork and eat them first, just as I did the chips in mint-chip ice cream. But now the only time I have fried rice is when I ask for brown rice and mistakenly get it instead (though technically it is both brown and rice).

If you've ever had risotto cakes, you know that, unlike a restaurant that only serves penises, the concept of taking rice and frying it is not exclusively owned by the Chinese. (If you didn't click that link, know that it won't disappoint you.)

I recently did so with leftover, cooked Carolina Gold rice that I bought in the Lowcountry. I fried it up into little rice cakes that turned out about a million times better than the airy health food snack that bears the same name. But when I took my first bite, I realized that I had accidentally added seafood stock instead of chicken. As a result it tasted like a shortcut to using a full blown seafood risotto. In other words, the happy kind of accident.

Depending on the texture of your rice, you might be able to fry it as is. I added a dash of spelt flour and the aforementioned stock, plus plenty of black pepper. The cakes were crispy on the outside and as moist and lush as a Lowcountry summer on the inside. But best of all, they weren't a penis.

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Recipe: Fried Leftover Rice

Note: Depending on the consistency of your rice, you might need to add more or less liquid or flour, or nothing at all.

1 cup cooked rice (any kind)
1/4 cup stock (or water)
2 tbsp flour
black pepper
canola oil

Mix the rice, stock, flour and pepper.

Coat a skillet with sufficient oil for frying and set the burner to high.

When the oil is hot, drop in small handfuls of the rice batter. Once the crust begins to creep up the edges of the cakes, press gently to flatten, then flip and repeat on the B-side.

Serve hot and eat plain or with warm red sauce, which provides a welcome acidity.

Clean Your Plate, And Your Leftovers

For the second time in my life, I recently had take-out food so bad that I actually washed it off to make it better.

The offending dish came from a local Chinese restaurant that, despite its horrific, gaudy exterior, I desperately hoped would be good. I hadn't even thought to eat there until examining the dinner menu while having a (flaming) drink at the bar with some friends from out of town. When I saw the Yu Shiang section, my spirits lifted, or perhaps I was being lifted by the spirits shooting up the long straw from the scorpion bowl. In either case, I decided to go back for dinner, and I'm sorry I did.

I ate as much as I could while at the restaurant, choking down rubbery pieces of meat, the omnipresent (in bad Chinese restaurants) bell peppers, and a thick, cloying brown sauce that seemed composed of equal parts sugar and corn starch. I know that would just be powder, but that's how it tasted.

To make matters worse, while eating I was reading Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Peppercorns: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. The contrast between the dishes in her pages and the one before me was depressing beyond the help of any cocktail, no matter how on fire it was. I took most of it home.

There I dumped the slop into a strainer and ran it under water until the sauce broke free and it once again resembled food. I dressed it with nothing but the contents of the two bottles in the photo at top, soy sauce and toasted sesame oil, and the improvement was shocking. The food now tasted more like food and less like the food version of the restaurant's facade.

Still, I'll be going back for cocktails.

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Recipe: Washed Yu Hsiang Pork

1 takeout container of bad yu hsiang pork
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp soy sauce
running water

Dump the "food" into a strainer and hold under running water until the sauce has been rinsed away. Spit down the drain in contempt.

Shake the food until relatively dry.

Dress with sesame oil and soy sauce.

Bittman Meets Dunlop

An enthusiastic reader recently equipped me with a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan cooking guide, Land of Plenty, as well the ingredients to get started. He recommended that I start with one of the chicken appetizers. I did, and I can't imagine an easier or more inspiring introduction to the cuisine.

I made Hot-and-Numbing Chicken Slices from the "Four Ways of Dressing Cold Chicken Meat" portion of the appetizers section (p.141). Essentially you poach a chicken and then dress the meat with a highly flavorful and extremely easy to make sauce. It's amazing, and you'd work harder on meatloaf.

Looking at the broth leftover from the poached chicken, I thought back to Bittman's column/post/video on Hainanese Chicken and decided to merge the two recipes. This meant cooking rice in the water from the chicken and serving the meat on top of it.



Really the whole thing is just a vehicle for the Sichuan peppercorn, the flavor of which is often described as "numbing." (Can numbing be a flavor? "Timmy, what kind of ice cream do you want?" "Numbing!!!") In this dish the peppercorns, which are really the berries of the Chinese prickly ash, are lightly toasted before being ground.

Since I don't have a mortar and/or pestle, I used a jar on a cutting board, and it worked fine. While you're toasting the peppercorns, your kitchen fills with a tantalizing and baffling aroma that lies somewhere between juniper and marijuana. Maybe that's why I'm so hooked on the stuff.

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Recipe: Hot-and-Numbing Chicken Slices (ma la ji pian) meets Hainanese Chicken

Adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop (W.W. Norton) and Bittman's Hainanese Chicken.

For about 1 pound sustainably raised, cooked chicken meat (about 1/2 a chicken), cooled.

salt to taste
4-6 scallions, white parts only (I used onion)
4 teaspoons white sugar (I used honey)
3-6 tablespoons chili oil with chile flakes
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1/2-1 teaspoon ground roasted Sichuan pepper (I used 3)

Poach the chicken, then cook rice in the remaining liquid.

Cut or shred the meat, sprinkle with salt.

Thinly slice the scallions diagonally, 1 1/2 inches long, to form "horse ear" slices. Alternatively, thinly slice 1 small onion into whichever kind of ear you prefer.

Stir the sugar or honey into the soy sauce to dissolve it, and then add the oils.

Serve the chicken atop the rice and the scallion or onion atop the chicken. Sprinkle liberally with the ground "pepper" and serve the sauce on the side.

Get the munchies, repeat.

Zoe's Chinese Food, Somerville

I'll cut to the chase: this place is great. When I'm craving my favorite Chinese restaurants (Grace Garden of Odenton and China Road of Syracuse), I feel lucky to at least have Zoe's nearby. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but if you know how good my top two are, you'll realize it's actually just a compliment.

As when eating at Grace Garden, make sure to ask about the seasonal vegetable dishes. This roughage will brace you for the otherwise fleshy feast you are about to consume, and it's not too shabby either.

All whole fish options are delightful, the tea smoked Duck is as it should be, the salt and pepper squid are almost too hot to eat (another fronthanded compliment), and the sweet and sour lotus root appetizer will leave your tongue befuddled in all the right ways.



Equally good if less exotic is the spicy cucumber appetizer. It's almost an oxymoron, and that's why it works.

Other perks include a BYOB policy and a liquor store right across the street.

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Zoe's Chinese Food
289 Beacon Street
Somerville, MA 02143
(617) 864-6265

Grace Garden

Blogging about Grace Garden is like beating a dead horse. Scads of bloggers and chowhounds have already made public this gem of an eatery, eventually even drawing the attention of "old media" such as the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post. Still, I cannot contain my enthusiasm and feel compelled to do my part in the crusade to publicize what is obviously the best Chinese Food in America. Many are surprised to find such a place in Odenton, though I think it's a fitting home for food fit for a god.

We began with fish noodles, featured above. Are they noodles, or are they fish? The answer is "yes." It's hard to imagine something so soft, so subtle, yet so richly flavorful. They have a perfect ratio of give to bounce and are an absolute pleasure to chew. While eating them I thought: "Why is the idea of shaped, ground fish somehow familiar to me?" Then it came to me: gefilte.

Grace Garden might also be the only restaurant in a strip mall that features a rotating, just picked seasonal veggie dish straight from the owner's garden. In typical Grace Garden fashion, this attribute was in no way advertised, the only tip- off being a photo on the wall of some pea greens. When we inquired about these, we were told that they were no longer available, having been replaced by chive blossoms. After those peak, they plan to harvest their winter melon and serve it with soup that has been cooked inside of it.



This was the best single-vegetable dish I have ever eaten. Chives are so often so pathetic, so tasteless, nothing more that dry O's sprinkled onto a baked potato as an afterthought. Eating this dish was like only having seen dusty old dinosaur bones in a museum then finding yourself in Jurassic Park, surrounded by velociraptors of freshness and flavor. The szechuan fish fillets were even more mind-blowing.



This and the pork belly with rice powder were the two dishes that absolutely put me in a trance. I stopped talking and felt a surge of euphoria well up inside me, one not unlike the theobromine high I've gotten after an L.A. Burdick's hot chocolate. Beside the soul satisfying experience of eating great food, my only guess is that I was feeling the effects of the tongue-numbing szechuan, or sichuan, peppercorn. But I probably just think that because, like absinthe, it was until recently banned in the U.S.

Grace Garden is clearly the über food blog darling. Unpretentious, ethnic, off the beaten path but close to a major city, it is the ultimate find. I thought it was the best Chinese food I've ever had, and Dave thinks it's the best food he's ever had. When we asked the owner, who is also the chef, what the secret to his cooking is, he said:

"Heart. You must feel the ingredients that you are going to cook. Also, you need very good sauce."

Review: China Road, Syracuse

What can you expect from such an unassuming store front as this? Well, for one thing, whole, fried Cornish game hen:



China Road in Syracuse is the best Chinese food I've ever had. However, that was not always the case. China Road is also the only restaurant I've had a gestalt shift for.

Though I adore it now, my first trip to China Road was an utter disappointment. I went with a lover of fake meats who wouldn't shut up about their gluten. Since the "meat" dishes were about three dollars more than the tofu, I foolishly went with the latter. There I sat, eating mediocre bean curd and string beans, in what would later become one of my most sought after food temples. It was as though I was in Aladdin's cave, surrounded by riches, but pocketing a piece of jackal poop.

My most recent trip to China Road started with a lingering Chinese New Year Special: crispy shrimp balls.



True to their name, they were crunchy, shrimpy, and spherical. Also, they were delicious. Next came the soup dumplings.



The chef and owner of China Road boasts that his are the only Shanghai soup dumplings outside of New York City. While I imagine that there must be some in San Francisco's Chinatown, or in Shanghai, these might just be the best anywhere.

For those who have never experienced the soup dumpling before, be warned that you must carefully -- carefully! -- use a deep spoon to lift them from their bed of cabbage lest they break, spilling their precious cargo. If you can get one to your lips intact, you're then rewarded with all of the porky flavor of a whole bowl of soup somehow condensed and injected into one, soft, doughy wonder. If you find the meatiness overwhelming, the black vinegar with ginger which accompanies them will perfectly cut it.

A guest blogger on Bitten writes that they're "supposed to be so hot they burn your mouth a little bit." Perhaps, or perhaps this myth is circulated to excuse the gluttonous haste with which people like me eat them.

After these excellent appetizers, the "crunchy Cornish hen" featured at top was a perfect climax. The skin was so crisp, the sauce so savory, that my companion and I were positively moved to abandon our silverware and eat the bird like our earliest ancestors must have: with our hands, and a side of steamed, delicately sauced Chinese broccoli.

This is what our table looked like when we were done:



On our way out the hostess said "You boys have big lunch." We certainly have.

Review: Asia Kitchen

Today I had the pleasure of dining at Asia Kitchen in Owings Mills, Maryland. It squarely meets most expectations and exceeds the rest.

Thanks to the photographic evidence above, I'm sure the rest of the planet will soon follow in my decree of their having the Best Fried Eggplant on Earth (with Bengal Cafe in Camridge, MA a not too distant second, having stolen that title from the now defunct Peking Garden of Cleveland). A.K.'s comes in a serious, candy coated batter complete with citrus peel and disks of scallion. Somewhere in there is actual eggplant, but you don't care.

Their kimchee is also fantastic, and they once told me they make it right there, though twice they have told me that they do not. But their most impressive accomplishment is a deft hand with fake meat. Being a fake meat skeptic, I am also exposed to a lot of it from regularly traveling with a vegan and a vegetarian. (My skepticism is well informed by experience.) But Asia Kitchen's is dense, flavorful, and umamilicious, especially in the form of "Chicken" Cashew Nut. Go there.

Both Tea and Food

And here is that afore mentioned dish, the tea smoked duck. I concur with Mr. Tea and Food in regards to how good the meal was. China Road in Syracuse is one of those rare restaurants in the United States that actually seems more Chinese than Chinese-American. Everything was just right, especially the soup dumplings, which somehow featured all of the flavor of a whole bowl of soup wrapped in up in one little, doughy package.

Fish With Sour Cabbage

Our lunch at China Road in Syracuse, NY was uniformly excellent. I highly recommend a visit. Of particular note was the tea-smoked duck: tea and food. Pictured above is my order of fish with sour cabbage.