Ipomoea Aquatica

According to Gabriel Miller-Phillips, noted expert on Southeast-Asian gourmet specialities, the tastiest leafy green of all is something called “kang kong.” When I heard this, I ran to the internet to look it up, and was somewhat amused to discover that kang kong is among our shadier vegetables. First of all, it goes by a huge number of names – including water spinach, swamp cabbage, swamp bindweed, water convolvulus, kangkong, kang cung, rau muong, kongxincai and ong choy, among many, many others. Second, it’s one of the world’s most popular vegetables because it will grow more or less anywhere that’s warm and wet. And third, it’s pretty much illegal in this country.

It’s classified as a “federal noxious weed” for the simple reason that, should it gain a foothold in any warm and swampy environment, it will clog waterways, crowd out other plants, and generally make a nuisance of itself and wreak havoc upon a complex ecosystem. The Florida Department of Natural Resources, on its website, warns us (in both English and Vietnamese) that possession of kang kong is punishable by a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail. But it also mentions that it’s “grown illegally in Florida as an oriental food vegetable.”

To my mind, this means that people really are risking jail time (it never says how many are caught) just to get their hands on fresh leafy greens, and what’s the FDNR’s loss should be considered the FDA’s gain – one must admit it’s a step up from simply getting the kids to eat their broccoli.

Many restaurants in NYC (where it’s legal to grow, since our cold winters prevent it from becoming entrenched) offer it on their menus, either in its common Vietnamese preparation (called “Rau Muong Xao Toi,” in a savory garlic sauce) or in its usual Malaysian form (“Kangkong Belacan,” sautéed with unspeakably stinky shrimp paste). I sampled it this afternoon at Nha Trang One (87 Baxter St., btw Canal and Bayard) and was pretty impressed. It’s very similar to spinach, with a hollow stem, and a rich “greeniness” to the flavor. Not dark or muddy in taste at all, the way spinach can sometimes be. And it was dressed with a thin, slightly salty soy and garlic sauce that set it off nicely. It was especially good dotted with the pungent chili sauce served alongside it in a too-small dose (though I realize I probably prefer more heat than most).

Apocalypse Noodles

I was a little disappointed when I first saw Grand Sichuan’s (125 Canal St., east of Bowery – the original, and not part of the chain) Dan Dan Noodles. A smallish tinfoil and plastic takeout tray, with some pasty-looking boiled noodles and about a tablespoon of minced pork and some dried woodsy vegetable – nothing really to recommend it. And I opened it up, and took a bite, hoping it was coated in some sort of invisible sauce (it wasn’t) and that’s when I finally upset the nest of noodles, saw a delicate wisp of pale orange oil below, and realized that the actual sauce was in a puddle under the noodles (I guess they’re the pasta equivalent of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt – heat-on-the-bottom spicy noodles). And that’s when everything changed.

In order to eat the Dan Dan Noodles, you mix up bland noodles with spicy sauce. My guess would be that this is to allow guests to (at least theoretically) determine the intensity of the dish to their individual tastes. Which is a nice thought, but I’m skeptical. It pretty much mixes itself as you eat. And when fully mixed, Grand Sichuan’s Dan Dan Noodles is the single spiciest dish I have ever consumed. It’s like sucking on lightning.

BUT it’s also unspeakably delicious, which in the end is much more important than the experience of its extreme heat. I was reading somewhere somebody describing Sichuan cooking as a “different language,” and this is a perfect illustration – what others (sanely) use in small quantities as a seasoning (chili oil) here becomes the basis of an entire dish. By turns it shows off flavors of garlic, sesame and fermented black beans, so strong that they would each overpower the dish were the others not there.

But the heat is still the dominant characteristic, and it’s worth noting that in these days where there are silly “chile pepper societies” full of overgrown nerdy boys daring each other to eat things, this relentless heat is not an afterthought or a novelty aspect of the dish. It really is the apex – it’s what pulls all the flavors together and carries them. The intensity of the heat gives the food another dimension, which allows for (and even helps create) stronger, bigger flavors. I would venture to say that at the same time as the Dan Dan Noodles is the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten, it’s also the most flavorful.

The only fault I can find with the Dan Dan Noodles is the portion – it’s too small to be satisfying on its own (at least to a hefty chap like myself), yet large enough (and intense enough) that ordering two doses seems perverse. Oh well, nothing’s perfect.

At the same time as this most recent bout of noodles, I sampled the Sichuan Double-Cooked Pork Economic Lunch Special, which was lovely, though not as earth-shattering as the noodles. Double-Cooked Pork is fatty belly bacon boiled and sautéed (hence “double-cooked”) and served in a spicy sauce of fermented black beans, onions and peppers - hot peppers, naturally. It’s a traditional dish, and I’ve had it before at other places, but have always found the belly bacon to be far too fatty to be enjoyable. The master chef at Grand Sichuan, however, knows how to do things properly.

Also suffice it to say that the peppers here are not the little dried red ones that wink slyly up at you from your General Tso’s. They are, instead, big honkin’ chunks of serpentine green long-hots, cooked as a vegetable and definitely meant to be eaten as part of the dish. And they are what makes it, adding a sultry, smoky bitter heat to the brightness of the onions and beans.

All in all, Grand Sichuan is among Chinatown’s best restaurants, consistently turning out ridiculously good food at low prices. It’s highly recommended, in case you were wondering.

In the Garden of Sweet and Sour

1) If there were an actual wonton garden, I could happily spend the rest of my life there.

2) A reasonably good substitute is New Wonton Garden (54 Mott St., btw. Bayard and Canal).

Lunch: Fried Wontons with Sweet and Sour Sauce, and Braised Lamb with Rice Noodles in Casserole.

Everybody (myself included) gets all excited about dumplings, whether fried, steamed or soup-containing. And wonton soup has its obsessive devotees. Where’s the love for the fried wonton? Few restaurants make it their specialty – you can’t even get an order in most places in Chinatown. It’s up to Wonton Garden to represent, and they come fucking correct.

The wontons themselves are paragons of wonton-ness, exactly what they should be – large flaps of flaky crispness around a tender center bursting with shrimp and maybe pork. Somewhere between snack food and real food. Perhaps both.

But what launches Wonton Garden’s fried wontons into the stratosphere is the sweet and sour sauce. No neon-pink goop here – thin, about the color of soy sauce, but leaving a red aura on the side of the coffee cup it’s supplied in – bursting with black vinegar and flavors in all directions.

And ultimately, we’re always told that Sweet and Sour dishes are, up there with Chop Suey and Chow Mein, the most egregious examples we have of bland, fake, mass-produced super-westernized Chinese food. And by and large they probably are. But Sweet and Sour sauces like this one demonstrate the brilliant possibilities of the style when approached by serious cooks.

The lamb casserole was lovely too – I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and was most pleasantly surprised by a mild (but not at all bland) stew containing falling-off-the-bone-tender lamb ribs. It could have been mistaken for a really tasty Irish stew if it had potatoes and carrots instead of chubby rice noodles and rolls of bean curd skin.

All in all an incredible cheap lunch. Go. Now.

In Which We Upscale Ourselves

Shanghai Cuisine (88 Bayard St., at Mulberry) is an upscale Chinese restaurant, lauded for their eats by upscale publications like New York Magazine and Gourmet, but left alone by the more downtown ones like the Voice.

Ordered Pork with Garlic Sauce, in lunch special format, sided by Hot and Sour Soup (included) and Scallion Pancakes. Admittedly rather down-market dishes, so I don’t know if I’m judging wrongly. There is, I know, a world of difference between sitting down in the restaurant to eat the chef’s best, and grabbing a quick cheapie and eating at a desk in an office. So take this with a grain of salt.

But the rice was lousy. I was unaware that was possible, in these days of hi-tech rice cookers, but my lunch came with a small portion of crappy rice. It was alternately dry and sticky, with an unpleasant “plastic” thing going on. Say what you will about the el-cheapo places I frequent, they always pony up impressive portions of first-rate rice when called upon to do so.

Lousy rice kicked off an uninteresting meal in thorough fashion. The pork itself was fine, sauteed in a rich and garlicky sauce with strips of Chinese celery, and the scallion pancakes were nice also (crisp, not very greasy). The Hot and Sour Soup would have been fantastic were it not for the profusion of shreds of stewed pork, but that’s a style thing (I prefer mine with just veggies) so I won’t get involved.

So it was all okay, but in the end the whole presentation just seemed uncared for. I can only assume it’s because I ordered cheap food in an upscale joint. Bottom line – stick to cheap dives for cheap meals, and maybe hit up Shanghai Cuisine for Tong Po Pork, Lion’s Head Meatballs or Yellow Fish when yer feeling flush.

Dumpling Lunch

Ladies and Gentlemen - the greatest cheap lunch on earth.

Seriously.

Ten Fried Dumplings (pork and chive) from Tasty Dumpling (54 Mulberry St., btw. Bayard and Mosco): 2.00

One Golden Pancake, from Tasty Dumpling: .50

One Small Hot and Sour Soup from Chanoodle (79 Mulberry St., btw. Bayard and Canal): 1.50

Total cost of lunch: four measly bucks.

First, the dumplings: thin crusty/chewy sheaths of wheaty dough stretched over a small, pungently chive-and-ginger flavored meatball. Containers on the tables contain a soy/vinegar mix and a thin, garlicky hot sauce (they're Sriracha bottles, but the sauce is something else). Douse the dumplings, and munch blissfully.

It should also be noted that Tasty Dumpling vends excellent steamed veggie dumplings to the tune of 8 for 2.00.

The Golden Pancake is sort of an example of what would happen if a scallion pancake mated with a buttermilk biscuit and dipped the result in sesame seeds. It’s dense, chewy and a great way to settle disputes between saucy dumplings and sour soup, whose flavors (delicious though they may be) can clash if left unchecked. Plus it’s real cheap, real filling, and real homey.

And, of course, Chanoodle’s soup is poetry in a plastic tub. Damn. It’s indescribable. Tasty Dumpling makes a Hot and Sour Soup as well, and it’s pretty good, but with Chanoodle just down the street, why not go for the gold? Chanoodle’s soup is in its own league. It is the best soup ever.

So there you have it. If you’ve got four bucks, you can drive cold and hunger out Chinatown-style.

Fusion?

So why is it that when an expensive restaurant invents a new dish or blends two cuisines, it's "fusion," whereas when a cheap one does it it's "inauthentic"? I'll leave y'all to ponder that while I get down to brass tacks regarding Joe's Ginger.

Joe's Ginger (113 Mott St., next to New Chao Chow, twixt Hester and Canal) is, the papers tell us, the latest outpost of the ever- (perhaps too-) popular Joe's Shanghai family. Foodies celebrate it for its uncrowdedness and under-the-radar status as much as its food, as the big Joe's Shanghai down the street frequently boasts hour-long lines, legendarily pissy waiters and an abundance of tourists in addition to its legendary shao lon bao (soup dumplings).

Walking up, it's clear that this is no fly-by-night ordinary operation - the facade is carved entirely of marble, and since the marble is the color of fresh ginger root, I'd bet that it was put up specifically for Joe's Ginger. So a classy joint - and the patronizing intruder wonders how good the food can be (or how authentic) if the place looks so nice and refined.

Well, everybody lauds the soup dumplings, but I'm no fan of even the best, so I gave those a miss and sampled the "Shredded Pork & Dried Bean Curd with Jalapeno Pepper Over Rice" with the free Hot and Sour Soup that the menu promised, as well as an order of pan-fried "mini buns," the result of a misunderstanding on my part.

Okay. The Shredded Pork etc. was spectacular, mostly shreds of dried bean curd with a few pieces of flavorful pork here and there, and big, juicy chunks of fresh jalapeno pepper, all under a moistening (no more) of a slightly smoky and deeply savory sauce. Jalapenos, it should be pointed out, are non-traditional in Chinese cuisine - but they worked, in their distinctive jalapeno-ness, and added a new dimension of flavor. Hence, I hereby declare it officially "fusion cuisine" (sino-mexican) despite its moderate ($3.95) price tag, and everybody else can kiss my ass.

The Hot and Sour Soup was great also, though very different stylisticaly from Chanoodle's definitive version mentioned above. The pronounced and nuanced flavor of black pepper (as opposed to chili pepper) really shone through, with only the merest suggestion of tartness, a rich broth, and satisfyingly crunchy veggies. The best thing about it? What had originally appeared to be noodles floating around in the soup turned out to be tiny, wispy enoki mushrooms. Yum.

The mini-buns were my fault - I had assumed that this was another way of describing some form of dumpling or other. Nope. They were deep fried dough balls. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing unless you're an artery, but these were porous and oily, and came with a cup of suspicious-looking (white) liquid. Oh well.

So all in all, Joe's Ginger seems worthy of further serious exploration, which I shall undertake next week. And it happily thumbs its nose at the notion of "authenticity" as the sole criterion on which to judge Chinatown places. Huzzah.

Duck Atrocity

It must surely say something (I have no idea what) about East/West differences in culinary thought, that the Chinese cut up a duck the way they do. Bonelessness is an alien idea (skinlessness is anathema) - they just hack the thing cross-wise. So upon ordering the celebrated Chao Chow Duck from New Chao Chow (111 Mott, between Hester and Canal) one is presented with a dish of bite-sized duck pieces that one can't reasonably bite. Very tasty, but yielding about two tablespoons of edible meat all together, and setting unsuspecting diners up for the possibility of bone splinters... ouch.

The Old and the New (Chao Chow)

I remember my father (who grew up in NYC in the 1920s and 30s) telling me that when he was a boy, the East Side above 90th Street was a German neighborhood - and a rough one, where nice Jewish kids dared not go. It seemed preposterous to me at the time of hearing that the Germans could have a real ethnic neighborhood, or any need for one. Germany seems so much just one more relatively innocuous, modern and assimilated flavor of Western Europe, completely cosmopolitan and therefore non-"ethnic." But at one time Germanness was as alien a national identity as any other, I guess, and Yorktown was a big, dangerous German neighborhood, with German businesses, impenetrable German signage and weird German foods on offer.

Now - moving right along. Little Italy is disappearing. Older tourists look for it and lament when they find out that it's really only three blocks of one street, catering more or less directly to tourists. Cosmopolitan New Yorkers of my generation fume pissily at the oily smells and blaring music of San Gennaro. My children's generation (okay, grandchildren's, maybe) will, I predict, find the idea of an Italian neighborhood as odd as I find the idea of a German one, as Italy enjoys relative prosperity, modern technology, and a growing number of years from its wave of immigration into this country.

NOW... I walked up Mott Street north of Canal today, a bit taken aback. It always surprises me that there are certain streets that I just never walk down, despite being often enough in the area - just force of habit, I guess, developing my patterns. Well, Mott north of Canal doesn't feel like Mulberry north of Canal at all - it feels like Mulberry Street circa 1920, or what I would imagine it as - a rude blaze of produce and shouted foreign languages. Loud smells. Chaos, dust, construction. North of Canal Street, Chinatown is eating Little Italy, as everyone has been pointing out forever. Fair enough.

In the middle of all of this lies New Chao Chow, a small restaurant populated mostly by Chinese folks eating noodle soups. A great smell to it, maybe the best in Chinatown - savory and garlic and ginger. I don't know if something can smell "umami" but this place does. Anyway, I ordered my food, wasn't certain the fellow behind the counter heard me, wandered off to buy some mustard greens, and came back to find my food rather neatly organized in a red bag. Hooray for brusque, efficient service.

I got "Pork Chop with Onion on Rice" for the princely sum of 3.50. Very tasty but fairly unremarkable - lots of meat, lots of rice, a small pile of onions. Seemed quite fatty, but hey, that's fried pork for you.

So I'm currently planning on returning and pursuing a noodle soup.