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.
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.
posted by Big Red at
11:41 AM
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