The Bizarre Truth

by Andrew Zimmern

  If you’re looking for something on the lighter side, check out the restaurant’s old-school tea service. Carts equipped with hot-coal-filled iron pots wheel adjacent to your table, keeping tea hot for the duration. Tea drinkers sit in their own corridor, sipping tea out of these tiny cups and eating elegant snacks. The teapots were just charming and looked to be hundreds of years old. The pots were chipped, cracked, and discolored, yet beautiful in their ancient state. Weaving my way through table after table, the sounds and scents of bubbling tea, echoing in the narrow rooms, the smell of jasmine and oolong and pu-er in the breeze—I couldn’t help but be impressed.

  But my meal at Guanzhou Restaurant that day was just the beginning; I needed to see for myself one of Cantonese food’s crowning glories, the noodle house. Noodles are the primary component of many Chinese dishes. At one time, all noodles were made by hand in homes and restaurants. Modern machinery has since taken over that process, but fortunately for me, the art of handpulled noodles is still practiced at the Jiu Mao Jiu Noodle Restaurant. This place is all about the noodles, and they make dozens of varieties there from scratch.

  Jiu Mao Jiu Restaurant is located on the other side of town in the Tainhe District, smack dab in the middle of an office park. When have you ever found a decent meal on the first floor of a nondescript office building? From the street it looks like nothing is there—no signs and no big car-size plastic noodle bowl hanging from the roof over the door—but the place is packed, with the smell of ginger, garlic, and that welcoming starchy humidity that I associate with great Chinese food hanging in the air. You hear the clitter-clatter of metal on metal—the sounds of chefs feverishly working dough on giant metal tables and wooden chopping boards.

  Jiu Mao Jiu, also dubbed the Noodle King, takes its noodles seriously. Hand-pulled noodles are unique to China, and this is where it all started; the noodles are made by a trained cook who spends years perfecting the art form. The noodle paste or dough is handmade in massive work bowls, and through a series of stretching and pulling techniques the dough becomes pliable, then gets rolled back up into a ball. The ball is rolled out into a fat tube, rolled thin until it is about four feet long, then the ends are joined, the dough is twisted, and the process repeats a hundred times. Every time the ends are joined, the middle of the long tube of paste is swung so it twists around itself, then gets stretched again. Then, on a cutting board, the noodle maker begins pulling the paste with his arms outstretched, folding the thick strings of paste in two with fewer refolds in between stretches. He pulls again and again and again until the strings of pasta paste become longer and more numerous, thinner and thinner, finally turning the mass into very fine noodles. It’s an art form requiring extreme dexterity.

  Stir-fried dishes are cooked in a closed kitchen here, but all the noodle stuff is done in the open. It’s a slightly less cheesy Benihana teppanyaki show that concludes with food that actually tastes really good. You can also watch as these pasta experts turn balls of noodle dough into delicate noodle chips right before your eyes. They take a sharp tool that looks like a four-inch spackling knife, then strike the ball of dough sitting in their opposite hand outward, away from their body, sending little chips of raw noodle dough into a giant wok of boiling water six feet away. These fat, thick doughy globs get cooked, then sauced. The process reminded me of flipping playing cards into a hat, except that these guys had great aim.

  Jiu Mao Jiu also creates noodles literally as thin as silk thread, formed through a process where they keep folding and refolding the noodles, weaving and reweaving dough to a point where they dramatically smash them on a table, exploding the dough into hundreds of thin noodles. It’s like Rubik’s Cube—I have seen it done and I can’t explain it.

  The Chinese equate long noodles with a long life, and thus have created a method that turns dough into spaghetti-sized strands of single noodles that stretch hundreds of feet long. In fact, the only restriction to a noodle’s length is how much dough is available. These long, singular noodles are the crux of big noodle bowls here at Jiu Mao Jiu. In a quality restaurant like Jiu Mao Jiu, it’s one noodle, just piled in there, coiled on top of itself. This is executed by weaving the noodles by hand, then spooling the dough from the noodle maker’s hand into a giant bowl of water. The strand of dough is quickly pulled from the bowl and tossed into a cooking pot. The dough is cut only when they feel they’ve achieved the right noodle proportion. One giant long noodle will easily feed two or three people. Order up a bowl of minced pork with black bean sauce, and out comes a big soup bowl filled with enough noodle to feed two or three people, the whole dish swimming in porky, beany goodness.

  Noodles, of course, need accompaniments, and the kitchen was just as skillful at dressing up a noodle as they were in constructing them. I fell in love with this dish called Cat’s Ears Noodles. These tiny noodles started out life as flat dough triangles, no larger than a half-inch wide at the base, and were pinched together in such a way that when dropped in the water, they swelled dramatically, eradicating the harsh, angular edges. The end result: curled shapes that looked just like teeny cat’s ears. When these noodles were fried in a wok with a light vinegar sauce, bits of minced meat, and scallion, the first bite exploded with flavor. The tart edge to the sauce just made the dish seem lighter, allowing you to eat a lot more than is probably advisable.

  I was amazed by a dish called Kow-low-low, which literally translates to “standing shoulder to shoulder.” This dish is made with sturdy, thick, macaroni-shaped hollow noodles lined up vertically, symbolizing strength and unity. The noodles are put into a dim sum steamer standing on end, packed tightly so they don’t topple over on their sides (then they would be cheek to jowl, a slightly less Maoist food metaphor than shoulder to shoulder). A plate of these conjoined noodles arrives at the table with a rich, earthy, oyster sauce, sautéed minced pork, ginger, and aged fermented black beans spooned over the top. Using your chopsticks, you pull apart these starchy tubes that have been steamed together, dripping with the meaty, rich, salty, sweet sauce.

  In addition to phenomenal noodles, I sampled stir-fry dishes that remain some of my all-time favorites. I’ll never forget the twice-cooked pork with garlic sauce, which had the wok dragon’s breath still on it. That’s the kind of charry, smoky flavor and aroma you’ll get only from food that’s been properly scorched in the hottest of woks and then whisked to your table so fast that you can still taste the wok’s heat with your first bite.

  So with all apologies to those of Italian heritage reading this book, as amazing as many of the pasta dishes that I’ve eaten in Italy are, and many Italian restaurants around the world that I have visited and fallen in love with, I’d have to say without a doubt that the best noodle experience I’ve ever had has been at Jiu Mao Jiu in Guangzhou.

  Eating My Words

  When the Most Obvious Choice

  Is the Best

  didn’t grow up in a “food is fuel” kind of home. As a child, food played a magical role in our daily lives, part of our Jewish heritage, part of our New York City lifestyle. Sharing food and eating meals together shaped our family life.

  My first memory of eating Chinese food goes back to the mid-1960s. My dad and I left the Ziegfeld Theater at Fifty-fourth Street and Avenue of the Americas after taking in one of those epic David Lean films, hopped a cab to Chinatown, and headed for Bobo’s. In the decades before it closed in the nineties, falling victim to increased competition and the ever-expanding New York food scene, Bobo’s was the place in Chinatown. I vividly remember eating spareribs there for the first time, as well as Dragon and Phoenix, which sounds exactly like the kind of dish a five-year-old goes gaga over, but was in fact the gussied-up fancy name that Bobo’s gave their traditional lettuce package offering. The Dragon in the dish was the shrimp, the Phoenix represented by squab. The shrimp and squab, ground fine, were served wok-tossed with micro-diced vegetables and bathed in sweet, spicy, and salty flavors in a hot, hot mixture that came to the table in a small o
val platter with a lacquered enamel spoon. The textures were incredible. You scooped up gobs of this mixture and placed it in shallow, crisp, and cold iceberg lettuce cups. The leaves gave in just enough to the hot mixture that you could roll it up and put it into your mouth with great ease.

  All great food is about contrast, if you think about it: the cool crunch of a pickle on a hamburger; the toasted bun served with a yielding hot dog; a crisp cone filled with cold, soft ice cream. Biting into that lettuce package was a revelatory moment for me. It was the first time I had eaten Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant, and it opened my eyes to a world of flavors and textures and ingredients that I didn’t know existed before.

  I’d eaten Chinese food once or twice, but mostly the cheap takeout versions or the nicely turned out homemade chow mein my mother served at home. My mother attended Mills College in San Francisco in the late 1940s, where she met Vic Bergeron’s daughter, rooming with her for several years. Even if you aren’t familiar with the name, you’re certainly aware of his legacy. He spearheaded the creation of one of America’s most famous fusion cuisines. Trader Vic’s merged Chinese, Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Californian food all under one umbrella. After college, my mother and her roommate moved to Los Angeles, where one night they invited Vic over for dinner. Neither girl could boil a pot of water, and consequently the meal failed miserably. After calling the restaurant to send over a dessert that hadn’t burned, he insisted the girls learn to cook in his kitchen. So my mother learned to cook at the original Trader Vic’s. I remember her version of chicken chow mein topped with crispy egg noodles, which I nicknamed Chicken à la Goosh as a toddler. It was delicious, and we ate it at least once a week.

  We loved Chinese food in our house, but the Bobo’s meal was the first time I’d tried it at a restaurant. By the late 1960s, higher-quality Chinese restaurants had started to pop up outside Chinatown in greater numbers, offering adventurous diners more options. The Zimmern family took advantage. Regional Chinese cuisine was slowly becoming the rage in New York. Today, people like to think that midcentury New York was as diverse and accessible from a food standpoint as it is today. It wasn’t. New York supermarkets were similar to Iowa’s in the sixties, old-fashioned and devoid of international flavors of any kind. Nary a caper in sight. The late sixties and early seventies marked the beginning of the New York City food explosion for diners and, more important in a sense, for home cooks. Next thing you knew, customers were clamoring for different types of vinegars, exotic Asian ingredients, and tropical fruits in their local markets. Italian and Chinese immigrants propelled that movement upward, with their swelling population expanding businesses, especially restaurants, out of their traditional neighborhoods and into other parts of the city.

  In 1970, Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan opened on the Upper East Side. This Hunan- and Sichuan-style restaurant was the first to gain any traction with mainstream New Yorkers. The movement hit like a tidal wave. People were eating food they had never tried before. Chinese take-out shops opened, hawking pot stickers and steamed dumplings for the first time in great numbers. Dumplings are so much fun to eat, especially for kids. Traditional dumplings are soft and doughy on the outside and filled with ginger-spiked pork inside. Easy to eat, kid-size, and kid-friendly. My four-year-old son can’t get enough of them, and I remember it being the same way for me. As a nine-year-old, I was a dumpling freak. There was so much excitement surrounding Chinese food at that time, and my father and I would scour the city looking for hidden gems.

  This was an exciting time for New York’s food scene. Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, and Mimi Sheridan dominated the food journalism scene. All of a sudden, people talked food in a much different way. Julia Child’s and Graham Kerr’s TV shows energized the city, and food slowly became the currency of the realm. After my parents divorced in the late sixties, my dad moved to Greenwich Village, where the action was really taking place. Balducci’s, Jefferson Market, and other food shops started carrying exotic fare—things like extra-virgin olive oil paired with the fresh mozzarella—that you previously could find only in Little Italy. Those were the kinds of ingredients that people really got excited about having access to. It seems odd now, but back then, being able to buy fresh herbs or hoisin sauce in a specialty shop was a big deal.

  Our family tradition became Chinese food on Sunday nights. We’d order takeout all the time from Richard Mei’s King Dragon, on Seventy-fourth and Third, a restaurant right next door to where J. G. Melon is today. At least once a month we would eat in the restaurant, most of the time with my dad’s mother in tow. King Dragon offered traditional Cantonese food, with a few choice steamed or fried dumplings on the menu. Sometimes, if I’d done well in school or had just gotten over a cold, my parents would treat me to something off their menu, and my passion for Chinese food really started there. It still remains my favorite comfort food.

  These days, my family doesn’t do too many Sunday-night Chinese dinners. However, we love the opportunity to eat dim sum on a Sunday morning. Dim sum literally translates to “touch heart” and consists of tender, endearing small-plate dishes. Some people refer to it as Chinese tapas—it’s an entirely different tradition, but I guess the same sort of sentiment is at play. Sharing small plates over conversation and having casual snack foods that sum up to a meal is something that everybody enjoys. I almost regard dim sum as my stock-in-trade in terms of eating. I’d rather sit down at a Chinese restaurant and eat twenty different plates of small goodies than just about any other meal I can think of.

  In high school, my friends and I would often head to Chinatown on weekends in pursuit of great dim sum. Clark, Toby, Eric, Aaron, and I hit the subway, most times venturing to Num Wah. For generations, this was the “under-the-radar” place for enjoying dim sum on weekend mornings. Shao-mai dumplings, char siu bao (barbecued pork buns), and crispy shrimp wrapped in rice noodles, then deep-fried so they looked like they were dunked in futuristic spiderwebs were always on the table. Paper-thin sheets of bean curd, wrapped around vegetables and braised pork, chicken feet simmered in black bean sauce, teeny sparerib nuggets just about a half-inch wide, with a bit of meat clinging to them, bathed in ginger and garlic. Sticky fried rice, loaded with Chinese sausage, roast pork, and beaten egg, stuffed inside a lotus leaf and then baked again. This was a hungry, teenage boy’s heaven, and we regularly gorged ourselves. We’d follow it up with nickel pinball games at the Chinese arcade down the street. We always ended our sojourn with a stop at the Dancing Chicken. This oddity was a large chicken-wire-wrapped box sitting on a table. Insert a coin, and a small door opened in the back of the box and out would come a rooster. He danced around for a few seconds, then raced back into the door. It was hilarious. We’d bum around downtown, sometimes grabbing another meal, then climb back on the subway to make curfew. That was a great day for us, and not an unusual one. So if that’s how I was as a child and a teenager, you can understand how my passion for dumplings grew with time.

  It took a trip to Taiwan to find what may have been the ultimate dumpling experience. Interestingly, I tried with all my might to avoid this particular dumpling house. I’m the kind of guy who likes to go to the last stop on the subway. I don’t want to go to the obvious place that every guidebook recommends. I like the challenge of discovering that obscure, hole-in-the-wall joint. It’s usually these sorts of hidden gems where I find the best food, but often the most obvious answer is the right answer, and so it was when I finally got to Taiwan.

  While we filmed in Taipei, a nice crew dinner was in the works. We had a local producer, Josh, who expertly guided us though the show. He’s a wacky genius, very creative—a geeky filmmaker with a great eye for both story and shot detail. He led us to some great locations, already knowing the best shots and setups to take advantage of. He was just fantastic to work with, as was his crew, composed of three dynamite PAs. Apparently, these guys met while practicing kung fu in the local gym there. Some of these guys were national-caliber champions, with others still cl
imbing the ranks—an authentic group of big, bad-ass motherfuckers. These guys are all big eaters, and on the night I suggested we have dinner together after work, they all wanted to head to Din Tai Fung.

  Din Tai Fung? I couldn’t have been more disappointed. The New York Times called it one of the ten best restaurants in the world twenty years ago. It’s a dumpling house turned chain restaurant, with three or four now in Taipei, even locations as far away as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. The idea of the place struck me as a soulless choice, like a Ruth’s Chris steakhouse—decent food, I suppose, but surely there had to be something better in town. I didn’t want to eat there. I was convinced it was way too commercialized. I wanted to go to the sleepy, out-of-the-way place where all Taipei’s foodies gathered in hushed tones to eat dumplings.

  We piled out of a few taxis and walked toward the giant, glowing red sign outside Din Tai Fung. A steady stream of customers flowed in and out on this weekday night. Taipei is a city of restaurants, most of which do a nice trade, but find the one that’s packed all the time and you’ll know you’ve found a winner. Din Tai Fung was packed. I sat outside as we waited twenty minutes for a table. I had a very visceral reaction waiting for dinner, with my stomach in knots, my mouth salivating uncontrollably. I had started the evening not wanting to go to Din Tai Fung, and then standing outside in the drizzling rain waiting for a table, smelling the restaurant every time the door opened, seeing the faces of the guests as they left—well, my viewpoint did a slick 180. The anticipation just killed me, but I was trying to keep my expectations low. I repeated mantras in my head to stay calm, otherwise whatever I ate would inevitably fall short of living up to my expectations. My serenity level is directly tied to my level of expectations, and I didn’t want to swing and sway too violently in the opposite direction of my earlier disdain for my companions’ choice of eatery.