Few people in the world have a more passionate relationship with food than the Chinese. Due to large-scale immigration from the southern province of Guangdong to the rest of the world, Cantonese cuisine is by far China’s best known. Cantonese cuisine originated in Canton, which is now called Guangzhou. With its fertile soil, perfect for growing all kinds of vegetables and raising healthy animals, as well as proximity to rivers, lakes, and oceans, Guangzhou puts every ingredient you could possibly want within reach. And if the people there can reach it, they’ll eat it. As an old Cantonese adage says, if it walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven, it must be edible. Cantonese live by those words. They will eat anything and everything. It’s not that they are obsessed with exotic foods; it’s just that if it tastes good, they’ll eat it.
THE GUANGZHOU RESTAURANT
The simply named Guangzhou Restaurant is the city’s most popular. Founded in 1935, it is the oldest operating restaurant in Guangzhou. You’d think that, in a country as storied and steeped in history, there would be some form of eatery still in operation predating 1935 in this eater’s city, but there isn’t. Its original name was Xi Nan Restaurant, but when the People’s Republic was established, the name was changed to the nondescript, egalitarian one the restaurant has today. Despite the name change, the food remained the same. In fact, many dishes are just as famous today as they were at the restaurant’s inception, most notably the dim sum.
Guangzhou Restaurant is located at the busy merging of Wenchang Nan Road and Shangxiajiu Street, one of the most famous intersections in the Li Wan district. Over the years, it’s expanded from just a restaurant on the first floor to a catering and banquet service, housed on the second and third floors. They feed as many as ten thousand people a day at the original location, and run affiliated branches from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. I’m sure you can eat a fine meal at any of their outposts, but you can’t beat a meal at the original.
The main dining room is all about classic Cantonese food served in a beautiful classic setting. An antique stained-glass window from the Ching dynasty hangs in the main dining room, with a giant rongshu (banyan tree) spreading overhead. The restaurant is composed of numerous courtyards and rooms connected by arcade corridors. The waitstaff, dressed in traditional Ching dynasty servant uniforms, gives the dining experience the air of taking a step back in time. Add the fact that they’ve mastered Cantonese cuisine, and you have a hard time convincing me that if you could eat only one meal in Guangzhou, it shouldn’t be here.
SIGNATURE DISHES
The Guangzhou Restaurant is known for its dim sum, which was decent but not half as good as that found at other places I’d visited in China or Taiwan. But if you’re looking for traditional Cantonese cuisine, look no further. Cantonese cuisine offers a rather mild flavor profile and consists of contrasting elements. When it comes to flavors and styles, you’re not going to get a one-note Charlie, and when dinner is all said and done, often you’ve enjoyed a steamed dish, a cold dish, a boiled dish, a spicy dish, and a double-fried dish. I had duck soup with Chinese watermelon, and a bowl of creamy northeast Chinese peanuts simmered with the black skins still intact. Interestingly, they use a lot of milk skin in dishes, which struck me as odd. Milk skin is made by boiling fresh milk until a fine layer of skin is formed. After the milk cools, the liquid separates from the skin, making a congealed, fatty, egg-white-like substance that offers a textural counterpoint to most other dishes. While I didn’t care for the milk skin in savory dishes, I really liked it served as a dessert. Their double-skin milk, braised with sugar forming yet another layer of skin, is sweeter still. Caramel heaven.
The dish that sticks out most in my mind is their Wenchang chicken. Such special care goes into creating this impeccable dish that it’s difficult not to swoon over it. These chickens are to China what Wagyu beef is to Japan. The chickens are tenderly cared for, raised in coops high off the ground and fed a specific diet of coconut, peanut cakes, and banyan seeds. As a result, the meat becomes fatty, with the skin turning yellow and very brittle when cooked. Guangzhou Restaurant’s version is cooked twice, steamed at first, then deboned, plated, and steamed again to heat it back up. It’s finished with a light, aromatic sauce of aged soy sauce and faintly salty and briny abalone. It’s even said that a Cantonese meal without traditional Wenchang chicken is really no meal at all.
But my meal at Guangzhou 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 hand-pulled noodles is still practiced at the Jiu Mao Jiu Noodle Restaurant. This place is all about the noodles, and they make dozens of varieties from scratch.
Aside from great noodle dishes, China is also known for its odd translations of the English language on signs, menus, T-shirts, and more. Due to the recent massive tourism push, mainly for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the Expo 2010 Shanghai China (the most expensive world’s fair of all time), the Chinese government has been determined to fix hundreds of thousands of erroneous signs. The Chinese do have a point—signs are supposed to be helpful, not confusing. However, Chinglish lovers like myself hope they leave many of the signs alone—they’re hysterical. Here are some of my favorites:
~What the sign means: Please don’t cross the street.
What the sign actually says: The front not opened section road, no passing!
~What the sign means: Watch your step.
What the sign actually says: Don’t fall down!
~What the sign means: During thunderstorms, cell phone use is prohibited.
What the sign actually says: Speaking cellphone is strictly prohibited when thunderstorm.
~What the sign means: Cherish cultural relics—no graffiti, please.
What the sign actually says: Cherish the cultural relic—please don’t scribble.
~What the sign means: Please don’t flush toilet paper.
What the sign actually says: Please do not put any paper in the toilet. You will see DISASTER!
~What the sign means: Please stay off the grass.
What the sign actually says: Do not disturb—tiny grass is dreaming!
~What the sign means: I’m really not sure.…
What the sign actually says: Please keep the toilet clean and don’t feed the toilet.
Jiu Mao Jiu, also dubbed the Noodle King, takes its noodles seriously. The noodles are made by a trained cook who spends years perfecting the art form. The noodle paste or dough is made by hand in massive work bowls, and through a series of stretching and pulling maneuvers the dough becomes pliable, then gets rolled back up into a ball. The ball is rolled out into a fat tube until it’s about four feet long, then the ends are joined, the dough is twisted, and the process is repeated a hundred times. Every time the ends are joined, the middle of the long tube of dough is swung so it twists around itself, then gets stretched again.
Then, on a cutting board, the noodle maker begins pulling the dough with his arms outstretched, folding the thick strings of dough in two with fewer refolds in between stretches. He pulls again and again and again until the strings of dough 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 experts turn balls of 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, th
en sauced. The process reminded me of flipping playing cards into a hat, except that these guys had great aim.
During the Sung dynasty (AD 960–1280), noodle shops were very popular in the cities, and they remained open all night. Think of them as the ancient Chinese version of your favorite pizza shop.
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 the dough to a point where they dramatically smash it on a table, exploding the dough into hundreds of thin noodles. It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube—I have seen it done, but I can’t explain it.
The Chinese equate long noodles with a long life, and therefore have created a method that turns dough into spaghetti-thin strands of single noodles that stretch hundreds of feet long. In fact, the only limit to a noodle’s length is how much dough is available. These long single noodles are the basis of big noodle bowls here at Jiu Mao Jiu.
The Chinese, Arabs, and Italians all claim to be the first noodle makers; the Chinese documented noodles’ existence in writing between AD 25 and AD 220. In 2005, a four-thousand-year-old bowl of noodles was found underneath ten feet of sediment at Lajia, in northwestern China. This is the earliest example ever found of one of the world’s most popular foods. Scientists now call Asia—not Italy—the birthplace of the noodle.
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 noodle 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 the right proportion of noodle has been achieved. 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.
MY FAVORITE DISH
Noodles, of course, need accompaniments, and the kitchen staff were just as skillful at dressing up a noodle as they were in constructing it. I fell in love with a dish made with cat’s ear noodles. These tiny noodles start life as flat dough triangles, no larger than a half-inch wide at the base, and are pinched together in such a way that when dropped in the water, they swell dramatically, softening the angular edges. The result: curled shapes that looked just like teeny cat’s ears. When these noodles were cooked 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 translates as “standing shoulder to shoulder.” This dish is made with thick, sturdy, hollow noodles lined up to symbolize 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 by 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 and are dripping with the meaty, rich, salty-sweet sauce.
In addition to phenomenal noodles, I sampled stir-fry dishes at Jiu Mao Jiu 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 no matter how many Italian restaurants around the world 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.
Although it has yet to achieve the everyday normalcy hot dogs and doughnuts have in this country, sushi is perhaps the most popular food in the United States, possibly in the world. Over the last five years, hundreds of millions of Russian and Chinese middle-class consumers came online, joining the legions of global sushi nuts. Demand increased so drastically that the prices high-quality fish were able to garner at wholesale fish markets around the world hiccupped forward almost overnight, responding to and then resulting in a sea change in demand.
The Japanese have long enjoyed a food made by salting and drying small lake fish, then packing it in cooked rice, leaving it to ferment in barrels. The pickled fish product plucked from those barrels over a year later was called funa-zushi. The Japanese loved it, and funa-zushi became cheap, convenient peasant fare consumed both for pleasure and out of necessity.
During the Edo period, which began in the early seventeenth century, gambling became very popular. People would sit in small taverns and mark their cards, dice, or playing tiles with rice that had stuck to the pickled fish, or with grains from their rice bowls. Enterprising tavern owners began offering a snack alternative. They kept the funa-zushi and the rice, but they wrapped the two together in nori, edible paper made of seaweed. Thus began the world’s obsession with sushi—but thankfully, today the fish is a lot fresher.
I remember when Japanese food was essentially a handful of little yakitori-style restaurants in Manhattan. I was probably eleven or twelve when my friends, the Wakabayashi family, began taking me to Tenryu on a weekly basis. Invariably, one of our appetizers was a large platter of assorted sashimi and sushi. Around the same time, I began accompanying my dad to lunches and dinners at the old (and long-since-closed) Edo in the West Forties. Like most sushi newcomers, I first fell in love with tekka maki, those small chunks of tuna rolled in rice and nori. I eventually graduated to eel, freshwater and saltwater; hamachi (young yellowtail); then to geoduck, known in Japan as mirugai. This gigantic saltwater clam soon became my favorite.
The first time I tried uni, or sea urchin, was at Hatsuhana. The liver-y and softly textured creamy roe of the sea urchin isn’t for everyone, but I adored its one-of-a-kind saline and minerally flavor profile. This was the place to eat sushi and sashimi in the late 1970s. I would sit mesmerized for hours as I watched the brigade of sushi chefs with long, thin blades turning four-inch chunks of cucumber into paper-thin sheets. They would make their thin cucumber paper, roll it around in thin warm slices of unagi (freshwater eel), then slice it thin, creating little eel and cucumber pinwheels, one of their first signature dishes.
TO THE MARKET
I love sushi and sashimi, and I’ve eaten some great fish in my day. Still, to my mind, one of the great experiences in my food life was getting up at oh-dark-thirty and heading over to Tsukiji Market in Tokyo to watch the fresh- and frozen-tuna auctions. Participants still dress up in the ancient uniforms, march into the auction room, and bid away for some of the most beautiful fish you’ve ever seen in your life. I’ve had the honor of escorting three-hundred-pound fish from the market floor at four in the morning to a dealer’s booth. This wholesaler cut up the fish, dispensing pieces to sushi restaurants around the greater Tokyo metro area who had placed orders with him that day. I watched the cutters take six-foot-long samurai swords and divide the fish into panels, separating the chutoro from the otoro and the toro from the guro. He weighed the different cuts of tuna, wrapped the order up, and sent it on its way.
I’ve learned more about tuna from spending a few days at Tsukiji Market than I ever did eating and working in restaurants. I’ve prowled the market extensively, hopping booth to booth, tasting tuna brought in from different parts of the world. I’ve had wholesalers lead me by the hand to the carcass of mammoth bluefin and yellowfin tuna, where they’d run a spoon along certain bones or along the spinal cord, collecting scrapings of particularly fatty or noteworthy bites to educate me o
n what to look for in terms of fat content, flavor, and texture.
I’ve eaten some of the most world-renowned sushi. I’ve been lucky enough to dine at Nobu Matsuhisa’s restaurants many times. I’ve probably visited eight or nine of them globally, often getting fed by the master himself. I didn’t think anything could top having Nobu Matsuhisa himself prepare uni, raw scallop, a selection of toro, and more for me, as he stood behind the sushi bar at his restaurant one night in Los Angeles. This was the thrill of a lifetime—until I got a chance to eat with him in the kitchen of his Tokyo restaurant a year later. If you’ve never eaten poached octopus eggs cooked in dashi (Japanese soup stock) and mirin, accompanied by some fresh fried frog, I can tell you it’s imperative to do so one day.
And speaking of frog, not in my wildest dreams did I ever consider eating frog sashimi. They serve it in Japan at a little getemono bar called the Asadachi. Tokyo’s getemono bars are notorious for serving food-forward, psyche-challenging dishes, so if you have a craving for a grilled lizard, that’s where you go. Businessmen flock to these little restaurants to eat for sport, usually as a way to celebrate the closing of an auspicious business deal. Eating frog sashimi involved more audience participation than I’d anticipated. I actually selected my live frog from a basket. The chef then took a penknife and ripped its skin off. He served me paper-thin slices of the frog’s flesh with a bit of soy and lemon sauce for dipping, along with a separate bowl for the still-beating frog’s heart.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 11