jeff yen

Picture time 10/2010

JJ came to visit for a few days, and we managed to grab some quality time together (at the expense of some of my clients' sanity... sorry guys). Anyway, the vacation's over and I'm back in the saddle.

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I've been fortunate enough to have become acquainted with several supposed five-star hotels; when I was young, our family vacations usually consisted of month-long jaunts to Europe, Southeast Asia, or the like, doing the tourist circuit and generally being frustrated with each other. The only definitive conclusion about five star hotels that I have been able to draw from this experience is that the value of a star is immensely variable, completely subjective, and often negotiable.

So, when I was making arrangements for JJ and me to celebrate our 1-year anniversary (short a week, but close enough), I figured I'd try to give her something she's never or only very rarely encountered before, namely a taste of luxury. She's stayed in upper scale hotels before... possibly once or twice, on business trips with her father... but the aforementioned variability is particularly evident here in China, and a five-star hotel somewhere like Wuhan may not rate much higher than a motel with a fancy lobby in the States.

And then there's the question of... well, of class. In most higher-end hotels I've seen in China, they have two baskets of items that a customer might need. One is free for use; toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, and so on. The other is kind of like a minibar, with a price tag stuck on each product, usually in unobvious places. They also consist of items that, when needed, customers in a bind would usually be willing to pay the exorbitant prices; things like condoms, lubricant, feminine hygiene products, and various kinds of OTC medication.

Not classy.

So, I opted to book a place I'd seen once before, visiting a friend who was staying there. Long story short, it was probably the best hotel I've ever stayed in from a design standpoint, but it was lacking in the service department. I posted a long and boring review on TripAdvisor, but here's 6000 words' worth for you:

We hit up a massage parlor that Christine recommended, and it was amazing. After having experienced massage at the hands of this guy, I can honestly say that I have never really had a massage before.

We also went to Din Tai Fung (by pure chance, we were walking past it and I remembered Jishnu mentioning it), a Taiwanese restaurant. The Taipei branch has a Michelin star. I don't know what to expect from Michelin ratings, really, but I certainly hope this branch is not representative of the one in Taipei. Every dish we tried was overpriced, under-seasoned, and overall a major disappointment. I would not visit that restaurant again if the food were free; the flavors are not worth the trip to their door.

And we went to my favorite Indian restaurant in Shanghai, Lotus Land. JJ never had Indian food before, and she loved it all. We ate like maniacs and lived to regret it. We ordered the yellow dal, and it is the only place anywhere I've found that even gets close to the flavor of the Palace Restaurant (a.k.a Paki Palace) of my youth in Yanbu, K.S.A. Even at the tourist prices they charge, I'll be back at the next opportunity.

After our dinner at Lotus Land, we cruised around the Tianzifang area... she bought me a hat, which was supposed to keep my ears from freezing this winter, but so far has just been used to make me look even more ridiculous than normal. I wore this hat during the check-out process at our hotel, which was great fun. I also bought her a hat, which is no use at all in cold weather, but I think looks great on her.

And finally, after eating all that food, it turns out she likes the stuff I make the best, which I find very gratifying, but bodes ill for time away from washing dishes.

Also, after decapitating, flaying, and disemboweling two or three pounds of live shrimp, feeling the tails push weakly against my hand as I peeled off the shells, and watching the internal muscles twitch madly after I butterflied them, I can honestly say that I am edging ever closer to vegetarianism... or at least, buying my shrimp frozen.

Seriously. Fuck everything about that.

The dirtier it looks…

The local specialty in Wuhan for this time of year (although the season is just starting to end) is crayfish (xiao long xia / 小龙虾).

I'm not actually quite sure where this eating tradition comes from, but after Googling some fairly questionable sources, apparently the consensus is that crayfish in China are an imported species from the U.S, recently popularized (reports range from the 1940s to the 1990s), and would be considered an exotic destructive pest but for the fact that people eat the hell out of them every year, so they're actually more profitable than the cash crops they destroy.

There are apparently some quite sensitive political and economic issues surrounding the little mud bug, like destruction of local fauna/flora, US-China import/export relations and the state of the Louisiana crayfish industry (such as it is after the oil spill), heavy metal poisoning, and so on, but I'm not all that concerned with any of it. I just got back from Wuhan after a week visiting Jing Jing, Yang Guang and the gang, and all I care about is that they're delicious.

There is a somewhat stressful length of time that accompanies any travel in China to any place one might have friends. This is generally characterized by stuffing your face with unreasonable amounts of food with various groups of people who are:
  a) happy to see you and insisting on buying you dinner
  b) happy to see you and angling for a free meal
  c) dutifully upholding the traditions of hospitality
  d) hungry and anywhere nearby when dinner plans are being made
  e) a blood relation or friend to anyone in any of the above groups.

Although I'm very much in favor of the practice, after a few days of this, I just get slow, sluggish, and greasy... it stops being fun. In China -- particularly outside the tier one cities -- there are certain parts of the year in which "festival foods" almost universally take over the local restaurants. So if you happen to arrive in town during any of these times, when you go out to eat it's almost invariably to eat this local specialty.

Consequently, there was a five-day period where Jing Jing and I gorged on crayfish no less than five times. Just our luck that every day that week, a new friend or relative popped out of the woodwork and asked to treat us (or be treated) to dinner.

So we ate crayfish. Lots and lots of crayfish. Steamed (zheng / 蒸), poached in oil (you men / 油焖), or barbecued (shao kao / 烧烤), we must have depopulated several provinces' worth of ponds. Accompanied by ice-cold sweet mung bean soup (lv dou tang / 绿豆汤), beer, and whatever we could think to ask to be barbecued, there was really no reason to stop eating, so we just kept on going.

Our preferred venues for these were invariably da pai dang / 大排档, which essentially means "a big market stall." These are typically a restaurant consisting of an outdoor seating area, a smaller indoor seating area for when it's raining, a kitchen somewhere in between, and no air conditioning. Basically, as you might conclude, like a larger version of a market food stall.

There is also a room where they do the washing up.

I highly recommend not going into the room where they do the washing up.

These places are not subject to the health code regulations typical of Western eating establishments, and even if they are, they are generally not in the habit of observing them.

So, telling if a place is safe and/or good actually becomes a much simpler and more effective enterprise than evaluating a rating in the window; simply look around. Regardless of how much trash there is strewn on the floor or how greasy and filthy the kitchen looks, if there are lots of local people chowing down it's probably safe.

Moreover, it probably tastes amazing. Restaurants that turn out bland or tainted food do not survive very long in China; margins are low, and patrons with limited disposable income and several thousand years of common culinary traditions can be surprisingly discriminating about where they spend their money.

In fact, for da pai dang, it's often said that the dirtier the place looks, the better the flavor. I can't speak to the reasoning behind this, but I can attest that the theory has proven true every time I've eaten at one of these places.

Our favorite establishment is no exception. Every night that week it was packed, so every night we had to wait a while for a table to open up, grab a broom from the owner and sweep up piles of discarded crayfish shells and heads, and, on one memorable occasion, convince the owner to move our table a little further away from the street because of the twin inconveniences of wayward cars and omnipresent gutter water. If you're seated near the kitchen, be ready to deal with both the incredible heat and the occasional crustacean escapee.

Once you get down to the food, the eating experience is... lively.

Most of the male customers are shirtless from the heat, and half of the patrons are smoking almost continuously. It will be loud; service in these places is typically requested by shouting at full volume. Moreover, beer flows freely all night -- it's cheap and cold, and everyone's trying to cool off from the heat of the day or the spice of the food.

This atmosphere is better known as re nao / 热闹, literally meaning "hot and noisy," and it's something that I've learned to welcome when eating out. In a way, it signifies celebration, community, and boisterous happiness all at the same time. Even when a drunken patron gets a little too upset and starts yelling at his waitress, the rest of the patrons watch on with mild amusement, and crack jokes at his expense with the rest of the staff.

It can be something of an acquired taste, unlike the food.

My favorite dish was invariably the roasted crayfish tails, served three-to-a-skewer, lightly dusted with spices and oil. The shells crisp and glistening from the long slow roast, they crackle between your teeth and peel away readily from the sweet, tender flesh.

We would also tack on orders of steamed crayfish (oversized crayfish cooked just firm, with a side of vinegar-chili dipping sauce), oil-poached crayfish (stewed in chili-peppercorn oil, along with onions, garlic, and other aromatics), garlic-chili edamame, braised clams and mussels, roasted scallops, honey-basted chicken wings, and really just about anything else the cook would consent to putting on his grill.

I loved it. Then I tolerated it. Then, I swore I'd be eating nothing but salad for months when I could finally escape the endless avalanche of seafood.

Now... dammit, now I'm hungry.

The Avocado Lady

Since I've come to Shanghai, I've heard various reports of the Avocado Lady (a.k.a. Arugula Lady, Basil Lady, &c.), the expat nickname for a woman who runs a small grocery stall near the French Concession. She's so named because her store is one of the few places in town where you can actually get fresh avocados for relatively cheap (11RMB each, which works out to around $1.60).

She seems to have cleverly cornered the market in that part of town for "exotic" produce like basil, arugula, limes, avocados, and so on. Likewise, she supplies cheese – fresh mozzarella for 17RMB per round, buffalo mozzarella for 53 – and a variety of other goods more often found in Western kitchens than Chinese.

So it's been a vague goal of mine to visit ever since I've heard about her. Today, having really nothing better to do, I decided to take a look and see what all the fuss was about.

The shop is situated near the French Concession, a part of Shanghai well known for its comparatively dense population of foreigners, so her decision to stock items popular with Westerners is not surprising. What is interesting, however, is that her prices are quite a lot cheaper than her competition. It's actually difficult to do an apples to apples comparison here. She doesn't actually have any direct competition, since... even more interesting... to best of my knowledge, nobody else is doing this.

To be fair, it wasn't quite perfect. The basil, while about 1/4 of the price of the basil at the Shanghai Metro superstore, had almost as many bruised, blackened leaves as not. Digging down into the bag for fresher specimens helped somewhat. The endive/frisée and arugula were likewise kind of wilted and sad.

The "parmesan" ( ba ma / 巴马 or ban ma chen / 斑马臣 – phonetic translations that, literally translated, could respectively mean "sticky horse" or "I pledge allegiance to a zebra" ) cheese was in fact Gran Moravia, a Czech product more akin to a cross between cheddar and romano. That's fine... it works just as well in most applications as a stand-in for Parmesan, and most – myself included – would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in a completed dish. If I had an oven, I might even consider substituting it for gruyère in a batch of gougeres. You know, just because I like to live dangerously.

The prices on canned goods were fairly typical, maybe one or two RMB short of the prices I've seen in major supermarket chains; i.e., nothing special. I'm guessing this is because the prices on all imported canned products reflect import duties, which are criminally high in China, so she can't get around those like she can on locally sourced produce.

The strange thing is, and the source of not a little cognitive dissonance on my part, this place has the imported goods of a large supermarket or boutique store, and the atmosphere of a local fruit stall. A scrawny black-and-white cat wanders around the aisles, idly batting at my hand when I try to pet it. A sweating block of cheese sits unattended on an upturned plastic crate, accompanied only by a knife of questionable cleanliness. Prices are unmarked, and apparently variable. I asked the owner's assistant what the price was for the... parmesan... cheese; 60rmb per half-kilo ( jin / æ–¤ ). When I was ready to buy, I asked the owner; 55.

It was great.

The owner seemed nice enough, but Sunday was obviously the wrong day to visit. She was harried and a little snappish, as the place was crawling with customers, mostly foreign. One man showed up, filled a sack with about 30 avocados, paid, and left without saying a single word. Others lingered, tripping over produce and each other in the narrow aisle, moonstruck at the array of foreign goods on offer.

Seeing as I have no food processor (or substantial enough knives) with which to make pesto, and no tortilla chips (or corn tortillas to make chips, or masa flour to make tortillas) to eat with any theoretical guacamole, I opted to go for a couple of simple salads, with an eye for reuse.

Picked up a container of Spanish olive oil and a can of chickpeas (chickpea-parmesan salad, hummus), a couple of tomatoes, some fresh basil (insalata caprese, basil stir fry, omelets, thai curry), a red onion, one fresh mozzarella round, 1/3æ–¤ of gran moravia, and a lemon. All told, 86RMB. Not bad, and the olive oil and cheeses took up 62 of that.

The olive oil is... certainly not the worst I've ever had, but with a name like "El Toro" it was fighting an uphill battle anyway. I would describe the aroma as halfway between a rich, fruity, full-blooded olive oil, and fermented kerosene.

Next time I'm just going to bite the bullet and spend a little more on a brand I recognize.

The tomatoes were simultaneously rather soft and not exactly bursting with flavor. Woe, woe for the days of the North Park farmer's market, where heirloom tomatoes were practically free for the taking.

I was planning on taking a look around the French Concession – I suppose I should give it a chance, eventually – but the mozzarella wasn't going to wait on me, so I ended up getting right back on the subway. Brief stop at the supermarket to pick up a baguette and some more dragon fruit ( huo long guo / 火龙果 ) and I was set.

Dinner was a solitary affair. Christine's gotten herself hooked on World of Warcraft, and now seldom leaves her room except to go to the corner store for some sushi, and Ellen's working all weekend.

So, you know.

More for me.

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Credit for my actually being able to find this place goes to the Shanghai Dolls weblog, and their map.

274 Wulumuqi Zhong Lu, near Wuyuan Lu
乌鲁木齐中路274号, 近五原路
Google map

5 minutes' walk from Changshou Lu (常熟路) subway station (metro lines 1 and 7).

P: +86 64377262

Restaurautism

Today has been an interesting day for me. In virtually every respect it was fairly boring, but nevertheless for some reason it made an impression on me. I did some work, went to the gym but didn't work out (forgot my ID card), did some more work, talked on the phone, and came home for dinner.

I guess dinner was a little non-standard.

After a trip to a Carrefour yesterday, I've been armed with a few things that I can't normally find in China. In fact, I had to seriously control my urges in order to leave there with even enough money for the subway ride home.

At any rate, that haul put me a handful of shrimp and some mushrooms short of a bowl of Tom Yum, or a few vegetables away from a pot of green curry.

So I hit the street market today after work for some curry fixins. Got back to my apartment and my fake kitchen, whipped out my handy pocketknife, and started peeling and slicing. Nothing says "temporary living arrangements" like having a 3-inch folding blade as your primary kitchen knife.

Midway through food prep, Christine came barging in (she has very few other modes of locomotion) and said I absolutely had to come and see the view from her balcony. Sean chose that moment to join us, and we all agreed the view was good enough to warrant a minor photographic frenzy.

Twenty minutes later I had a pot of green curry happily bubbling away on my induction stove, and a couple of roommates wafting through my door on wings of curried steam.

So we made a party of it. Pulled our chairs out to Christine's balcony, pooled our starches together, and had dinner lit by the Shanghai skyline.

By the way, it turns out that Thai curries go with baguettes just as well as Vietnamese curries do… i.e., very.

Afterwards, we sat around picking our teeth and each others' brains, which was unsurprisingly a fairly food-centric affair.

We're all foodies to varying degrees. Christine, while resting more on the consumption side of the equation, has nevertheless perfected an astonishing array of cooking techniques centered around the microwave, and Sean's a world traveler who's picked up more than his fair share of cooking smarts. He described his version of a paneer which had us all salivating, even having just stuffed ourselves with ungodly amounts of curry, french bread, and fried rice.

The interesting part of the conversation came when we started discussing Wuhan's variety of restaurants, or lack thereof. This led to a cursory examination of how successful, for example, a Chinese-American owned and operated gastropub might be, with a healthy selection of fairly authentic Asian and Western dishes.

This is a conversation I've had many times, both in- and externally, with a fairly wide assortment of people here, from friends and fellow foodies to former restaurateurs.

The thing is, I know just enough about cooking to know that I know nothing about cooking, especially professionally. Sure, I can whip up an array of passable curries (from two cans and a fistful of fresh veg) or fried rice, or even invent a half-decent dish once in a while ( try jicama stir-fried with five-spice beef… it's actually pretty awesome ). But to cook quickly and above all consistently, day after day, in a high pressure environment, is not a skill I've ever developed. Nor do I know anything about running a restaurant, which is a rather larger and more putrid kettle of fish.

But, you know, I keep going back to that thought, that it might be… fun.