eatingwitheddie

Most sophisticated Chinese cooks often mix dark and light soy depending upon what they're trying to do. For light soy I prefer a Japanese soy such as Kikkoman which is an exellent all round product. However I do frequently work with some of the higher end Japanese soys. I particularly like the Kikkoman product that is labeled specially made for sushi - it's delicious. Kikkoman produces something like 10 varieties. I also like a number of the other brand super hi end Japanese soys. Sorry most of them don't have English names. I just recognize their packaging. Worth exploring if this is an area of interest. For dark soy I have never really liked Pearl River Brand's flavor. The mushroom soy always tastes a little off to me. It's color is great though. I prefer Amoy dark golden label. Been using it for years. I also really like various thick soys. They can have a wonderful molasses flavor.

Can anyone point me in the direction of good kosher Chinese cooking? Any thoughts as to the most popular dishes in the kosher Chinese food biz?

Looking for the best Chinese ribs in town. Any suggestions?

more Beijing restaurants: For Peking Duck: 'Da Dong' Beijing Kao Ya is not one of the big factories, but a smaller chef owned very popular-with-the-locals eatery that features exciting traditional and contemporary Bejijng food. There is a whole 'spiel' on their menu about their less fat, 'Superneat' Beijing Duck. They carve and serve it with great finesse. You might also want to try the abalone mushroom with saffron sauce (saffron is the new 'in' ingredient in Beijing) or homemade pasta with lobster flavor. Gui Gung Foo (phonetically correct) This 2-year-old Hangzhou restaurant is difficult to locate and find. It is housed in a 100 year old hutong that was home to a princely member of the Empress Dowager's family. The surrounding's have an untouched-in-100-years patina, and currently one needs to walk through a construction site to get to the dining room. Nevermind, it's worth the difficulty. There is no English menu but the food was special. A cold appetizer of house smoked pressed dofu was intense, and a dish of minced eggplant in a sweetish brown sauce was delicious with its unusal garnish of chopped mixed nuts, peppers and seeds. However the most memorable dish was a simple toss of soft noodles and vegetable shreds infused with the taste of fresh jasmine - a major WOW!

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Some Beijing Restaurant Suggestions Made in China – Grand Hyatt Hotel Opened in the end of 2003 this innovative and excellent restaurant showcases a Northern style menu designed to appeal to locals as well as hotel guests. The décor is a stylish mix of traditional and contemporary, and the careful cooking focuses on gutsy flavors with a savvy and modern viewpoint. Elegantly served Peking Ducks are cooked in an oven fueled with fruitwood, and duck foie gras is delicious in homemade sesame bread. Book ahead. Li Family Restaurant – This treasure of a restaurant is owned and operated by an 84-year-old retired mathematics professor whose grandfather was in charge of kitchen security for the Empress Dowager. He retired possessing certain secret recipes of the Imperial kitchen which were passed to Mr. Li and which he features in this unique quasi-private restaurant that is accessed by reservation only and located in the hutong where Mr. Li has resided for over 1/2 a century. One chooses between a series of similar fixed price menus, eats in bare-bones surroundings, and if lucky will get to enjoy the remarkable Mr. Li explaining life as well as dinner. Book ahead and bring cash: $25-$200/person. We selected one of the least expensive meals and were quite happy. Ask them to call you a cab when you’re done.

For the record the place in Atlanta is most likely Fogo de Chao. It is a branch of Brazil's most famous steak/house churascerria. I recently ate at their branch in Sao Paulo, which was remarkably similar to their Atlanta restaurant which I have also visited. Rodizio is the name of the actual dish of skewered meats and also the name of the restaurant type. And yes they give you a card with a red and a green side. When green is up they continuously come by your table with meats, turn it over to red to stop the onslaught. In Manhattan, Plataforma on W. 49th St west of 8th Ave. (they have a new downtown location too) does an excellent job - better than others I've had in the ironbound district of Newark - though those were pretty good too - and an amazing value.

Being a bit older and a resident of Brooklyn for a seriously long time (many decades) I have a list that is somewhat different (and somewhat similar) to the others in this thread. NB I haven't included many Smith St/Northside/Williamsburg places. That has been thoroughly covered by others. Peter Luger - for all the obvious reasons, well one really, some of the greatest steak available anytime anywhere. Not all of them are that good, just most. When they're good they're great. Detractors complain about the pre slicing and the butter, but that doesn't mean the raw product and its handling aren't close to perfect. The rest of the stuff ranges from pretty good to very good (bacon app/burger/potatoes). Embers- 3rd Ave & 101st St. Bay Ridge. Where for $36 two of you can share a Porterhouse that is considerably larger than Lugers double and 1/3 of the cost, and not half bad, it's often quite good in fact - definitely not Lugers, but you can go here 3 times for one meal at Luger's. Big bargain. Tom's Luncheonette - a treasure in prospect hgts. (washington & sterling) that since 1937 has served all day bkfst until it closes at 4 PM. A place that has the best hospitality in the industry and is the last (almost) of its breed. Not to be missed for the experience. Closed Sunday. Owner Gus Vlahavas is an exceptional person who is the unofficial 'Mayor' of Brooklyn. Club sandwiches for lunch, anything for breakfast (except the puny ham). Tanoreen - Patestinian home style 'cuisine du femme' which puts most other middle easterns to shame. Amazing lasagnish baked eggplant. One of my favorites. 3rd Av and about 75th St. Moderate. Aero - Bay Ridge Italian full of Bay Ridge Italians with a contemporay Italian menu and an excellent kitchen that compares favorably with the best of Manhattan. Valet parking, not cheap, busy and always very good. Tomasso's - 86th St. - Famous for arias sung by the owner, 'the boys' hanging out, and good cooking too. Have an early Sunday dinner to get you in the mood for The Sorpranos. Al Di La - 5th & Carroll - Mario Batali called this one of his favorite Italians. Food savvy delicious cooking, no reservations, and a new wine bar. I always enjoy the food here - it's one of the best places in the whole city for this kind of cooking. Worth a trip. Owner/chef Anna Klinger and her husband Emiliano Coppa are dedicated serious foodies. Sahara, King of Shish Kebob - Coney island Avenue @ Ave T - this is our default restaurant - always happy to go here. Still hot from the oven great bread, very good salad and well flavored and grilled meats. Try the excellent grilled 'bone' chicken (dark meat). In the summer its large backyard garden makes for one of the most pleasant evenings I know. Part of Brooklyn's burgeoning Turkish restaurant scene. Well priced/good value Taci Beyti - Another Coney Island Turkish where the menu is more about cooking than just grilling. Good food/good value. Koram - 4th Ave bet 85/86th St. Looks like a fast food/pizza parlor, but has serious Middle Eastern cooking for the ME community. Good sandwiches (gyro and others) worth a stop when in the hood (around the corner from Century 21 for any shoppers out there). Large Chinese restaurant (the name changed & I never remember the new one) at the SE corner of 6th Ave & 61st St. Two blocks off Brooklyn Chinatown's main drag (8th Ave), this renovated industrial space is a very large Cantonese serving worthwhile dim sum and modestly priced dinner until late (2 AM?). DiFara's - J & 15th. Pizza. The round pies are really good, but the square pies are some of the best pizza anywhere. Artisanally crafted, one by one, using the best ingredients, be prepared to wait too long even for a slice. I'm a sausage guy but here I go for the excellent pepperoni. For a whole pie, order one hour ahead by phone, show up 15 minutes after the pie is supposed to be ready, then be prepared to wait more. The calzone is expensive (relatively) and worth it. As some eGulleters already know, Dominic (THE man) will also make other Italian food (rabbit etc.) by special arrangement. It's worth it, but the digs are pretty funky. Junior's - Fashionable to trash but the cheescake really is good (see todays NY Times), and the chargrilled burgers are typically excellent and typically cooked a bit more than you want - don't hesitate to send them back and get a rarer one if that's what you like (and I do). Where else can you get an ice cream soda, let alone a Hoboken? Yes, Queen and Noodle Pudding are places you can really eat, and Los Pollitos II on 5th Avenue does have really tasty rotisserie chicken that is virtually always just freshly cooked and removed from the spit, and @ $8.95 for a whole one served in house it's a gigantic bargain. Their guacamole is good too - just that at $7.95 it costs almost as much as that whole chicken. Quick, easy, and tasty. Szechuan Delight - 7th Avenue in Park Slope - Edible for neighborhood Chinese with pretty good old-fashioned American style egg rolls. That's all for now folks!

El Obrero - since 1910 - in so-so area of La Boca but a great old place - Jorge the waiter has been there 43 years and remembered me from a visit 2 years earlier! Grilled meats, Spanish omelette with sausage and potatoes ---- cheap with good real food and a special atmosphere that money can't buy. With Argentine steaks at this price you can't go wrong. Oviedo is a classy but not pretentious Spanish restaurant that is professionallty run, full of Portenos, excellent seafood cooking and one of the best cellars in the country. A truly good restaurant in any city!

CELERY In my view celery is a particularly special vegetable that is often misunderstood. While French chefs may braise it or use it in a mirepoix as the base of a stew or sauce, it is the renowned Thai chef, Arun Sampanthaviant, the owner of the great Arun's in Chicago, who helped raise my consciousness. Celery or its leaves when chopped very lightly and left either very lightly cooked or kept raw, makes an extraordinary last moment addition to many dishes. It works like parsley that has been added to a pasta sauce just before serving. It can add a touch of freshness and a complexity of flavor that is just right. Try adding a 1/2 cup to fried rice at the last moment or a little finely chopped leaf to a salad dressing.

Before cutting does your wife: 1) remove the tough outer coating - how does she do this, please ask 2) blanch the peeled bb shoot in water first to remove its acrid, mouth irritating quality ?????

I have been seeing fresh winter bamboo shoots in NYC Chinatown. Anyone with stories, cooking instructions, recipes?

I'll be in shanghai and environs for a week. Don't have a hotel yet, but would love to hear what you might suggest (really nice, not too dear) We will be traveling with a literate Chinese Mandarin speaking friend. My own speaking skills are limited to food, money, greetings and bad words. I usually do quite well here in a Chinese speaking environment where there is some English - over there, well I'm not so sure - but I'll have no trouble ordering dumplings. Absolutely minimal reading, just a few basic food characters. Love any help or contacts - we have a few people to look up already. Very interested in: Great Shanghai cooking Great dumplings Local seafood Great classic restaurants (other categories: old, particularly beautiful, the most popular, great BBQ, red-cooking specialties) Street food Markets Egg cream venues thanks for your thoughts

LOL, I'm a nice guy, so I won't tell you what my sister-in-law says about Beijing except that it ends with ".....BUT the people there are very friendly." I love Shanghai and plan to spend half my life there after retiring (we already have a comfortable apartment in SH). You are right about the XLB at the Nanxiang Dumpling shop. The last time I was in town I waited a full HOUR with "the masses" at the downstairs takeout window for a single long of baozi. Not a single one of the locals in the line appeared to be grumbling about the wait, such is the anticipation of those xiaolong bao. They're still the standard all other XLB should be judged against. Here's what passes for Xiaolong Bao in Beijing: BEIJING XIAOLONG BAO .... and at Yuyuan in Shanghai: SHANGHAI XIAOLONG BAO Are you saying that yu yuan and Nanxiang dumpling shop are the same place? If so, where in Shanghai is it? Can you talk more about the other Shanghaiese restaurants you mentioned. Actually I will be in Shanghai during March and would love to hear more thoughts on places you like, what you dishes you eat where, and enough information to actually find the restaurants you're talking about. thanks, Ed

I don't doubt it, but that seems to be the exception. Also 3 months back Kan Man was having a fire sale of many goods because their Mott St location was going out of business. Perhaps they had some in a warehouse and thought that this would be a good time to move it. Or perhaps they are able to obtain them on a regular basis and just sell them quietly. Clearly restaurants have them and they are around. But by and large I believe they are not available. I have looked hundreds of times.

At the moment this is essentially NOT true. While you may be able to find some here and there (back room stashes for special customers?), by and large their availability is minimal or none at all. As many have written on this site, if you enter virtually any grocery store in NY's 3 1/2 Chinatowns they are not for sale - certainly not in the way they had been available up until 'enforcement' began a year or two ago. I know this for a fact, because I prowl around Chinese groceries many times a week and always look for them (for fun - I have a large personal supply). I NEVER see them and when I ask I'm told: 'no more, illegal'. Go to Toronto, or perhaps to wholesale/internet spice sources where the ban hasn't been enforced and you can find some. My son reports seeing some for sale at NY's Porto Rico coffee on Bleecker St. just last week. But by and large they're not readily available the way they used to be. By the way I was interviewed by The New York Times for an article that will be appearing on this subject. The writer who has done serious research on the subject tells me that the USDA regulation prohibiting Sichuan peppercorn importation and distribution dates back quite a long time, to the late 60's I believe she said. It's just recently that they have decided to enforce it. I don't know what precipitated this change in policy.

There is. They make dumplings and noodles cut by hand and dropped directly into boiling water. I've not been there since they opened some years ago. Unfortunately it was not terrific then, don't know about now.

While General Tso's Chicken may not be regularly found in London or California Chinese restaurants, talk about it originating in the US is incorrect. What is correct is that it became very popular (and bastardized) here. By the way I know this from first hand experience having been instrumental in creating and operating Amercia's first Hunanese restaurants. I believe that General Tso first reared his head in the US in NYC during the early 70's. While he may have made an appearance at other venues, I know for certain that we were serving this preparation in NYC at Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan in Jan '73. I also know for certain that we were inspired by, to a certain extent, a Hunan restaurant in Taipei, Peng Teng, created and owned by the renowned Hunanese Chef Peng. This is a dish that was genuinely part of his repetoire in Asia and was NOT invented in the US. Once the dish arrived here, it became crisper, sweeter,. less hot, had vegetables added etc. Authentic General Tso's should be made from chunks of dark meat chicken that have been marinated with egg white, rice wine, salt, and a little more cornstarch than normal. The chicken pieces are briefly passed through oil THREE times: the idea is to increase the heat of the oil each time (300 degrees F, 350 degrees F. then almost 400 degrees) in order to get the outside of the chicken crusted while the meat inside remained juicy and just cooked through. The chicken is then sauced with a 'kung pao' sauce made with garlic, ginger, scallion, scortched chiles. It had an extra bit of vinegar tossed in at the last moment along with some sesame oil. Never should have any veg unless you wanted to garnish the dish with a little sauted watercress or spinach. Definitely no broccoli or cauliflower. By the way, we were also the first American restaurant to serve Sichuan style orange beef, another dish that has become wildly popular here and that has been Americanized, in much the same way as General Tso's Chicken. It is also true that simultaneously to Uncle Tai's another restaurant called Hunam, was opened by NYC's Shun Lee Group and that they featured many of these dishes as well. Hunam opened a few months before Uncle Tai's in the end of 1972. It too was inspired by the success of Taiwan's Peng Teng and by its brilliant chef/owner, the fabled T.T.Wang.

That's right, Moo Shu Pork is originally an EGG dish. The title 'moo shu' poetically refers to little yellow cassia flowers which the curds of scramble egg in the dish are said to resemble. When I prepare this dish the classical way it has 4 eggs and just a little pork, no cabbage but shredded bamboo shoots instead, and it should be musty smelling from lilly buds and tree ears and it should never need or be served with hoisin sauce!

We've rented a home in Kyoto for the last week of March and the first week of April. Looking for suggestions for: Restaurants Food Stores Markets Anything else fun

I'll be traveling to Beijing in a few weeks and am interested in hearing about restaurants, street food and wet markets. Any suggestions?

So happy you enjoyed the recipe. You can adapt it for a Whole Crispy Sea Bass. To prep the fish: Butchering the fish: Use a 2 1/2 lb. white fleshed fish such as a sea bass. Lay the fish on its side and holding your knife at a 45 degree angle to the cutting surface make 3 or 4 incisions across each side of the fish. Each cut should go all the way to the bone and be parallel to and about 1 1/2" away from the previous cut. When properly done you should have 4-5 flaps of meat on each side, with each flap firmly attached at the bone. Dredging and frying the fish: Using a large wok heat 8 cups of vegetable oil until it is very hot: 375 degrees F. Make a cornstarch slurry (with cornstarch and water), and have 1 1/2 cups of dry cornstarch on a piece of wax paper. First dredge the fish in dry starch, then dip it in the slurry and then back in the dry starch. This triple starch application is a professional chef's trick for getting an extra crispy coating. Shake off any starch that doesn't cling to the fish , and then gently lower the fish into the oil. Make sure there is at least 2" between the edge of the wok and the level of the oil. This so the hot oil doesn't spill out when the fish is placed in the wok. Cook vigorously over the highest heat, until the fish starts to lightly color, about 5 minutes. Working gently (the fish will be fragile) remove the fish from the wok and let the oil reheat for a minute or two. When it is quite hot and almost smoking, 375 -400 degrees F., return the fish to the oil for about 2-3 minutes, until the batter is medium brown and quite crisp. Drain well and using a paper or kitchen towel dab away any extra oil that sticks to the fish. Place the fish on a serving platter while making the sauce. To make the sauce: use the technique and sauce recipe that I have listed above for Prawns with Chile Sauce, but add 2 T each of minced bamboo shoots and mushrooms (cut to the shape of pieces of rice) and omit the catsup. Also add 1/2 cup chicken stock and 1 T kikkoman soy and 1 T dark soy. Bring the sauce to a boil, thicken with cornstarch slurry and just before serving add some chopped scallions and 1 t sesame oil. There should be enough sauce to coat the fish and the plate around the fish. Serve immediately.

Hunan Cottage was good when we ate there a few months back. Real Chinese food - don't order much off the Americanized menu. The name is silly though - it's really a Shanghai-style place.

1)Tamarind is an excellent Thai restaurant with a woman chef. 2) The Silver Skillet is a funky breakfast spot that is unchanged from the 40's - salty country ham with red-eye gravy(and regular ham). Atmosphere worth gobbling up. Love to go here. Atlanta's Buckhead restaurant group runs terrific restaurants. It's one of the top operators around. Last time I looked they had around 10 places. Two of them are: 3) Nava -south western 4) Bluepointe - contemporary one of these is also a buckhead group restaurant, both are good: 5) Bones - Steaks 6) Chops - Steaks 7) Bacchanalia - maybe the most popular in town, more gastronomic than some others 8) Seegers - is celebrity chef owned and operated and renonwned for a big and very good night out. (Expensive?)

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