XO Kitchen Redux - January 17, 2011

Now, here is another case study of a second date following an ecstatic first date - A heavy dose of reality check. Previously clad in a suit, does the guy still look as confident in a pair of jeans? Or, has the girl now gotten careless with her appearance, leaving a smudge of lipstick on the right front tooth? And, how about their friends? Does your new partner come with a set of unsavory friends, boring acquaintances and garrulous relatives? In the case of XO Kitchen’s fish congee and Yuan Yang, it seems that I had picked out the best of XO’s mediocre clan; however, even the best of XO clan seemed to cower in the midst of their embarrassing relatives.

Spong Cake Redux: New Kam Hing Coffee Shop - January 17, 2011

The euphoria of the first date is, more often than not, misleading; otherwise, we would have gotten married a hundred times over.  Say thanks to our instinctive skepticism. Therefore, when the second date comes around, without the element of surprise and under the broad day light, the former allure usually seems to have toned down a shade or two. However, such will not be the case when the person, or a cake, is made of true ingenuity.

XO Kitchen - December 30, 2010

While XO’s yuan yang was working to enslave me, I had plenty of time to gawk, stare and drool at the pictures and descriptions of XO’s offerings – in color photos, too – on the walls. Since my imagination had been blown out of proportions, I made a return trip to XO Kitchen for breakfast to quench my thirst for knowledge and, well, simply and frankly, hunger.

New Kam Hing Coffee Shop - December 28, 2010

Why do they bother calling themselves a coffee shop? Their coffee is only an afterthought or a preventive forethought – take your pick – provided for customers who cannot wait to swallow a dozen sponge cakes until they get to a safe haven; in either case, it is a mere convenient lubricant to facilitate the transfer of their criminally addictive sponge cakes from their plastic Target containers to people’s extending and expanding holiday girths.

Bai Cuisine in Dali

Dali is the land of the Bai people. Again, I cannot and will not lecture you on the characteristics of the Bais, but you know how to use the internet (otherwise, how did you find me?). Dali is distressingly touristy; the town is totally infested with cheap-in-quality-but-high-in price souvenir shops (I don’t really buy the story that the Bais call a high price out of respect for the customer and as an invitation for further bargaining – I mean, how can it be so if they immediately dropped the price by 1/3 without any words from me? Am I not respected?), tourist-trap restaurants serving coffee, cheesecakes (Really, do you have to have them while you are in China? Why are you here?), fish and chips (I suppose it is simple enough to make, minus the malt vinegar), and buried among these are the locals (yes, they are there – just hard to find). In a town like this, how do you find good restaurants? – Of course, ask the locals. You can start with your hotel, but if they recommend their own restaurants, ignore and move on to the next self-respecting local with taste buds instead of a calculator.

Dai Cuisine in Kunming (Part 2 of 2)

Once I like something, I cannot just have it once. For the second round of Dai food, I came to傣家塞 (Dai Jia Zhai), located in a food court on Baoshan Jie. The waiters here were all very young and seem not to know anything about their own dishes, and the only recommendation they could give was “Oh, this is very typical.” Not deterred, I relied on an expert – my unfailing instinct for good food.

Dai Cuisine in Kunming (Part 1 of 2)

Who are the Dai people? They are one of the many ethnic groups living in Yunnan Province in China. In Chinese, Dai is written as “傣,” which closely resembles 泰, the letter meaning Thai; therefore, not surprisingly, Dai people seem to have originally come from Thailand. Beyond this tiny bit of anthropology/ethnology from me, you will just have to go to you-know-where, the venerable Wikipedia: Although my alma mater has forbidden the use of Wikipedia, but go for it, you have my explicit permission to do so.

With basically no reference point beyond a mere preconception that it was probably something akin to Thai food, I walked into 傣家竹楼 (Dai Jia Zhu Lo) in Kunming, after meandering in the side streets with a whining stomach, because apparently the Kunminites have long decided that street names did not need to be enlightening to anyone, including the locals (they had no idea when I asked for directions) and, God forbid, the foreigners… The waitresses were wearing yellow ethnic costumes, which looked the yellow version of the Singapore Airline’s Balmain uniform. The restaurant was quickly filling up at 6PM on a Saturday, so I was fortunate to have landed a seat on the balcony overlooking a not particularly pretty street.

Paomo in Xian (Part 2 of 2)

春発生 (Chun Fa Sheng) is another place to try the paomo, but not for the traditional lamb base. Here, the famous paomo is hulu paomo. Hulu is a type of melon actually, which you will find dried up and carved into an ornament as a lucky charm. However, hulu here does not mean melon but intestine: Hulu is the auspicious word or sound for intestine. I will join the frowning competition; I personally cannot verify, as I have no idea in which language hulu actually means intestine, but I assume it is at least more “elegant” than saying, “Give me a bowl of the intestine soup,” not that anyone who orders cares much.

You have to repeat the same crumbling process and do some people watching. See my crumbs? These are still not as fine as to be desired by the local crumbling bureau, but I am learning. After I attain enough calluses on my finger tips, I am sure I would finally win their approval.

There were two men sitting at the same table – not locals based on how big their crumbs were, tourists…what can you do? – and they were rightly rejected by the waitress when they asked for the soup. Ha!

Then you waive down one of the much harassed and highly reluctant waitresses to get your bowl filled with the hulu soup. How do you waive down such a grumpy looking waitress? – Be Chinese and be strong. You don’t have to leave a tip, you know? I assume you are not one of those discriminatory and hypocritical pseudo gourmet: Can anyone explain to me why the fillet is superior to stomach, hearts or the colon? The animal is already dead, OK? The very least you can do is to show some respect and treat all parts equally. As for myself, I practice total equality: I eat all kinds of animals and all parts of the body. If someone is going to eat me, I would appreciate it if whoever it is would eat all of me. Don’t you agree? It would be quite insulting otherwise.

I have again digressed. At 春発生, you do not get the pickled garlic but a pot of chili is already on the table. The intestines at 春発生 is tender, not fatty – all right, I did order the “lean” version, but you have to give credit to how thoroughly they removed the fat. Seeing the fat in the intestines makes me want to go straight to the gym: Do you think your intestines are healthier than what you are eating? The intestine has been stewed for so long that it is not tough at all, but very soft. The soup is richly white and very mild – no, I do not mean boring or bland – but just rich in flavor, smooth in texture and overall not “too much.” The soup has so much depth in it, and it is not from MSG. Rich means multi-layered goodness, not necessarily fat, which is a concept a little hard to get across in the U.S. Combined with my now expertly crumbled bread (after an admonition by the waitress), I think I can blend in as a Xianese now.

The two men, now finally re-crumbled their breads, are also enjoying the delicious hulu paomo. Everyone is happy.


Restaurant Info:
春発生 (Chun Fa Sheng): 碑林区南院門25号（Nanyuanmen No. 25）

Paomo in Xian (Part 1 of 2)

What is exactly paomo? Paomao is a popular, local specialty in Xian, China, and originally a Muslim dish. There are many specialized restaurants selling paomo, especially the yangrou paomo, the lamb paomo, in the Muslim Quarter. Lamb in China? You may think: Do not forget that the Muslims do not eat pork and Mongols also favor lamb. Xian has a longstanding Muslim community, and thus, the Muslim Quarter – it feels like Chinatown in New York, but the common tongue, the Mandarin, somehow gets you further than English in Chinatown: I suppose the Chinese tenacity will dominate the world eventually. I know I am dragging it and you just want to know what paomo is. However, an interesting dish deserves a bit of a lead-in, don’t you think? After all, a dish is a slice of living history – layered by the experience of the forbearers (“Experience is the name given to mistakes” – Oscar Wilde), the wisdom and the whim of the previous generations.

In order to explain what a paomo is, I should start from the beginning – the preparation – because this is a very involved action, as opposed to passively reacting to whatever is served in front of you. When you order a yangrou paomo, you usually get to pick a big or a small bowl – the small is usually enough even for a starving person because it is intensely filling, and I will explain why soon. At 老米家 (Lao Mi Jia), a small bowl would get you two white round disks – about 4-5 inch in diameter x 2/3 inch in thickness of bread, slightly brown in a pattern created from baking in the oven.

Now, this “bread” can be very big – there are special stores, which sell them, and they have some the sizes of miniature sun dials. I would hate to have to carry these miniature sun dials anywhere… This “bread” has gone through some seriously tough kneading, that is how to make good chewy manto (steamed bread), too, and then baked. These staples were meant to last in the old days prior to the refrigerator, OK? After all the abuse, the dough turns into a dense, a very dense, and yet somewhat moist white carbohydrate monster. Even imagining this “bread” has exhausted me momentarily.

What you must do with this bread is to crumble it: No, it is not simple at all – crumbling is a lot of real “work.” It is like Korean BBQ: Why am I cooking my own food in a restaurant? The crumbling is akin to grilling the meat: The restaurant has done the seasoning, but you are in charge of the ultimate texture of the dish, a final touch, which will decide your fate of whether your food will be a success or a total failure. It is a serious business, let me tell you, especially when the “bread” you are dealing with is this abused, hardened, meant-to-last thing. A very important tip: Do not slack and do not cheat – you must crumble them fine and well. Otherwise, the waitress may just not take your sorry mess and will tell you to redo it. You do not want such an ignominious treatment. I am not threatening you: It is true, I have seen it and been told it. There are a whole family chatting and scolding over the crumbling of breads, an old man seriously concentrating on it as if his remaining, dwindling years depended on it, and a couple romanticizing and joking over the crumbling… It makes an interesting people watch and it helps the process – you need the entertainment because crumbling takes time!

Now, once you have crumbled to your heart’s satisfaction, although your waitress would probably tell you to do it again, you call the waitress and she would carry the bowl of crumbled bread over to the kitchen. The kitchen people, in charge of a caldron of hot, bubbling, rich soup of lamb, would ladle out the soup over your crumbled bread along with some 粉糸 (fen si), clear noodles made from the starch of mung beans (see how useful I can be?).



At 老米家, your yangrou paomo will return to you accompanied by a small dish of hot pepper sauce and pickled garlic. Embrace the garlic and stop being a snob. The pickled garlic is a nice and necessary complement for the lamb. Finally, you are ready to dig in.


老米家’s soup has a couple of slices of tender lamb, and make sure you enjoy the paomo as it is first, then you do the chili and the garlic versions – a little variety is good, you know, don’t be such a bore. When you have tasted the pure version – the soup rich and opaque with the goodness of the lamb, you get a piece of the sweet pickled garlic to cleanse your palette, so to speak, but well, not much chance of that when you deal with garlic, I suppose. The cilantro sprinkled on top, not just sitting there looking pretty, also adds contrast to the soup and the lamb. Pay some attention to the 粉糸, the clear noodles you see – one dangling over that big piece of lamb – because it has soaked up the delicious lamb stock and is perfectly chewy, not soggy. A self-respecting restaurant will not serve it soggy; as pasta needs to be al dente.

Now the bread that you have worked on to crumble has been soaking up the beautiful soup all this time, right? This is exactly why crumbling is so critical: The smaller it is, the faster it soaks up. Therefore, if you have a chunk of bread – by the way, it won’t float, it sinks – it will just be like a rock in a pond. The locals will just look at you and shake their heads, “Foreigners…” You sip some of the soup and take in a few of the crumbs in at the same time and chew and enjoy. After this, you can just say, “ahhhh.” All your hard work has been rewarded: The crumbs still retain some chewiness – I told you, they are meant to last – but has now been softened and mellowed by the soup. Your heart also is softened: Warm and fuzzy feeling after several mouthfuls and a full-blown carbo food coma after the whole bowl.

Restaurant Info:

老米家 (Lao Mi Jia): 碑林区西羊市127号 ( Located in the Muslim Quarter on Xiyang Shi, No. 127.) I think, but just ask anyone. The people at the hotel told me only the name, and I just stumbled on it by myself: It must have been fate.