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A Stinky Dish at Tasty Garden

Eat this if you dare. It's steamed ground pork with stinky salt fish on top.

One place you can get it is Tasty Garden in Alhambra. The pork mixture is mild. The fish is anything but mild. It's extremely salty and as pungent as the smelliest cheese. If you're sitting downwind, you'll be overpowered. 

But devotees, like my friend Billy, love it. When I eat Chinese food, I leave the ordering to him.

We started with a much more palatable dish, French style filet mignon (above). French here must mean from France by way of Indochina, because the steak is spicy enough to merit a red chile on the menu, and it's cooked with basil.  

Still another dish in the same vein, Vietnamese style shrimp (above) is also cooked with fresh basil. It's slightly sweet and spiced with black pepper. 

And look at these clams (above). The golden flecks aren't bread crumbs but dried garlic. 

Still more seafood--pan-fried fish fillet in black bean sauce (above).

We switched from seafood to chicken on fried noodles with Chinese broccoli (above).

But we wanted still more vegetables, so here are stir-fried green beans (above).

Tea doesn't come with lunch. Drinks are extra, which means you can try Hong Kong style ice coffee with milk tea. A couple of these, and you'll be wired for the rest of the day.

Tasty Garden has several outlets, with two more set to open in Rowland Heights and Irvine. However, Billy says the Alhambra location has the best chef.

Tasty Garden, 288 W. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, CA 91801. Tel: (626) 300-8262.

Going Meatless Shanghai Style

Shanghai No. 1 is loaded with meaty dishes--peppery-sweet steak cubes, braised pork, crab roe, abalone, chicken feet and the like.

Think you should avoid it if you're a vegetarian?  Then you'd miss out on meatless dishes good enough to rival the others.

From the appetizers, you can choose cold sweet and sour marinated cucumbers (above) and marinated green broadbeans. 

Deep red Shanghai style lotus root (above) is stuffed with glutinous rice and bathed in sweet honey sauce. It's so good, you may need a double order.  

What a surprise to find an extraordinary salad in a Chinese restaurant. It's crown daisy with cumin, a leafy green (Chrysanthemum coronarium) with sweet, acidic dressing and a surprisingly prominent taste of cumin.

You're more likely to have run into crown daisy at a Korean market, where it's known as ssukgat.

Delicately flavored rather than drenched with sauce, steamed eggplant comes topped with tomatoes and sliced garlic. 

Oval rice cakes are combined with green onions instead of meat.

When ordering this dish and vegetables such as ong choy, pea tendrils and other greens, make sure the sauce does not include meat broth or oyster sauce. Then you can relax and enjoy a delicious, and safely meatless, meal. 

Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village, 250 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, CA 91776.  Tel: (626) 282-1777.

Dim Sum at Shanghai No. 1

"It looks like an Asian brothel in the 1930s." 

That's the sort of reaction Shanghai No. I Seafood Village has set itself up for with its red velvet walls, huge, glittery chandeliers and gaudy silver chairs.

This posh look wasn't installed to make up for mediocre food, because the cooking is very good--perhaps Asian brothel food in the '30s was very good too. 

The main menu is so thick with photos and Shanghai history that holding it up long enough to order is a challenge.

Lunch is easier. It's dim sum listed on a sheet of paper. Although dim sum is Cantonese, some Shanghainese snacks are included, and the Chinese I ate with could pick these out.

If you have a sweet tooth, you'll love Shanghai style pork buns (above), the meat wrapped in sweet, flaky yellow dough shiny with glaze and sprinkled with sesame seeds. 

Pan-fried pork buns (above) look like cupcakes, with black sesame seeds on top and pale seeds around the bottom. These spurt almost as much soup as juicy steamed soup dumplings.

The wrapper for deep-fried carrot pastry (above) appears shredded, thanks to the way it is formed. The "carrot" in this case is white radish. 

Pine nuts are mixed with the chicken inside yellow pineapple buns (above). This hints at the caliber of cooking at Shanghai No. 1, because pine nuts are expensive and could easily have been left out. By the way, there is no pineapple in pineapple buns. They're named for their appearance. 

We also ate spicely seasoned green beans (above), mellow pork ball soup and crystal shrimp (below) that were perhaps more impressive than anything, because they were so perfectly cooked.

It takes an expert to get something as delicate as shrimp in and out of the wok so that it remains fresh and light. There was no sauce, just a dish of dark Chinkiang vinegar, a rice vinegar as rich as balsamic, for dipping.

Shanghai pan-fried noodles (above) were fat and round, pleasantly light and chewy. And for more of that chewy texture, there were fried rice cakes with pork--"very Shanghainese," my companions said.

The restaurant has one crew of cooks for dim sum and another for the main menu. It's so popular that without a reservation, you'll probably have to wait. Not to worry. You can pass the time at a foot massage place in the same plaza. 

Shanghai No. 1 Seafood Village, 250 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, CA 91776.  Tel: (626) 282-1777.

 

 

A Taiwanese Year of the Dragon

If you had to choose just one dish to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Dragon, it would have to be "dragon shrimp." That's what the Chinese call lobster, a costly, auspicious food perfect for greeting the lunar new year January 23.

There's lobster all over the San Gabriel Valley, but the sweetest version, symbolizing a sweet future, would have to be the lobster salad (above) at Cafe Fusion in Arcadia.

Large, succulent slices of lobster are lined up on a mountain of apples, pears and mangoes and laced with a light, creamy dressing. Orange slices surround the plate. 

Cafe Fusion, which specializes in Taiwanese food, also suggests a plate of assorted cold foods (below) that conveys the idea of family members gathering to share the special dishes of the season. 

The cafe's cold plate is nothing like the perfunctory collection of barbecued pork, cold chicken, cuttlefish and so forth that most Chinese restaurants put out.

Instead, you will eat like the Taiwanese, snacking on Taiwanese "caviar," which is smoked mullet roe in rust-colored slices, paired with fresh garlic stem and fluted slices of daikon.

Smoked shark, a country style dish, comes with finely shredded ginger and a soy sauce dip. A sweet and spicy five-flavor dip accompanies boiled squid. Because bamboo shoots are a major crop in Taiwan, you will have fresh bamboo shoot chunks to dip in sweet mayonnaise.

But the most typical Chinese cold dish, says cafe owner Arthur Chen, is fresh water clams, simmered in a mixture of soy sauce, wine, lemon juice, garlic and chile.

In the past, new year foods only appeared for the holiday, but Cafe Fusion has them throughout the year, like glistening pork belly (above) that has been braised for hours with soy sauce and such spices as star anise, Sichuan peppercorns, fennel seeds, cassia bark and orange peel.

In Taiwanese homes, the pork would be set out on a table of foods honoring ancestors, then recooked for the family to eat later.

Chicken and fish are other new year essentials, and so you would have Taiwan's three-cup chicken (above), named for the amounts of soy sauce, sesame oil and wine with which the chicken is cooked. Fresh basil also goes into this dish.   

Fish represents prosperity. You can partake of that with a whole black cod steamed with Chinese tree seeds, which are tangy pickled berries with a large seed.

A hot pot of mutton soup (above) is seasonal, only eaten in winter in Taiwan. The aromatic broth is flavored with angelica and chrysanthemum leaves.

Dessert would be a cake of glutinous rice flour and brown sugar that is cut up and pan-fried to make chewy, crisp-edged slices. Chinese markets right now have stacks of the cakes, some plain, some containing red beans, others flavored with coconut.

The most important dinner is New Year's Eve, when family members come home to celebrate, but the festival continues for days after that. And Cafe Fusion has the dessert you would eat on the final day, a sweet clear soup (above) with egg shreds, osmanthus and tiny glutinous rice dumplings filled with sweetened sesame seeds. 

Cafe Fusion, 510 E. Live Oak Ave., Arcadia, CA 91006. Tel: (626) 447-6488.

A Place That's Worth the Wait

There's nothing new about Newport Seafood Restaurant in San Gabriel. Everybody's been there and everybody goes back, so the wait for tables is a swirling mob scene. But you don't mind, because you know you're about to eat some of the most interesting Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley.

It's a given that you'll order lobster (at top). Laden with spicy sauce and green onions, it's so delicious you don't mind the splurge. Or you could have the lobster plain, or with black beans or salt and pepper.

Probably everyone will order fish with basil too, and bo luc lac (above), glossy wok-seared Vietnamese beef. That's what sets Newport apart from other Chinese restaurants, its Southeast Asian inflection and a menu in English and Vietnamese.

But the restaurant does well with such popular Cantonese dishes as shrimp with sweet glazed walnuts. And vegetables such as brilliant green peasprouts.

The menu is long but there are still more dishes on hand. The other night there were clams with tamarind (above)--spicy, like most of the dishes I had that night, including squid with Asian basil, bean sprouts and jalapeños (below).

You think of Newport first for lobster and probably not for wine, but the restaurant has some good ones--perhaps its the Vietnamese-French influence.

Waiting for a table, my friends shared a bottle of 2008 Robert Mondavi Napa Chardonnay. But the surprise was a bottle of Caymus Vineyards 2008 Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon, which costs $100 and up, depending upon where you buy it, plus more on a wine list.

Far from out of its element, that wine mastered the spicy dishes like a warlord subduing a fractious horde.

Newport Seafood Chinese Restaurant, 518 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, CA 91776. Tel: (626) 289-5998.

Eat Your Greens at CBS Seafood

CBS Seafood concentrates on guess what, seafood. And those eat often in Chinatown say it does the best job there.

But the other night something humble got more enthusiastic comments than the crab, squid and shrimp--a simple green, ong choy (above), cooked to perfection.

If you've eaten in Thailand, you may know this vegetable as pak boong--in English morning glory vine, or water spinach. I've eaten a lot of it over there, but never as good as that at CBS, which was very young, fresh and tender. I've bought ong choy at farmers markets in Los Angeles, and even that was not as good. The coarse stems always had to be cut off.

We had plenty of seafood that night too, and it was fine--crab, deep-fried squid, shrimp with XO sauce (at right), a seafood casserole with tofu, crabmeat and corn soup--but the ong choy stole the show.

So hurry down and try it, although who knows how long the restaurant will be able to get such premium quality. Perhaps it's a seasonal thing.

On the menu you won't see it listed as ong choy. Instead, look for water convolvulus with garlic sauce, which is number 191 on a very long list of dishes.

 CBS Seafood Restaurant, 700 N. Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Tel: (213) 617-2323.

Give Thanks for Peking Duck

It's turkey month, but when the Plum Tree Inn staged a pre-Thanksgiving dinner, there wasn't a turkey in sight.

The main course was just what you would expect from a Chinatown restaurant--Beijing (Peking) duck (above), followed by soup made from the duck bones.

Then came two-flavored shrimp, one version orange and spicy and the other translucent and delicate, then giant lion's head meatballs; sweet crispy beef, kon pao that combined shrimp, fish and scallops and asparagus covered with fat black mushrooms.

Oh yes, and minced chicken in lettuce cups (below) for a first course, nice if you're not a turkey fan.

Dessert was quintessentially Chinese, a hot clear soup with tiny dumplings lightly flavored with sesame and barely sweet--a much better dessert after a gluttonous feast than the usual pumpkin pie.

Plum Tree Inn, 913 N. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Tel: (213) 613-1819.

MINCED CHICKEN IN LETTUCE CUPS
From Elaine Ting, owner of Plum Tree Inn 

Plum Sauce:

3/4 (16-ounce) jar plum jam
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon dried minced onion
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Chicken and Lettuce:

2 boneless skinless chicken breast halves 
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup minced water chestnuts
2/3 cup minced green and red bell peppers
3 tablespoons minced onion
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
4 to 5 leaves of iceberg lettuce

To make the plum sauce, combine the jam, vinegar, brown sugar, dried onion, red pepper flakes, garlic and ginger in a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring. Remove from the heat and set aside.

To prepare the chicken, coat the chicken breasts evenly with the cornstarch and salt.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a wok over high heat. Add the chicken and cook for 4 to 5 minutes on each side or until cooked through. Remove the chicken and set aside to cool, then mince. 

Add the remaining tablespoon of oil to the wok over high heat. Add the water chestnuts, peppers and minced onion and stir fry for 1 to 2 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

Add the chicken to the wok, then stir in the sugar, soy sauce and white pepper and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. 

Spoon the chicken mixture into the lettuce cups, adding some of the plum sauce.

Makes 4 to 5 servings.

 

Crab Stars at Seafood Village

What people go to Seafood Village for is crab, sweet, succulent deep-fried crab, so freshly cooked that the meat is hot and burns your fingers.

Golden crumbs of fried garlic scattered over the shells are the only seasoning. It's a greasy job, pulling the shells apart to get at the meat. And the table grows silent because all attention is on the work.

A Dungeness for three runs close to $18. That's about $6 a pound, most of which is shell. More costly than it used to be, my crab-eating friends observed, but worth the small splurge.

Chinese restaurants usually put everything on the table at once, but Seafood Village allowed time to eat most of the crab before bringing out the other dishes we had ordered. 

Perhaps the delay was by chance, or perhaps it was out of respect for the supreme moment we were enjoying.

The other food was fine too, especially sweet pea shoots with garlic (above), which you can only get in season.

Honey walnut cream shrimp (I can't resist that gooey, sweet dish) was well presented, with the walnuts on the side in case anyone couldn't eat nuts.

We also managed  a platter of crispy rock cod fillet with house special sauce (red and sweet).

Well why not?This is a seafood place after all, and we had come a long way to eat there. 

Seafood Village, 684 W. Garvey Ave., Monterey Park, CA 91754. Tel: (626) 289-0088. Also at 9669 Las Tunas Drive, Temple City, CA 91780. Tel: (626) 286-2299.

 

A Bargain at Monterey Palace

The sign over the entrance to Monterey Palace Restaurant says "dim sum & lunch special." What you need to pay attention to is the price, $2.09.

Until recently, dim sum at this Monterey Park restaurant was $1.89 a plate. It's still a bargain, even though tea is extra and so is a dish of mustard and chili sauce.

Still, three of us ate all we could handle for less than $10 each.

The low price is why the restaurant is crowded.

At peak lunch hour, even during the week, the huge room is jammed. Don't think about the weekends, or take a book or magazine for distraction during the long wait.

Dim sum hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., so an early start is a good idea.

You mark off your order on a sheet that lists the choices. No roving carts, in other words, maybe in order to squeeze in more tables. Carts couldn't get through the tight spaces now.

Is the dim sum good, for the price? Yes. 

There is plenty to choose from.  The classics are good, among them yellow shumai with orange crab roe on top (right). 

The wrapper for har gow (steamed shrimp dumpling) was well seasoned--no soy sauce necessary.

My favorite was Chao Zhou (Chiuchow) dumpling, filled with pork, peanuts and cilantro. But my Cantonese friend liked it the least. We all admired the bright fresh green flavors of a steamed dumpling filled with shrimp and chives (at the bottom in the photo above).

You might expect a shrimp and scallop dumpling to include fresh scallops, but these were dried. And what emerged once the wrapper was pierced was also a surprise--noodles.

The slight sweetness of pork in a chewy sticky rice flour dumpling was pleasant. So was pork in a baked dumpling with sesame seeds.

And chicken with mushrooms and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves (in the steamer container  in the photo above) was better than a takeout version that I bought in L.A.'s Chinatown.

From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., you can get "chef's special dishes."  These aren't $2.09 but top out at $8.99 for stir-fried lamb with green onion or, if you're a stronger soul than I am, stir-fried goose intestine with wild fungus.

Monterey Palace Restaurant, 1001 E. Garvey Ave., Monterey Park, Ca 90755. Tel: (626-571-0888.

 

Yang Chow's Two Top Dishes

Yang Chow's slippery shrimp gets all the attention. But it has a rival, in my opinion.

And that is Szechuan beef with orange peel sauce (above).  It's food candy--sweet and crunchy, like a meaty lollipop.

At lunch the other day in the downtown Yang Chow, I spotted a platter of slippery shrimp on every table.

There's no secret to the dish, which has been around for more than 30 years. I wrote up the recipe for the LA Times in 2005. 

Brown and saucy, Szechuan beef doesn't stand out. It looks like a lot of other brownish Chinese dishes. But its nonstop crisp, crunchy sweetness is irresistible.

Why choose between the two? My friends ordered both, and that was the best of all possible lunches.

Yang Chow, 819 N.Broadway, Los Angeles CA 90012. Tel: (213) 625-0811.