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Dessert of the Week: It's Chinese

What are these pretty things, petits fours from some exclusive French patisserie?

No,you're looking at a Chinese dessert, taken off a dim sum cart at the Golden Dragon in downtown Los Angeles.

The delicate tones are so springlike.  But the dark layer is something you're not likely to find at an exclusive French patisserie--black beans.

Not pastries, these are gelatin desserts set so firmly that, if you're not adept with chopsticks and dropped one, there'd be no embarrassing mess on the table. And not a crack or crumble to make it any less pretty.

Golden Dragon Restaurant,  960 North Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Tel: (213) 626-2039.

Zzamong: A Trip to Korea's Past

"You are traveling to '70s Korea in a time machine," said my Korean friend as we ate at Zzamong on West 3rd Street in Los Angeles.

A Korean-style Chinese restaurant, Zzamong is like the old fashioned neighborhood family restaurants she remembers from home. Its ambitious menu of 70 dishes has been whittled down to half that size, retaining only what customers really like.

At the top of their favorites is the noodle dish jjajang-myeon.

Kids love it because the dark sauce looks like chocolate and because they can laugh at each other when the sauce dribbles onto their faces. The dark color comes from caramel and black bean sauce, not chocolate. 

At Zzamong, the English name is Peking noodle, and there are three versions. The most elaborate contains seafood (above), but pork is more traditional, my friend said. The typical garnish is sliced cucumber.

Often this would be the only dish a Korean would order.

If the occasion called for something more, the typical choice would be sweet and sour pork (right).

Zzamong's version is nothing like the usual Chinese-American rendition of this dish. The only additions are onion and cucumber, no pineapple, bell peppers and catsup. The meat is thickly battered and very crisp. The sauce is clear, thick and sweet.

Because the food is Chinese, banchan do not accompany meals. You do, however, get three small side dishes--cubed radish kimchi, onion and yellow pickled radish. The Korean way is to sprinkle vinegar over the radish and onion and dip the onion slices in a small dish of thick black sauce. 

Although tea in some form usually comes with Chinese and Korean meals, the only drink provided at Zzamong is water.

Zzamong Chinese Restaurant, 4255 w. 3rd St., Los Angeles, CA 90020. Tel: (213) 739-2747.  

What's Hot (and Not) at Ji Rong

It seems silly to rave about cabbage at a restaurant that prides itself on Peking duck.

But the cabbage at Ji Rong in Rosemead is very, very good. It is crisp, laced with bits of meat and glistens with clear sauce that has lots of savory flavor.

The Peking duck is okay--$33.98 per duck includes thin pancakes for wrapping the meat and skin along with hoisin sauce and slivered green onions and cucumbers. But it's not as refined a presentation as that at the Duck House in Monterey Park. The meat and skin are cut more coarsely, for one thing. 

On the other hand, you get duck bone soup, with cubes of tofu and excellent, richly flavored broth. 

Soup doesn't come with the  basic $33.95 duck at the Duck House. You have to pay more if you want that.

Pumpkin with egg sounds like nothing at all.  However, like Ji Rong's cabbage, it is worth ordering, even addictive. The egg must have been mixed into the batter coating the deep-fried squash slices. It wasn't apparent otherwise.

Cod with basil (at right) is tempting, the way it's mixed with fresh basil sprigs. 

Virtually all at my table agreed, though, that Ji Rong's walnut shrimp is one of its weaker dishes--too much batter and not enough walnuts.

We ate a lot more food, including a beef hot pot (at right) seething with red chiles, stir-fried pork strips, wrinkly green beans with XO sauce, a fried coiled pancake and something I had never seen before--cucumber wrapped in a tofu pancake for dipping into thick bean sauce.

The sparkly lights outside make Ji Rong look like Christmas. The restaurant is obviously popular. It was crowded on a Sunday night and did so much business during Chinese New Year that it has run out of takeout menus and business cards.

 Ji Rong Restaurant, 8450 Valley Blvd., No. 115, Rosemead, CA 91770. Tel: (626) 280-8600.

 

The Dim Sum of the Day

I used to stand in line at the Golden Crown in Hong Kong, waiting for the doors to open so I could run in, snatch a table and wait for the egg custard tarts to roll out of the kitchen.

The soft, shimmery, yellow custard was wonderful. And the flaky pastry surrounding it was tender and light, really heavenly.

The Golden Crown, which was on Nathan Road in Kowloon, is now gone, and I haven't been back to Hong Kong in years. But I did have egg custard tarts the other day--at the Golden Dragon in downtown Los Angeles.

They may not have been quite as good, but they too came straight from the oven. And they were so hot it was risky to bite into them, but I did anyway, not minding a burned tongue.

The Chinese name for the tarts is, in rough English,  daan taat, which is easy to remember, because it's what I say to misbehaving cats in my household.

Golden Dragon restaurant, 960 N. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Tel: (213) 626-2039.

A Rabbit-less New Year Dinner

The right way to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit is to eat--rabbit, right?

Not so. My group tucked into duck at the perfect place for that, the Duck House in Monterey Park. This was no ordinary duck but the restaurant's "famous roasted Peking duck," according to the menu. 

And it was pretty good, a platter of duck meat cut into small, manageable pieces surrounded by equally manageable pieces of crisp skin, with no fat in sight.

What looked like a tortilla holder contained thin white pancakes in which to wrap the meat and skin with shredded cucumber, shredded green onion and hoisin sauce.

"It's essentially a burrito," said my neighbor, who was entitled to make such an irreverent statement because she is Chinese and adept at anything to do with Chinese cuisine.

The Duck House has a special New Year menu in Chinese only. The one person at the table who could read the characters said the dishes were related to health, wealth and longevity.

To make sure we had something auspicious, she showered us with candies in red and gold wrappers.

The duck was the star of the meal, certainly.  But it had a rival in Taiwanese style BBQ eel on sticky rice.

The sweet, tender strips of eel almost melted into the chewy rice, which contained dried shrimp and other seasonings that made for tantalizing flavor. 

And everybody liked garlic green beans, stir-fried but still  fresh and crisp. 

There was much more--a head of bok choy smothered with bright yellow crab sauce; shrimp and scallops with corn; a crab and tofu omelet the size of a large platter; sizzling tofu, and tender beef cubes with onions (above).

Stir-fried bean sprouts looked innocent until you bit into them and discovered that they were loaded with garlic.

The Duck House offers tea, soft drinks and Chinese style beverages such as sweet and sour plum juice and wintermelon sweet tea.

I saw somebody with a bottle of beer, but we brought wines and toasted the New Year with Pacific Rim Riesling 2008 from the Yakima Valley.

Then we moved on to Demeter Zoltan Tokaji 2007, Lafond Chardonnay 2005 and Provenance Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2007. I mention these not to show off what we drank but to report on a few wines that go very well with Chinese food.

Duck House, 501 S. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, CA 91754. Tel: (626) 2884-3227.

 

Durian Pastry--It's Not Stinky

I've eaten durian cake, durian pudding, durian ice cream, durian and sticky rice and fresh durian. But durian dim sum? That's new to me.

I came across it at Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant in Rosemead, where deep-fried durian pastry is No. 57 on the menu.

The sunny yellow, flaky pastry filled with durian is slightly sweet but not sugary, although it's in the dessert section. 

As my lunch companions examined the pastries, I heard such words as "stench," "fermented,"  "smelly," "horrible," all referring to durian's notoriously stinky reputation.

Not deserved in my opinion. I would call the aroma and flavor tropical, ripe, sun-baked, concentrated, assertively fruity, exotically pleasant.  In other words, I like durian, and I thought the  pastries were great.

Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant, 3939 N. Rosemead Blvd., Rosemead, CA 91770. Tel: (626) 288-3939.

Joss Serves a Beautiful Lunch

The prettiest Chinese food I've seen lately appeared Sunday at a conference at UCLA.

Interesting food at an academic gathering? Let me explain. The conference was "Asia in LA 2010," arranged by the UCLA Asia Institute. And the topic was "Creating and Consuming Asian Cuisines."

That morning, graduate students delivered papers on such topics as "Food Practices of the Okinawan Diaspora," "Finding Home in Koreatown Coffee Shops" and "Eating at the Edge of Ulaanbaatar."

Lunch couldn't possibly be as intriguing as these. But then the food appeared--four courses of artful plates designed by Joss Cuisine of Beverly Hills.

The restaurant brought its own waiters and dishes to make the presentation just right.

The lunch, for event sponsors, started with a cold mustard hand shredded chicken salad (at top) with bean sprouts, lettuce, soft rice noodles and a wasabi mustard sesame oil dressing

Next came dim sum degustation. A stack of three tiny steamer baskets, just big enough to hold a single dumpling, contained pea sprout and crab meat siu mai, Cantonese shrimp har gow and dai leung fan quor, a translucent dumpling filled with mushrooms, shrimp and cilantro.

A separate container held char siu bao, a steamed bun stuffed with honey roasted barbecued pork. Thin slashes of  hot mustard, spicy red and sesame sauces decorated the rest of the platter.

The next course, a south, north, west provicincial noodle pairing, matched Cantonese shrimp wonton mein tossed with ginger scallion dressing (at left in the photo) with Bejing jia jiang mein topped with chopped mushrooms. In between, a bowl of Szechwan chile garlic sauce held a single crab wonton.

The dessert, green pyramid of sweet rice tsungtuz, was a triangular sweet rice dumpling filled with lentil mousse and paired with a stylish splash of lotus nut sauce.

No fortune cookies with such a feast, but plates of almond and ginger cookies ensured that lunch guests would be well fortified for the remainder of the conference.   

Joss Cuisine, 9919 Santa Monica Blvd.,  Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Tel: (310) 277-3888.

A Lot to Taste at Tasty Duck

Why else would you go to Tasty Duck in San Gabriel but to eat its famous Peking duck?  However, there's a lot more on the menu. and lunch the other day was like a tour around China.

The guide: Theresa Lin Cheng, chef, Chinese cookbook author and organizer of the Taipei Food Festival for the Taiwan Tourism Bureau.

If you saw the Ang Lee film "Eat Drink Man Woman," you may have seen her hands. They appeared on screen briefly, because Cheng was on the set as executive food designer.

Cheng had ordered a duck in advance--that's the policy at Tasty Duck. It had been carved carefully so that the skin was free of fat and every shred of meat had been extracted, enough for three courses.

First, we ate  duck meat and skin wrapped with shredded green onion and cucumber in thin pancakes smeared with dark, sweet, fermented flour paste.

Next came stir-fried bean sprouts with slivers of duck and then duck bone soup with tofu and nappa cabbage. A tour de duck to be sure.

But on with our tour of China. Two of the dishes came from Sichuan. A hot pot filled with fish and beef (Sichuan surf and turf)  was smothered with enough red chiles to set the coldest heart on fire.

Sichuan peppercorns contributed their fragrance and helped to numb the pain, and there were deeper flavors from vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil.

Kung pao chicken was  less excruciating--lots of chicken, lots of peanuts, but a sensible amount of chiles. 

We had worked up to these strong flavors with bland, soft sea cucumber, a northern dish and expensive to prepare. Good for the health, we were told.

And we relaxed before and after with a couple of sweet dishes: sticky, syrupy Shanghai style spareribs and Cantonese honey-glazed shrimp, meaning shrimp (and pineapple) buried in fluffy mounds of mayo sweetened with honey.

The candied walnuts that come with this dish have to be eaten quickly before the luscious goo softens their crackly finish.

Cheng is from Taiwan, and so we tasted a Taiwanese/Fujian dish. That was eel marinated with teriyaki seasonings, barbecued and placed on top of steamed sticky rice in a bamboo container lined with dried lotus leaves.

A cold seaweed gelatin and cucumber salad was flavored Beijing style with sesame. Our vegetables were Chinese water spinach with fermented tofu sauce and sliced Chinese white yam with tea tree mushrooms and red goji berries. I couldn't help but think of holiday dinners when I saw that combination. 

What wine could possibly match such diverse flavors? Cheng chose a 2008 Villa Farnia di Farnese Montepulciano, which stood its ground surprisingly well. 

Tasty Duck's owner, Liya Shi (in the photo at the top) is from Shandong. She's a chef too and made the dessert, a whole pear coated with caramelized red wine sauce and sprinkled with tiny yellow osmanthus blossoms.  

Could we eat more? We managed, because there was no way to resist Shi's soft, sweet little cakes of kabocha squash and her sticky rice flour cake filled with red bean paste and cut into bite-size strips.

Tasty Duck Restaurant, 1039 E. Valley Blvd., #B 102, San Gabriel, CA 91776.  Tel: (626) 572-3885. Open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.