Food and Drink Chengdu

Back to Shang Palace for Dim Sum

2011-12-19T07:26:00.000-08:00

The dim sum scene in Chengdu has changed tons since my last visit to Shang Palace in the Shangri-La hotel, and I had been meaning to get back for a while. When I heard that the Hong Kong Shang Palace had gotten another Michelin star I decided to move Shang Palace up my list.

The menu had changed since we last visited. We tried the steamed beef tripe, which was tasty, but I found it chewy and a little tough to eat. I think it's for tripe lovers only.

These shrimp dumplings had unfortunately sat in the steamer a bit too long. The wrappers were too soft and the bamboo shoot inside had lost its crunch.

This radish cake had fantastic flavour, but was already a little cool by the time it landed on our table.

This was a new dish, peach and shrimp spring rolls. Light and lovely.

We got some dried scallop and gingko congee, It was very good, though I thought it could have had more scallop flavour.

We had a lull of several minutes between getting some of our dishes. There appears to be a distance between the kitchen and the dining room that introduces some lag into the process. I usually have a lot of patience when dishes take their time coming out of the kitchen. However, waiting a long time for the order does raise one's expectations that freshly and carefully prepared plates will eventually arrive. These expectations are not really met at Shang Palace.

Barbecue pork chang fen, tasty but without the supple smoothness that we associate with really good rice roll:

It's decent dim sum for the price (68 yuan each, plus service charge).

Homestyle in Hongpailou - Jia Wei Can Guan

2011-12-19T06:30:00.000-08:00

A friend invited me to eat at one of these small neighbourhood restaurants that always seem to do local food the best. I didn't do the ordering, so the first thing that landed on the table was this dish of pig ears (猪耳朵). I thought they were fantastic, but my table companions judged them a bit too sweet:

One useful way of gauging a kitchen is by the freshness of their greens, and the care with which they are prepared and presented. The restaurant did a very nice job with this plate of you cai:

I didn't catch the name of this fish dish, but it was done well - good, tender fish in spicy broth.

'Eat-by-hand' ribs (手撕排骨) is a dish that we are seeing on more and more menus lately. It's delicious, and spicy, and usually mixed with potatoes, dry pot style.

We also wanted to order twice cooked potatoes - 回锅土豆.

Name in Chinese: 佳味餐馆
Address: 红牌楼北街 23 号附 1 号

I have a picture menu label on this post, but only the main dishes were illustrated.

Clay Pot Dishes for a Chilly Day

2011-12-03T04:46:00.000-08:00

Chengdu is feeling quite wintery this week. If you are chilled and looking for something to warm you up, look for 'sha guo' dishes cooked in these heavy pots over a flame. There are all kinds of choices for what gets cooked inside. Absorbent stuff like intestines, meatballs, spam, tofu, or crispy fried pork pieces are popular. Veg options are available as well and some places will let you combine two veg in one pot, if you ask. The pots hold enough heat to keep your food warm even if you are eating outside.

Here is a sha guo restaurant at the mouth of the snack street on Guang Hua Village, which is rather famous. We thought the food was below average, unfortunately. We didn't like the tough, fatty pieces of meat.

This is a very good, and spicy, beef sha guo with the rice mixed in (牛肉砂锅饭), at the snack street by a vocational school outside the east third ring. The rice variation is not one we see often.

Locations in Chinese - 光华村小吃街 for the first picture, 四川长江职业学院后街 for the second one (so out of the way, many taxis from Chengdu won't even go there unless you negotiate a special rate)

Jinjiang District Police Cafeteria

2011-11-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

Office and government cafeterias that are open to the public are sought-after places for sustenance. Although they may have limited hours these places are fast, inexpensive, and many feel the food safety standards are higher than on the street. Recently some very cool friends brought me to the Jinjiang district police canteen for lunch.

The inside is strictly cafeteria style, but it was clean.

Most of the police officers were getting food trays to fill up from the dishes on offer that day, but we chose to order off of the menu. Cops have priority:

I asked the server about the beef shreds (牛肉丝) on the menu and she said we could get them done with celery or green peppers (our choice).

This was a pretty unique tasting bear paw tofu (熊掌豆腐). It tasted a little sweet, similar to yuxiang. However, it was fried to a nice crispiness under the sauce and we loved it.

By the time twelve thirty rolled around, most of the staff were cleaning up.

Strange Flavour

2011-11-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

There is a quasi-chain of noodle shops in Chengdu called Niu Wang Miao noodles. By that I mean there are several noodle shops with the same name but their menus, prices, and products are very different though many of them have the same sign and it's hard to tell which branches are actually related and which are not. If there were ever an original noodle shop around the Niu Wang Miao area (southeast of downtown) it's a mystery to me.

This bowl of strange flavour noodles is from the branch one on Xing Rong street.

These were too watery for my taste. I like a good slick of the red oil on top.

Address in Chinese: 兴容街 #63

The House of Red Oil

2011-11-13T00:08:00.000-08:00

This mao cai restaurant was named appropriately - Hong You Fang, or red oil house.

The baskets of ingredients simmered away in the spicy soup:

My vegetable version was pretty spicy. I got a bottle of peanut milk (豆奶) on ths side to tame the heat.

Storefront:

Address: 二环路东三段三号新居, on a small street north of the second ring across from Cheng Hua Ito Yokado

Two Ginkgoes

2011-11-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Among the last things I ate on a recent trip back to the home country were sashimi and a cocktail at Guu. Guu is a very popular Vancouver based family of Japanese izakaya - the kind of restaurant that does small plates to go with drinks.

When I got back to Chengdu and glanced at the business card I'd picked up from Guu, I was fairly stunned to see that Guu has a China location within walking distance from my home in Chengdu, of all places.

I noticed on the card that Guu shares an address and an expensive phone number (nearly all 8s) with Ginkgo Jingge. Ginkgo is a family of restaurants in Chengdu with each branch having its own specialty. Ginkgo Jingge, near the Rainbow bridge, is best known for dim sum. On arriving, I couldn't find any sign of Guu though the staff assured me I was at the right place and handed me a dim sum menu. A server eventually led me to another section of the restaurant, with very few people, and came up with a menu card which featured some dishes from Guu. When I asked for drinks they only offered me fruit juice.

There were no staff behind the bar and the atmosphere was extremely quiet. The server eventually found an English speaking staff member who explained they do have some dishes from Guu, and the Japanese chef from there visits every few months. However, they do not offer cocktails at the Guu in Ginkgo. Also, the energetic staff greetings and informal buzz of a place like Guu in Vancouver is nothing like the atmosphere in a large, stately, restaurant like Ginkgo. Once we got over expecting a local Guu, we tried a few of the dishes.

Salmon sushi, OK.

This seared fish salad was beautiful, but the dressing was really lacking something.

This beef salad was the only real hit among the dishes we ordered. We both loved the dressing.

This boneless stuffed and grilled chicken wing was tasty and we liked that they provided some vegetation on the side, but the dish came off feeling a bit overdone to us. I mean, it's a chicken wing and I was supposed to be in a bar.

Since this branch of Ginkgo is best known for its dim sum, which would cost about half the amount we paid per person, we'll ask for the dim sum menu on our next visit.

A couple of weeks later we got to try the dim sum at Ginkgo Chuntian, the newest member of the Ginkgo family at the Guanghua Village branch of Renhe Chuntian department store.

The first thing to land on the table were small bowls of pickles and spicy shredded chicken. They were fantastic, but the chicken was far too assertive of an introduction to delicate Cantonese food.

Their durian pastry was super simple: fresh durian scooped into a pastry shell. Very nice.

Fish slice congee. Congee is a must order if we go for dim sum and theirs is great.

Shrimp dumplings, nicely steamed and with firm shrimp filling. Liked a lot.

Turnip cake, a little soft to my taste, but a decent rendition.

Firm-skinned dumplings filled with gingery, piping hot soup:

We didn't get to try a lot of the dishes we wanted to, but will be back.

Ginkgo Jingge is absolutely beautiful inside and is a restaurant to impress with. Their servers are very polished but lack the warm, enthusiastic hospitality that characterizes very good Sichuan style service. Ginkgo Chuntian has the buzz you would expect from a new restaurant, and the servers were obviously not as experienced, but had the local 'reqing' and we felt better taken care of. They were also enforcing the no smoking policy, while at Jingge customers were puffing away freely. We would go back to Chuntian first.

Ginkgo Jingge:
青羊区锦里中路2号

Ginkgo Chuntian:
青羊区二环路西二段19号仁和春天A座

Ya'an

2011-10-31T01:51:00.000-07:00

This is one of those posts that got lost in the back of the filing cabinet. It's from a trip to Ya'an that I took a couple of months ago.

The South Bridge was great place for an evening stroll.

My destination the next day was Bifengxia, the largest panda base. The day I visited was sweltering hot so there was little activity among the star attractions. However, the keepers did bring a few out to play for us. I would recommend anyone visiting check the forecast and make sure the temperature will not be above 25 degrees C in the area before making the trip, if you are just going to see pandas.

A lot of the locals living near Bifengxia provide homestays for tourists, and I got a few offers for board and lodging on the bus. They also said they could sneak us into the park for free (it's over a hundred yuan to get in.) I chose not to take them up on the offer.

The panda base is in the middle of a nature/cultural park, which I really enjoyed. They even had some hanging coffins which I thought I had to go to Yibin to see (small, black rectangles on the mountainside below).

There was not much available to eat in the park besides these dicey looking roadside food stands. Some of it was good, most not so.

My next destination after Bifengxia part was Shang Li, one of the old towns that surround Chengdu.

Fortune teller (in red):

Shang Li has the typical small shop, tea house, and souvenir combination that you find in the traditional towns.

River:

I liked that it feels more like a place where real people live than a theme park. Some women were gathering and washing a reddish tree fungus that you could make into a tea to cool you off in the summer. Corn and red peppers were spread out to dry on roads, sidewalks, courtyards, and almost any available flat surface.

I found a guest house run by the Chen family (there are a few Chen family guest houses along the river) and asked for a room for about 50 yuan per night. They gave me a room with two beds, a TV, a fan, and a tiny bathroom about two feet square. There was no towel - I guess most guests bring their own - but they found one for me. I was a little worried about my laptop since there were no locks on the windows, but they assured me it was very safe. The next day I asked them to keep it for me and they just set it behind the front desk.

In the evening they invited me to share their family meal, since I was travelling solo. It was really delicious homestyle Sichuan food - dry fried eggplant, pork and green peppers, and deep fried small fish right from the river. New to me were the boiled chicken feet - they were hard, not pickled or steamed soft like the chicken feet we are used to, so they were a little complicated to eat. My hosts were cracking the feet apart and snapping the tendons with obvious enjoyment, so I just managed as well as I could.

Another Yaan specialty I tried on this trip was da rou mian - 'big meat noodles'. Fatty, spicy, and delicious. I know of a Ya'an noodle shop or two in Chengdu. These would be worth seeking out.

Another visit to Shu Jiu Xiang

2011-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

One of my top recs for Chengdu is always Shu Jiu Xiang hot pot, but I hadn't eaten there in over a year. It was time for a return.

We asked for the yuanyang hot pot, medium spicy (鸳鸯锅、中辣). Like many upscale hot pot places, they now mix the oil and the soup at the table. This proves they are using fresh oil.

For snacks, we ordered their flatbread (飞饼). We noticed a snack called 猫猫鱼, or 'cat cat fish', a menu item so new that the server wasn't even sure what it was. We ordered it out of curiosity and got crispy fried small fish covered with the typical ma la seasoning. We liked it so much we got another plate.

Some of the order. We really liked the shrimp dumplings (虾饺) and the crispy pork (酥肉):

This was another new item on the menu, extra-thin 'kung fu' potato slices (功夫土豆片). The way they soaked up the excellent Shu Jiu Xiang spicy broth made them worthy of the name.

Since the oil scandal last year, the costs of hot pot have gone up everywhere and Shu Jiu Xiang is definitely more expensive than I remember. However, it is still one of the top hot pot experiences in town.

Twice-Cooked Pork Noodles

2011-08-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

Chengdu has so many great noodle shops that you can afford to be choosy. I tend to avoid places where you can't get greens on the side, or which only offer large servings, or use the easily stained plastic bowls. This little place in Xiao Jia He would be ruled out on any of these counts, but I was intrigued by how popular it seemed. Customers were pulling up in vehicles, a sign that the noodle shop's draw extends far beyond the neighbourhood.

Another sign of popularity was the amount of overflow seating, with customers pulling up small stools and digging into bowls of noodles perched on top of larger stools.

The most popular order was twice-cooked pork noodles (回锅肉面）. They cost a whopping nine yuan, but came in a generous serving. As spicy and oily as you could wish.

I would definitely come back and try the spicy stomach noodles (红肚面) or rabbit noodles (红烧仔兔面).

Address in Chinese: 肖家河环二巷路口. Area is a maze of alleys so this one is a bit tougher to find than most.

Fresh Milk Tea

2011-08-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Bubble tea vendors are all over town, but finding a cup of tea that is not made from artificially coloured and flavoured powder is tough. I recently learned that you need to ask for tea made from fresh milk (鲜奶茶) to get the real deal. It costs about double the regular kinds of tea, but is worth it.

This vendor on Jian She Nan Xin Lu is popular on sunny days.

Location in Chinese: 建设南新路 83 号

Chengdu's Best Dan Hong Gao

2011-06-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

This is one of those places that is so good, and so small and perfect, that I hesitate to spread the word. However they are already on dianping so the secret is out. It's just off Cao Jia Alley, where I had great spring rolls last week.

Dan hong gao is more of a winter than a summer snack, but I still had to wait several minutes to make an order in the middle of the afternoon on one of the hottest days so far. They were also selling bing fen (cool clear jelly with sugar syrup on top) and a lot of customers were ordering that on the side.

They have a menu of several kinds of dan hong gao, many of which you would not find anywhere else. By far the most popular is 'guai wei', strange flavour. I also ordered a 'san xian'. I don't usually go for meat-filled dan hong gao, but these were so, so good. The outsides were unusually crisp and the fillings were amazing. I also asked the vendor to make my usual peanut butter and strawberry jam but I didn't like the peanut butter.

Sweet, spicy, and savoury insides for the guai wei:

Stepping into Cao Jia Alley is like stepping into the past. While I was there a delivery man with big milk cans on his bike came by, and people came out with their containers to get milk from him.

Location: 曹家内巷

Tsukushima

2011-06-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

Looking back through the archives, there hasn't been a post about a Japanese place in nearly two years. This is not for lack of eating Japanese food, but for the difficulty in finding Japanese food in Chengdu worth writing about. Tsukushima is the first Japanese restaurant in a long time that I've liked enough to not only go back, but to invite a Japanese friend along. (And did not lose face. Whew!)

They had a board with a couple of 25 yuan lunch specials, written in Chinese and Japanese:

Since it was a sweltering hot day I got an order of salmon sushi. The fish was decently fresh and cool and the rice was good quality and nicely seasoned. Liked it a lot.

I also got a bowl of buckwheat noodles and tempura. The noodle broth had an authentic flavour but I thought it could have been stronger. The tempura was a good version, though I expected a bit more of it and it got a little too soggy in the soup:

We tried their cold tofu salad, which was nice and smooth and refreshing, especially with the sweet, clean-flavoured Japanese soy sauce on the table.

The grilled fish lunch special came with salad, miso soup, rice, fruit, and pickles. The real stars on the platter were the rice and the miso soup. The miso soup was bottomless, which really impressed us.

The seasonings on the table, besides the soy sauce, included typical Japanese hot pepper and msg-salt.

The only thing I would not re-order was this 58 yuan California roll. It was rolled too loose and the seaweed was kind of tough. The large, loose chunks made for clumsy eating.

We didn't order anything off their drinks menu but they have a selection of sake and shochu and some Japanese fruit drinks. They also have some Western food on the menu, like steak, sandwiches, and noodles. The menu has pictures of most items but not of the set meals which are a better deal. The English on the menu has been translated from the Chinese names of the dishes so it can be a bit hard to make out, but is kind of fun - udon noodles are 'black winter noodles', etc.

The manager, a Chinese girl who spoke very fluent Japanese, was taking good care of us but the other servers seemed a little green. The ambiance, with Japanese traditional and pop songs playing, was good though we were bothered by the smokers. We would ask for one of their tatami rooms the next time we go.

Storefront:

Chinese name: 月岛
Address: 天益街38 号 4 栋附8

Just outside the High Tech Zone subway stop.

Cao Jia Alley Snacks

2011-06-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

The northeast quadrant of the first ring has some of the best residential food streets in Chengdu. Today I stopped by Cao Jia Alley to see what I could find. The first thing that tempted was some soft tofu (豆花), five yuan for a bowl.

The server mixed up a bowl of seasoning for me. Very good.

There were several vendors with carts doing things like fried rice or fried noodles. This bo bo chicken seemed popular, but I didn't try it:

A vendor mixing up seasoned cold noodles with rapid chopsticks caught my eye, and then what really made me take notice was the sign on her cart: 小春卷 - spring rolls! I asked for two yuan worth and when she said, "You want mustard?" I could have hugged her. She mixed up fresh shredded radish and carrot with the seasonings and added a couple of peanuts, a sesame seed or two, and a few pieces of dried tofu in the wrappers. She added a splash of vinegar at the end, after asking me if I wanted to eat them 'sweet or sour'. The spring rolls were searingly spicy from the mustard and tangy and crunchy and exactly what you feel like eating on a muggy night.

Great spring roll vendors seem to be harder to find in Chengdu than in other Sichuanese cities. I hope I run into her again.

Location: Cao Jia Inner Alley (曹家内巷)

Hong Xing

2011-06-18T06:39:00.000-07:00

When Chengdu folks are asked about good places to get local food, Hong Xing is one of the most frequent recommendations. A taxi driver is just as likely to mention it as a well-heeled businessperson. I'd been in the Zijin Rd Hong Xing before and liked it a lot, and stopped in at the Yang Xi Xian location recently.

My favourite dish of the day, the iron plate eggplant (铁板茄子). Perfectly cooked eggplant in a tangy sauce. Some of the pieces had meat stuffing, but it wasn't heavy at all.

One of our cold dishes, the liang fen (凉粉). Nice classic local dish, though much different than the menu picture.

Donkey in aspic, a nice refreshing cold meat dish, even better after a dip in the dressing that came on the side.

We had to try their dan dan noodles. Just ok.

Tea tree mushrooms were done up in a very typical local taste, but with shredded onions on top making the dish look like Beijing-style jing jiang rou si. Very clever.

Nicely done order of kong xin cai (空心菜)

They didn't have gong bao ji ding but we could order gong bao rou ding, which uses pork instead of chicken. I thought chicken would have been better.

Dining room.

The servers at Hong Xing all seem to be well managed and well trained, which really adds to the experience. Hong Xing is an occasion restaurant but is also an ideal place for those times when you just want to get together with people and eat well without breaking the bank.

Name in Chinese: 红杏

Address: 西延线蜀汉路289号一品天下美食街

Lei Garden 利苑

2011-06-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Expensive Cantonese food is all too easy to find in Chengdu. Really good Cantonese food presented in a beautiful setting is much rarer. Lei Garden is part of a respected Hong Kong based restaurant chain whose main branch has been graced with a Michelin star. The Chengdu branch is about a year old and we've stopped in for dim sum a couple of times.

The interior is elegant and non-smoking. There are a couple of tables outside for diners who want to smoke or enjoy the atmosphere. Each place setting has two sets of chopsticks - one for serving yourself and one for eating.

Chrysanthemum tea (菊花茶).

Crispy shredded taro spring rolls (芋丝脆春卷), one of our favourite dishes:

Classic cha shao bao (叉烧包), light and white as a cloud with well-sauced pork inside:

Our main difficulty with Lei Garden is that with no English and traditional Chinese characters only on their dim sum menu, we had a tough time ordering. (The regular menu has English.) Even with the help of their servers, who know the menu well, we had some ordering missteps. I tried to order turnip cake but ended up with a turnip pastry (银萝千层酥). Decent, but their turnip cake is better.

The server recommended we try the colorful coral roll - 五彩珊瑚卷. Nice creative dish with eye appeal, and a better treatment of seafood than we usually run into in Chengdu. The sauce was bottled French style salad dressing.

This lovely basket of classic shao mai (烧卖) made us forget for a moment all the terrible factory frozen dim sum that we've been subjected to in Chengdu.

Soup dumplings, (利苑小笼包), held together well and had rather gingery soup inside. Very good.

We sadly could not find any veg on the dim sum menu, so we ordered shrimp sauce lettuce from their regular menu. It was good, but cost more than three times our dim sum items.

Shrimp chang fen (鲜虾仁肠粉). Good shrimp but the big chunks of celery inside were so crisp they seemed almost raw. It seemed more like a display of steam cooking skill than an attempt to make a good dish.

Water chestnut cake (马蹄糕), bigger chunks of chestnut than most versions. Nice but not really to our taste. We would order their deceptively light and rich custard bun (奶黄包) next time.

Ice cold, tart, and gorgeous 杨枝甘路, a typical Hong Kong dessert with mango, tapioca, and pomelo. Lei Garden's version is deservedly famous. We ordered this off of the regular menu.

We didn't love every dish and there are certain dim sum that we prefer eating at other places. Prices are on the high side for dim sum in Chengdu, and ordering a couple of dishes off the regular menu nudged our bill well north of 100 yuan per person. However, even with their premium prices raising our expectations most of the dishes do not disappoint, and their servers are some of the best we've run into locally. Lei Garden has become one of our favourite places for occasions.

Address:
成都兰桂芳

Lao Ma Chao Shou

2011-05-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

In one of my earliest posts, I tried lao ma chao shou and was nearly numbed to death by Sichuan pepper (ma = numbing). It turns out Lao Ma means 'very, very ma'. Now that I can understand a bit more Chinese, I can hear people ordering the level of numbing and spice on their dumplings. They might say wei ma, zhong la, for a little numbing and medium heat. 'Lao ma' means the most numbing you've got. I still order it this way.

Delicious Fish

2011-05-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

Delicious Fish is a chain that does a popular version of the local barbecued fish - first grilled, then smothered in a large pan with seasoning and vegetables.

Like most grilled fish places, they have a few varieties that you order by the pound and then choose the post-grill flavour treatment. We asked the server what kind of fish had few bones and she recommended the helian (河鲢) as having a good meat/weight ratio. For flavour we asked for fragrant-spicy (香辣). Those who really want the spicy treatment can order fresh pepper (鲜椒) or pickled pepper (泡椒) and those with more timid palates can order black bean (豆豉) . Besides grilled fish, they also had several types of dry pot (干锅).

I ordered a small cup of the black Qingdao they have on tap, and the server set down a stein as tall as a chopstick. She confirmed it was a lady-sized glass (妇女杯).

Grilled fish usually takes time to prepare, particularly at busy places, so it's a good idea to get appetizers or snacks if you arrive hungry. At Delicious Fish they didn't have the stick barbecue that we usually like to get as an appetizer, but we saw orders of french fries going out to many tables so we asked for some. The fries themselves were pretty ordinary but came topped with bacon and had ketchup and mayo on the side, a genius presentation that we hope catches on.

Still, we were waiting over an hour for our order and were starving once it arrived. The 'fragrant-spicy' fish more than lived up to its billing. It was well grilled with tender meat and crispy skin.The veg on top were a crazy medley of cucumber, pineapple, hot pepper, peanuts, green onions, and other good stuff.

By the time we left there were quite a few customers waiting outside.

Name in Chinese: 滋味烤鱼店
Address: 超洋路1号香槟梧桐9号楼1楼A-02号

Near Yiguanmiao on the first ring, in the complex behind Chaoyang Huayuan.

Liang Mian and Guo Kui

2011-05-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Liang mian (cool noodles) is the number one street food in Chengdu once the weather gets hot. Wheat noodles are usually mixed with bean sprouts or shredded cucumber and then mixed up with a spicy seasoning. On hot days, those sold from the mobile vendors can be more like 'ambient temperature noodles' than cool noodles, so I prefer to eat them from the shops. This bowl, from the Zhang's on Renmin Mid Rd, is topped with a few shreds of chicken.

After mixing:

I also got a stewed meat guo kui (卤肉锅魁) from the shop next door. The bread was a little hard but they poured lots of the juice over it:

Name in Chinese: 张凉粉
Location: 人民中路一段32号、

Crazy Spicy and Cool

2011-05-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

Zhang's Bean Jelly, from the always-hopping branch at Wen Shu Temple. Generous and well-balanced seasoning makes this bowl of liang fen superior to most in town.

Location: Wenshu Temple, across from the temple entrance.

Gelato at koko casa

2011-04-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

Koko casa opened up last year in the new Yanlord Landmark building. They serve very good coffee and sell some of the best handmade chocolates I've ever eaten, anywhere. So I was excited to try their gelato.

The gelato is all house made and the flavours today included coconut, Thai milk tea, tomato, stout beer, dark chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, raspberry, and others. I liked the tomato gelato, with a creamy base and mild tomato flavour, and the Thai milk tea was good but a little sweet. They let you mix two flavours in a small, 28 yuan cup so I ended up getting half vanilla and half blueberry/black currant.

The fruit flavours were nice and clear. The vanilla had flecks of vanilla bean. I really appreciated that it was served just cold enough to be solid.

Storefront:

Location: Yanlord Landmark building B, 3d floor

Zhong Shui Jiao

2011-04-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

This is a chain of dumpling restaurants specializing in the Zhong dumplings and other traditional snacks. Zhong Shui Jiao, like Long Chao Shou, turns out what taste like very mass produced versions of local food, so I've come to think of these places as the McDonald's of Sichuan cuisine.

The soup in the seafood shuijiao (海味水饺) was pretty good. The dumpling filling's texture reminded me of a low quality hot dog, however.

I also tried a bowl of san he ni (triple harmonious mud? 三合泥) It's a sweet sesame flavoured paste with crunchy and sweet toppings. This was a bit gluey, but went down fine.

The place was quite busy.

My table companions were curious about what I was eating, especially the san he ni. They turned out to be from Shanghai and spent the whole time complaining about the local food. They probably would have had a happier experience going elsewhere to eat it.

Name in Chinese: 钟水饺
Address: 武侯祠大街2号

Organic Veg from Wen Jing Yuan

2011-04-21T02:47:00.000-07:00

Part of my haul today from Wen Jing Yuan, a small store that sells organic produce:

The beets were a whopping 16 yuan per pound, though as a repeat customer I got a discount. Also pictured are a couple of bunches of gai lan and chrysanthemum greens, which were 12-14 yuan per pound.They also sell 'healthy' pork (健康肉). I am not sure what classifies the pork as healthy, though it is not organic.

With people getting more and more concerned about their food supply it's no surprise that food products labelled green (绿色) , ecological (生态）, and organic (有机) are getting more and more common. Organic seems to be the strictest and rarest classification. The reason I like going to Wen Jing Yuan is not that the produce is organic, but it is fresh and beautiful and they have things like beets, Swiss chard, kohlrabi, and red and green leaf lettuce.

They have a few locations in Chengdu and one in Chongzhou.

Website: http://www.lhwjy.com/

I am copying the addresses in town from their website, though I have only been to the Shaoling Rd. location. The storekeeper said that you could call ahead anytime (in Chinese) and ask for what was fresh or make specific requests.

Jiuyanqiao:

地址：成都九眼桥宏济新路64号
电话：028 - 84597775

Shaoling Rd:

地址：成都市少陵路263号
电话：028 - 85050778

Xidan Market

青羊区西单商场负一楼文井源专卖柜
电话：18908002709

Wu Gu Liang Cang

2011-03-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

The name Wu Gu Liang Cang means something like 'five-grain granary'. The menu could not be simpler – congee, cold dishes, and dou hua (soft tofu). They also had baozi (steamed buns with filling) and wowo tou (steamed nest shaped buns). They had pumpkin congee, one made from preserved egg, several types of mixed grain congee, and one very good congee made from soy milk.

The servers seemed very well trained and were good at explaining the ingredients, flavours, and health benefits of each dish. There is no English menu but the cold dishes are arranged in a way that makes it very easy to choose by pointing, and the congee is self-serve all you can eat. The congee bases and other grains were also for sale from bins down the centre of the dining room. Many of the sidewalk passersby were also stopping to to look inside, which meant it hadn't been open long. A server confirmed they were only a month old.

Lunch:

I picked out a colourful dish of tiny 'silver needle' fish that had been fried and mixed with potato shreds, onions, cilanto, and peppers in a spicy dressing. There was not a great deal of fish on the plate, but everything else tasted so good I didn't care. Others were eating cucumbers, black bean fish, mixed tofu skins, eggplant, zhe er gen, and other small plates – all very simple stuff, but with obvious care taken in preparing and displaying the dishes. This place costs two to three times what you would spend on a bowl of congee and plate of cool dishes at other places, but the quality and location makes it well worth it. I hope this place catches on. They open at seven for breakfast.

Storefront:

Name in Chinese: 五谷粮仓

Address: 桐梓林南路 9号 36

Rui Tai Feng Yunnan Cuisine

2011-03-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Yunnan cuisine is most often represented in Chengdu by humbler dishes such as crossing the bridge noodles and the chicken steamed in a pot. Rui Tai Feng is a new, high end restaurant that presents a fascinating and bewildering variety of Yunnan dishes.

The elaborate place settings are very much in 'modern business dining' fashion.

The dining area is beautifully decorated with great light. We hoped the food would be worthy of the setting.

We usually associate Yunnan cuisine with pineapple, wild mushrooms, ham, potato dishes, rice noodles, and worms and insects. This menu had all that and more, with gorgeous pictures of each dish. If you can read Chinese, the menu's flavour descriptions are helpful. We asked lots of questions like "What is the best dish?", and "What dishes are most popular?" After some prompting the servers realized we needed some help ordering and told us which dishes were awesome (满不错).

The sweet dish we ordered came first - osmanthus tapioca (桂花西米露）。 We didn't eat it until we finished everything else. We are in love with anything osmanthus, so really enjoyed it.

The cold dish was long sprouts, which in most local restaurants are served in a very spicy and vinegary dressing. This one had garlic and pineapple juice with the hot peppers. Very nice.

Savoury, rich, foil baked mixed mushrooms. (瑞泰纸包菌)

Pineapple cowboy ribs (菠萝牛仔骨), delicious and juicy. Have never had pineapple cooked like this before.

The goose liver eggplant (鹅肝酱香茄) on the menu looked much nicer than what was served. I often order eggplant to get a sense of the kitchen's skill, and this dish was pretty greasy. The goose liver sauce was heavy too and the herbs on top couldn't save it.

(Goose intestine is so popular in hot pot restaurants I've often wondered what happens to the rest of the bird, but goose liver is something we're seeing on the menus of a lot of higher end restaurants lately. I think it is because of the French foie gras connection, but the 'gras' part has been a bit lost in translation and it's just ordinary liver from un-fattened birds. )

This was our favourite dish of the day, Lugu Lake roast lamb. 泸沽湖炭烤羊腿。 It seemed like it had been cooked, then shredded and cooked again. The pieces were chewy but not too dry, and came with a sauce and a mix of veg on the side. The menu described the flavour as xiang la, which means fragrant and spicy. It was one of the more unique lamb dishes we've tried.

We want to come back and sample a few more of the dishes that aroused our curiosity on the menu, but we'll have to save up a bit first.

Name in Chinese: 瑞泰丰餐饮

Location: 龙湖三千集 3楼

Third floor of new Paradise Walk shopping center, which is a short stroll away from SM Square.

Back to Yang Yang

2011-03-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

Always one of the best-known local restaurants among Chengdu's laowai crowd, Yang Yang has gotten quite a bit of English language press during the past year. I hadn't been for a very long time and recently stopped back in.

Clockwise from bottom:

Iron plate Japanese tofu (must order, this is one of the dishes that packs in the locals).

Dry fried green beans. Dry fried green beans are sadly disappearing off of Chengdu menus; many newer homestyle restaurants no longer offer them. I always order this dish if I can and Yang Yang's version is decent.

Upper right, a plate of you cai.

On the right, potato twice-cooked pork. I was looking on both the English and Chinese menu and they only had plain twice cooked pork. I asked the server why there was only that version and she said "Oh, we can add stuff. Green peppers, potato..." I immediately asked for potato twice cooked pork (土豆回锅肉). It was fantastic.

This is one of the more popular dishes among the foreigner crowd, their dry fried potatoes. They were....deep fried. The menu had both dry fried and deep fried potatoes. I asked the server what was up and she said "Oh, they are the same thing." I didn't love them but they are a nice side to a dish with a tangy sauce, like the tofu.

The shredded cabbage and bean threads:

Even in the smallest alley restaurants, the cabbage in this dish is usually in thin shreds that blend nicely with the bean threads. The knife work on this dish was highly unimpressive. They also gave us a dish of stir-fried pea shoots that were overgrown and a bit woody.

So we had a few hits and a few misses here. It's still one of the places I usually recommend to visitors since there is an English menu and the staff is very used to dealing with foreigners - they don't even blink if you ask for no msg. However, except for the tofu you can find equally good or better versions of these dishes elsewhere.

Name: 杨杨餐馆
Address: 武侯区锦苑巷24号

The Ming Ting

2011-03-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

Fly restaurants are usually neighbourhood spots, but Chengdu has a few that transcend their locales to become destination dining. The Ming Ting is one of these. The cab driver who took me there was pretty surprised to hear where I was going though; he thought I should be dining at some grand place.

The location, inside the Cao Jia Alley market, is even more modest than most fly restaurants.

Their most famous dish we saw on nearly every table - the pig brains and tofu (豆腐脑花). We loved this dish, which tasted quite a bit like the saucy kind of mapo tofu but which had quite a bit more going on. When a friend of mine recently mentioned her memory had been bad lately and she should eat some brains, I knew the place to recommend.

The pickles (泡菜） came in large, crunchy shreds.

Another can't-miss dish, the lotus leaf steamed pork belly (荷叶酱肉）.

From the veg listed by the server, we asked for a plate of pea shoots. Nice and tender, and a good sized serving.

We also got a dish of sliced potatoes from the bowls out front. They were excellent.

We now understand why the Ming Ting is known as a five-star fly restaurant.

Name in Chinese: 明婷饭店
Location: 曹家巷菜市场

A Noodle Shop in Pingle

2011-03-05T23:36:00.000-08:00

Pingle is one of the small old towns that surround Chengdu. It's very close to Qionglai, so we had to try the nai tang mian (奶汤面) - noodles in a plain, milky white broth.

The menu had another kind of noodle we'd never seen before - jiu mian (揪面). They were pieces of noodle dough pulled off in chunks in a similar style to the 'mian pian' you get at the Lanzhou noodle shops. The texture was a bit rougher, though, which picked up the spicy oil nicely when we mixed them together. We loved them. Note the ground pork and lard on top:

The noodle shop had self-serve pao cai (pickles), and an enormous pair of chopsticks to fish them out of the jar.

You could also snack on some spicy marinated chicken feet.

Sign outside the shop:

We loved Pingle and took tons of photos of the old buildings, though discovered it was a bit too far out to make a good day trip. We'll stay longer and take in more of the local attractions next time.

Noodle shop name in Chinese - 面大王
Address: 平乐古镇, 台子街 47 号

Mianyang Street Snack - Yu Ji Beef Pastry

2011-03-05T22:57:00.000-08:00

One evening in Mianyang I came across this little shop front selling beef pastries. They looked a little like fried-style guo kui and were being cooked on the same kind of round, shallow pan, but were much thicker. What really made me take note was the lineup of people outside. I had just eaten, but decided to join the line.

The workers were going very quickly. A sign recommended exact change. The guy standing two people in front of me ordered ten of them.

The outside pastry was tender without falling apart and the filling was dense, quite salty, seasoned ground beef. It tasted amazing and stayed hot for several minutes, making a nice hand warmer on a chilly evening. I loved it. I've never seen this snack in Chengdu, but can find online rumours of it in Deyang (a city between Mianyang and Chengdu.)

Another day my taxi happened to go by the same spot, but at four thirty in the afternoon. There was the same lineup of people. I am going to make a point of stopping here whenever I am in Mianyang. The pastries are two yuan each.

Name in Chinese: 愚记牛肉饼
Location: Not sure of exact address, near Huoju (火炬) area.

Beichuan Bacon in Mianyang

2011-03-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

Mianyang is the second largest city in Sichuan province, about two hours by bus or train from Chengdu. I was up there for work recently and stopped at this little restaurant by the bus station which was advertising Guanghan twice cooked pork ( 广汉回锅肉, which comes in enormous slices) and Beichuan bacon (北川老腊肉）.

Beichuan is best known as one of the places that sustained a great deal of damage in the 2008 earthquake. One good rule of thumb for cold weather eating anywhere in Sichuan is 'try the bacon' so that is what I ordered:

Liked it a lot. Chewy and not too salty and made really simply with the garlic stems.

Location: alley by the Mianyang bus station.

Tea at Huang Cheng Lao Ma

2011-03-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

This south location of the city's most famous hot pot restaurant has a tea house on the fourth floor.

They had a small but well-chosen selection of teas, including the big names like Long Jing, Tie Guan Yin and Red Robe and also a nice group of local teas. We decided to try a local tea from Guang An. The leaves were a beautiful emerald colour and tasted very fresh.

From the snacks menu we tried chao shou, which came only in clear (not spicy) soup, and zhong shui jiao.

Classic chao shou - mild, tender, and delicate, in a fantastic soup.

The zhong shui jiao dumplings were very good too. I was really impressed with the just-chewy-enough wrappers and the filling tasted like real meat, which is getting disturbingly rare in town lately.

The building that houses this branch of Huang Cheng Lao Ma is like a museum, and it felt like we were eating museum specimens of these traditional snacks. Besides dumplings and noodles they have a small selection of set meals and snacks, at prices that reflect the prestige of the place but are not out of line with the quality we have come to expect from their kitchen.

Name in Chinese: 皇城老妈
Address: 二环路南三段 20 号

China Travel Interview

2011-03-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

China Travel has been doing a series called Blogger Spotlight on their own very cool blog. Food and Drink Chengdu was recently honoured to be featured. You can read the article here.

Crossed Leg Beef - 跷脚牛肉

2011-02-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

Near Leshan, back in the 30's, there was a herbal medicine specialist who kept a pot of healing concoctions hanging over a fire by the river to sell to passersby. He noticed that rich houses would throw away some of the offal parts of beef into the river. Times being tough, he decided not to waste these parts and ended up collecting them, cleaning them, and putting some of them into the pot with the medicine. The resulting dish was so popular that people waiting to eat would stand, squat, or crowd on the steps with their legs crossed, hence the name crossed-leg beef (跷脚牛肉).

Crossed-leg beef falls into the 'tang guo' category, which means it's eaten almost exactly like you would eat hot pot, but is not really considered hot pot. This is definitely one of the trendier types of tang guo in town; I've noticed quite a few new crossed-leg beef restaurants this winter.

The soup is not spicy, but you can make up for that with your dipping plate. We had a choice of dry pepper, chopped fresh spicy pepper, or the normal sesame oil. I went with the dry red pepper:

You can order from a list of beef offal as long as your arm. We tried tongue, niu liu, which is very tender, and niu jin, tendon. I would have ordered the beef tripe, but I didn't want to be the only one eating it.

The soup was very good, the tongue was just ok. The 'niu liu' beef was fantastic and melted in our mouths. The tendon needed a little more time to boil and soften but it was also great.

Storefront:

Name in Chinese: 乐山跷脚牛肉
Location: Roman Holiday Plaza, south side on lower level

Tang's Dou Tang

2011-01-27T04:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a good winter lunch: a bowl of dou tang, or bean soup, with a basket of steamed beef in rice meal. The bean soup, which many places serve up way too thin or bland, is decent here.

The steaming basket outside looks and smells particularly inviting on a chilly day:

The big pots of shao cai (like stews) outside also attract customers.

Their wall menu covers the typical homestyle stir fry dishes as well. Upscale Tongzilin has fewer fly restaurants than other neighbourhoods, which makes this little spot particularly popular at mealtimes.

Name in Chinese: 唐记豆汤
Location: Xin Guang Rd, southeast of Great World Carrefour

Another Visit to Puzhong Kitchen

2011-01-27T04:08:00.000-08:00

Puzhong Kitchen, a restaurant on a mission to get people to eat healthier, is one place that I would visit more often if I was in the area. On a recent evening a friend and I popped in after strolling around Kuanxiangzi.

The rustic mix:

Stir fried greens, very nice:

Beef and radish:

Nothing that we like has changed about this place, and they now have an English menu available. And for those who are watching their waistlines, the menu now lists caloric values for each dish. We were well impressed.

Mengzi Crossing the Bridge Noodles

2011-01-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

In local bookstores, the Chicken Soup for the Soul books are sold with literally translated titles. I always wonder what kind of chicken soup comes to mind when people see that title. I think Crossing the Bridge Noodles is a pretty good candidate. I haven't eaten many bowls of these noodles after my previous favourite place went downhill, but I recently spied a newly opened shop with a very similar name in the bottom of the Roman Holiday Plaza at Gaoshengqiao.

Platter of stir-ins:

Among the usual suspects was a bowl of chrysanthemum petals (small bowl at the top beside the crispy chicken skin). It's pretty common knowledge that the chicken broth made by the famous Brothers Jiang chain contains chrysanthemum as an ingredient, but this is the first time I'd had the fresh petals as a stir-in. The soup served here was good, and came in an enormous bowl.

The interior has picture menus, making it easy to order. They have a non-smoking sign, which was being ignored.

The proprietor said he was not part of a chain, and makes the genuine article.

Name in Chinese: 蒙自过桥米线
Address: 罗马假日广场 A3-126, lower level in the centre

Brazilian Barbecue, Rou Jia Mo, Guo Kui

2010-11-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

In recent years Chengdu residents' eating habits have changed enormously. One factor is that locals now have an unprecedented chance to try foods from all over the world. I have mixed feelings about the resulting inevitable fusion, both in the high end and low end places.

One evening on the Daye Lu side of Women's street, this chuan chuan shop was doing a roaring side business selling sandwiches filled with barbecued chopped meat. We have a similar sandwich in Chengdu, though the meat doesn't get the mix/chop treatment that blends the ingredients while breaking them down into sandwich stuffing. The local sandwich is called guo kui (锅魁). The sandwich with chopped/mixed filling is native to Shaanxi, and known as rou jia mo (肉夹馍). The vertical spit barbecued meat is known as Brazilian barbecue (巴西烤肉). So this concoction is called 'baxi kaorou jia guokui' - 巴西烤肉夹锅魁.

The pumpkin congee they were serving on the side. Not bad.

The sandwich wasn't bad. The barbecued meat filling was mixed with a salad-y mix of shredded carrots, red peppers, lettuce, and spicy pepper to taste.

If given the choice, I'd eat a regular guo kui though.

Location: Yanshikou Women's street, lower level on Daye Lu side.

Bedspread Noodles

2010-11-26T06:55:00.000-08:00

This noodle shop I first wrote about a couple of years ago, and have returned to, is still one of my favourites. Lunch crowd:

I ordered suan cai noodles with an egg. The noodles came quickly:

And then I waited several minutes for the egg to come out. I was hungry enough to be irritable and started grousing to the servers about how long it takes to cook an egg. What came was well worth the wait though, and I am glad they cook sides to order rather than pre-making the stuff. I also found out how great their pao cai (pickles) are.

Name in Chinese:
鸡汤铺盖面

Address:
二环路西一段92号附6号(近金汉斯

Dolphin Sweets

2010-11-26T04:44:00.000-08:00

Went to check out the new Galeria shopping mall (凯丹广场） today, down near the south Auchan. Several of the stores are not open yet, but the city's first H&M was crawling with customers and both floors of Zara were open for business. The Uniqlo store wasn't open yet. At times it was tough to find my way between levels, but I absolutely love the natural light on the inside:

I was ready for a break when I spotted a branch of Dolphin Sweets (多副甜品) on the top level. There are a few other branches of Dolphin in town; one in the basement of Renhe Spring on the west second ring, and one in Tongzilin. (I tried to go into the Tongzilin store once but it was really smoky.) The interior is comfortable and nicely decorated:

Their specialty is sweet soft tofu, though they do have some other ice cream, fruit, shan cao (mountain herb) and shaved ice concoctions on their well illustrated but all characters menu. The server was very good, and recommended this mixture of coconut milk with various beans, grains, and large and small tapioca mixed in. She said it was good for the skin.

I thought it was served a bit oddly, with only a small spoon, but it was pretty delicious and not too sweet. I plan on trying one of the tofu desserts next time.

Name in Chines and location:
多副甜品
凯丹广场 4 楼

Sweet Stuff at Chicony Square

2010-11-26T04:23:00.000-08:00

Chicony Square is a new and very slick multi-floor shopping mall on the south end of Chunxi Rd. The sweet offerings in the basement always attract me the most.

This is a banana and red bean crepe from Berry Crepe. Chocolate sauce on top is free. They have no English menu but one of the staff spoke English when I visited.

When I first moved to Chengdu we had a Beard Papa but they unfortunately closed down. It was pretty exciting to see a new Beard Papa open up, with cream puffs much fresher tasting than we remember.

Location: B2 level, Chicony Square, Chunxi Rd. 群光广场, 春熙路

Huang Cheng Ba Halal Beef

2010-11-26T03:48:00.000-08:00

Many people have this mental image of Chinese halal food as being meat on skewers or Xinjiang-style dishes, but it is much more than that. Beef based halal hot pot can even be found in Sichuan. On dianping.com, the highly useful Yelp-style Chinese restaurant guide, Huang Cheng Ba is the highest-rated halal restaurant in town. I like the food a lot, and often bring visitors here.

Stewed pumpkin with red dates, beef soup, pickled cabbage and soybeans, and dipping sauce:

The double-flavour beef (双味牛排), deep fried beef slices with two seasonings, is one of the specialties. We liked it though thought it was a little dry. After it had sat for a while we were eating it dipped in the soup.

Golden sand corn (金沙玉米）, corn kernels coated in a batter that usually includes egg yolk and then deep fried. Artery-clogging and delicious.

The popularity of this place means you are often waiting for a table, and the servers seem focused on herding people in and out as efficiently as possible. Customers order from an all characters check-off menu, which makes the place a bit difficult for those lacking Chinese skills. It's also loud, not the place to bring a soft-spoken eating companion. However, the food is delicious and well priced. They also have a takeout window where you can buy cold sliced beef tendon and fuqi fei pian.

Name in Chinese and address:

清真皇城坝牛肉馆
肖家河街1号

Squid and Chicken Hot Pot

2010-11-26T03:23:00.000-08:00

I am not sure how the whole squid and chicken thing got started, but it has become a pretty popular combination. This hot pot restaurant to the south of Qin Tai lu specializes in squid and chicken hot pot. Soup, pre-boiling:

These chao shou that we ordered to cook in the soup were fantastic.

We also wanted a spicy dish, so ordered a dry pot frog (干锅青蛙)

Spicy frog dishes in Chengdu are usually amazingly delicious. However, you need to order them in the summer time when the fields are full of the critters. We were a bit past the season and were eating farmed frogs. (Bullfrog, 牛蛙, is also available in the colder months but is not as well loved.)

Name in Chinese and address: 龙二妹鱿鱼鸡, 青羊区锦里西路98号附3号
Along the river south of Qin Tai Rd.

Soup Dumplings

2010-11-26T02:58:00.000-08:00

Soup dumplings seem to be known in the English speaking world as xiao long bao. However, ordering xiao long bao (a small basket of bao) in Chengdu will not often get you dumplings with soup inside. They are more often sold as tang bao (汤包, literally soup dumpling) or guantang baozi (灌汤包子, the Xian name). Really good soup dumplings I have not yet found; they are pretty obviously not a local specialty.

These photos are from a soup dumpling shop right outside the Nijiaqiao subway stop, on the west side of Renmin Nan Lu. Place setting (碗筷）:

The place appeared to be a side enterprise of a higher end restaurant. Wooden benches and tables:

The dumplings were fresh, so not hard, and not broken. However, I thought the soup should be clearer.

Location: to the right of the Nijiaqiao subway exit on the west side of Renmin South Rd.

Soft Tofu across from Minorities University Bayi campus

2010-11-26T02:08:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I got pretty lost around Bayi, the area filled with wholesale furniture stores in the southwest. Down a small street was a row of fly restaurants. Since it was lunchtime I decided to try the dou hua (soft tofu) at this one:

Not til I sat down did I realize this was a point and choose type of place, where you could ask for a selection of dishes from whatever they had on display. Proteins:

Vegetables:

I stuck with my original choice of dou hua, which came with a bowl of spicy oil and pepper paste seasoned with onions and msg. I had to persuade the proprietor not to give me a huge portion.

View from the dining room:

Location: Tai Ping Yuan Jie, across the street from the Bayi campus of the Minorities University.

Yunmen Emerald Conceptual Restaurant

2010-10-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

For a few months I've been reading with interest the online reviews of Yunmen. The most common reaction seems to be that the restaurant is beautiful inside but the food is a little too out there. Diners express longing for some familiar cuisine or recommend going to a fly restaurant if you want to taste something really good.

The reviews did not prepare me for how uniquely the interior is decorated. The entrance and hallway to the dining room feel like an exaggerated Anna Sui display, with feathered ceilings and a pink and purple colour scheme. It's beautiful, though the too-efficient staff whisk you by so quickly you have little time to take it in. The indoor and outdoor dining areas are a bit more restrained. The natural light inside is great.

There are three identical black-bound menus. They feature Sichuan cuisine (川菜), Hunan cuisine (湘菜) , Beijing cuisine (京菜), and molecular cuisine （分子菜). I felt a bit out of my depth so brought a Beijing native along, hoping to sample some of each type of food.

We got complimentary bowls of fruit to begin, and then white bowls full of creamy congee. The staff said the congee was made from Gonga Mountain snow water. Whatever its origin, the stuff hit the right comfort food notes for my friend.

The Sichuan dish was an Emei mountain specialty of shredded eels and lettuce in red oil. It was hot, salty, and numbing. The dish of Hunan style bacon arrived right beside it. We had a good chance to taste the contrast between the ma la of the Sichuan dish and the straight-up heat of the Hunan dish. Then we remembered there were salmon and tofu dishes coming that we wouldn't be able to taste with our mouths on fire, so we set the spicy stuff aside to finish later.

Hunan bacon dish (湘西财神腊肉)

From the Beijing dishes menu, a plate of crispy eggplant (脆皮茄丁）. Sweet like candy, with spicy little rounds of needle peppers as a surprise. Fantastic.

When the server set the sous vide salmon on the table, she announced that this was a molecular cuisine dish, something we would not be able to taste anywhere else in town. The texture of the fish reminded me of jelly or pudding, and it melted in our mouths. The sauce, on the other hand, was full of rough and chewy chunks of meat, making a clever textural reversal between protein and accompaniment. All the parts of this dish tasted fine though they didn't really work any magic together.

Sous vide salmon (香辣坚果低温度三文鱼)

Tofu in mushroom sauce (菌菇私家豆腐）. Fried piece of soft tofu in mushroom gravy with a crispy lotus root slice and chive blossom. I thought this dish was a little bland, but my friend liked it.

At this point, a party of about six were seated at the table next to ours and began smoking. We asked to be moved to a different area, and the servers accommodated us after taking a few minutes to prepare one of the tables outside.

Fruit wood barbecued ribeye steak (果木燃烧肋眼皇).The steak was a decent piece of meat, nicely marbled and cooked medium rare. Whatever the fruit wood treatment involved gave it a similar taste to an ordinary pan sear. The portion was about the size of a man's thumb, and seemed to be plated to make it look as small as possible.

The patio outside was really pleasant.

Both of the desserts I'd been looking forward to trying were unavailable. The only dessert that we could order was something called lv da gun (驴打滚). This translates roughly as 'donkey rolling around in the dust', and is made of sticky rice flour rolled around a nugget of peanut paste and tossed in soybean powder. They tasted fine but again, whoever was decorating plates seemed to be dialing it in that day.

My friend told me the Qing dynasty origin of this sweet as we were enjoying it, which involved a cook trying to invent a dish to tempt troubled royalty.

This restaurant would be challenging to enjoy for those who lack Chinese language skills. There is a beautifully photographed picture menu with translations, but the food is so unusual and elaborately plated the pictures may not help much. The men's and women's washrooms are labeled in characters only. I definitely would have felt lost if my Chinese friend hadn't been along.

Diners laying out five hundred or so per person should expect fantastic food as well as a very perfect and smooth experience. These expectations are not really met at Yunmen, which is better suited for those who don't care how much food costs, or whose goal is to spend more. Though the meal had quite a few underwhelming moments, what I tasted did make me want to go back and try some of the other dishes.

Name in Chinese and address:
云门锦翠概念餐厅
人民南路 4 段 27 号

Veg Plate and Congee at Yetihua

2010-10-14T00:09:00.000-07:00

Many places offer trays of precooked vegetables, tofu, or meats that you can choose to eat as a snack or as part of your meal. These dishes are pretty popular in the warmer weather, though they sit at ambient temperature for long periods and therefore don't score very high on the food safety index. It's best to eat this kind of food at busy restaurants, or places with open kitchens where you can observe decent hygiene habits.Yetihua has some of the freshest looking and tasting offerings, they are very reasonably priced, and they let you mix up to three vegetables per plate. Here are shredded zucchini, spicy potatoes, and some lettuce heart and wood ear mushroom with a side of green bean congee.

Luzhou Noodles

2010-10-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

Luzhou's most famous product is its baijiu, but if you ask Luzhou natives about their favourite local food they often mention Luzhou style noodles. What is so special about Luzhou noodles? They are made with more lye than other wheat noodles which makes them softer.

This noodle shop on Computer Street is one place to get Luzhou noodles.

This is their specialty, spicy chicken noodles. 辣鸡面. Fourth tone on the 'la'. I mistakenly said la1ji1 mian, garbage noodles, but they figured it out.

Bowl of water spinach as a veg side.

Address in Chinese:

卢州老面馆
一环路南二段 16号 78

Holiday Special: Dim Sum at the Millenium

2010-10-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Millenium is one of the high end hotels that have been popping up like mushrooms all over town, and is located in a residential area on Shenxianshu South Rd. Over the holiday their Chinese restaurant on the second floor had a dim sum special that I decided to check out.

Interior, with retro and metallic decor in the dining room. Very well done except for the carpet, which is a terrible idea in a humid and warm climate.

There were about fifty items on the check-off dim sum menu, which was on for 88 yuan per person. The menu had no greens, so I ordered a side of gai lan which they didn't charge me for:

Shrimp dumplings, the first ones on the menu but not the kind I usually order. Their shape and the filling showing through the translucent skin made them look like small sea creatures. Delicious, with big chunks of shrimp, water chestnuts, and other good stuff inside.

Baked barbecue pork buns, not much bigger than ping pong balls, nicely browned and filled with delectable pork and barbecue sauce. Some of the best I've ever eaten. The pork flavour really came through.

Turnip cake, not the least bit stodgy, filled with delicate shreds of turnip. Browned just shy of a char. I asked for sauce and got a spicy red sauce that tasted like it was made with some fermented ingredient like dou ban or shrimp sauce. Delicious.

For a very long time I avoided ordering anything with water chestnuts (马蹄) on a menu because I thought it would be made from a literal horse's hoof. I mean, you never know, right? This water chestnut cake was sweet and had crunchy chunks of water chestnut inside a lovely translucent filling. It had also been fried, which I didn't expect, and was crispy on the outside. Fantastic.

Tapioca in grapefruit cream dessert. Nice and light and refreshing, with the tapioca at a good texture.

Shrimp and chive filled rice rolls were gorgeous. My one problem with this dish was the shrimp were a bit flavourless. Their texture was perfect though.

This dim sum made me sorry I'd waited so long to try the place out. Whoever is cooking here definitely has some skill and some guts. I had walked in and looked around before, but had never been impressed with the service - the hosts seem to be on the phone constantly and the servers seem to be very adept at avoiding eye contact. However, on this visit after I got seated I was very well looked after.

Yipin Restaurant
Millenium Hotel, 2nd Floor
No.41, South Shenxianshu Road,
Chengdu 610041

Buffet at Minshan Lhasa

2010-10-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

The Minshan Lhasa on Gaoshengqiao Rd is a business hotel that has been opened for a year or two. They have a Western and Chinese buffet advertised for $68 per person.

The room is Tibetan themed and full of large round tables, so if you come solo or in a smaller group you are very likely to share a table with other diners. They had a table of cold dishes, a table of bread and desserts, and a row of hot and stewed dishes with two soups, two congees, two kinds of rice, several meat dishes, a green vegetable or two, a mao cai station, a hot dog rack, some barely scared french fries and chicken on skewers. Everything was well labeled in Chinese and English.

There was a more than satisfying selection of Chinese pickled and marinated vegetables. One cold dish, made from dark shredded-looking dried tofu, really stood out for both its taste and appearance.

They had the most local selection of dishes I had ever seen on a hotel buffet, with old standards such as twice cooked pork (回锅肉） and spicy chicken (辣子鸡). I was pretty happy to see they served kou kou cui, (trans: mouth mouth crisp?) which I understood to be rabbit stomach but here was pork intestine along with an excellent tofu in a spicy, oily red broth. The fragrant and spicy frog dish was very good. (Frog dishes, (美蛙) are best enjoyed during months when frogs are plentiful in the fields. You can get bullfrog year round, but they are not nearly as good.). There was a fantastic stewed duck and potato dish. Fruit juice and coffee from a Nescafe machine were included.

Dessert table:

One dessert that I really loved was this warm soup with rice wine, tofu, and watermelon cubes.

The Western dishes were token and totally skippable. I probably won't rush back - it's easy to go out with friends and find dishes this good or better at half the price in regular neighbourhood restaurants. However, if someone new in town was going for a solo dinner and wanted to try a few different Chinese dishes without having to deal with a language barrier they might do worse.

Minshan Lhasa

一环路南四段肖家河北街88号

The restaurant is just up Gaoshengqiao Rd from the hotel.

Cantonese snacks in Xiaojiahe

2010-09-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today I found my favourite breakfast spot, Yong He Fu Le at Fangcao Jie, closed for renos. Walking back through an alley in Xiaojiahe, I was surprised to see a little restaurant serving Cantonese rice rolls.

There were three main sections on the menu: rice rolls （肠粉), claypot rice (煲子饭）, and congee (粥). I asked for an egg rice roll by pointing to the menu item on the board.

What came was not beautiful but really delicious. Crocks of hot sauce on the table helped. I would love to return and try their congee and claypot rice.

Storefront:

Address: 肖家河西一巷 27 号

Rivoli Benny

2010-09-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

My first taste of Rivoli was the 138 yuan evening buffet (includes wine, a bargain) but what caught my eye on the menu was in the breakfast section - eggs benedict for 32 yuan. Went back to check it out recently.

On the plate was a couple of pretty good breakfast sausages, two fried tomato slices with a fresh oregano garnish, and two crispy potato patties. There was no promised English muffin under the eggs (which were nicely poached, though a little cool by the time I got them) but plain white toast triangles.

The hollandaise was delicious, tangy and on the thin side...and bruleed with a blowtorch. I was upset at first to see the precious hollandaise scorched but decided to try it with an open mind. Under the torched part was a thin layer of separated sauce with a thin layer of real sauce underneath. I think torching would work better on thicker hollandaise. (Or, torch it and serve it, stat, rather than contemplating the plate for several minutes.)

My yardstick for coffee served locally has come down to: Better than Nescafe, or not? At Rivoli I first got a cup from the pot on the buffet, which tasted like it had been sitting there since the buffet opened (< Nescafe). I asked for fresher coffee and was served a cup freshly brewed but with very little character(probably an Americano with way, way too much water) and also unfortunately < Nescafe.

The servers were well trained and welcoming but did not have the polish one would expect from a five star place. I waited nearly half an hour for the order (about fifteen minutes for coffee), was interrupted several times about the bill and had to explain to a few different servers that I was not a hotel guest. At one point a cook strolled out of the kitchen, pulled a serviette off of my table, and used it to wipe my plate in the kitchen before it was brought out and served.

There is a fifteen percent service charge, so 32 for the plate and 35 for coffee totalled 77 kuai. I would go back in a heartbeat for the food and maybe drink tea with breakfast, or smuggle in some Nescafe. Unfortunately not smoke free.

Rivoli Restaurant, 2nd Floor Regal Master Hotel
人民南路 4段 48 号
028-8887 8888 xt 8033

Mao Cai at Dai Family Qionglai Noodles

2010-09-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

Dai Family Qionglai noodles is also known for their mao cai. I went the other day. Breaking my rule of ordering mao cai only at places where you can choose your own vegetables. I ordered a vegetarian mao cai and specifically told them not to add blood.

The mao cai flavour was great, but had too much starchy stuff and not enough greens, reminding me why I like to pick out my own stuff. Next time I will get noodles.

Pumpkin congee and a kind of dry, spicy pao cai on the side:

代氏邛崃清汤面
武侯区情融路2-3号

Ren Nan 8 号

2010-09-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

This restaurant is named for its address, #8 Ren Min Nan Lu. The name doesn't make the place any easier to find, since every building on that very long block seems to be #8. It's the same building as the provincial gymnasium, on the south side.The unusual decor is athletic themed but there are plenty of very nice spots to sit, both indoors and outdoors.

We asked about the specialties and were recommended the turtle and sea cucumber, neither of which really tempted us. We started with the celery appetizer (also recommended by the enthusiastic server). Not really a re-order. One intriguing thing on the menu was Sichuan pepper greens as a cold dish.

The thing is, Sichuan pepper comes from a plant with thorns. It tasted fine, with a mild numbing flavour, but care needs to be taken when eating something with the ability to bite back.

We had to try the fish appetizer. Small, split and fried and filled with healthy stuff, nine yuan each. We crunched them hole, including the heads. Delicious.

Tea tree mushrooms, in a pretty typical presentation, were very good.

Clay pot beef and radish. Very good.

We'd got complimentary bowls of fruit to start the meal. As a digestif, chilled test tubes full of bitter melon juice:

The menu has a few sweets on it, like egg tarts and durian pastry. I tried the strategy of ordering sweets after we ate the savoury dishes, since ordering dessert with your meal usually means it comes as the first dish or somewhere in the middle. However, they make their desserts to order and it would have been too long of a wait.

The staff were very sweet and took overwhelmingly good care of us, whisking plates away as soon as they were mostly empty and escorting us to and from the facilities when needed. Next time I would probably tell them to cool it a bit. The menu has pictures and English which is mostly understandable.

Ren Nan 8 Hao

人南 8 号
人民南路四段8号四川体育馆南厅 89598318

IKEA Meatballs, Sichuan Style

2010-06-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

The default way to eat street snacks like stinky tofu, sausage, or grilled meat is to dip them in a mix of hot pepper, Sichuan pepper, msg, and salt. Here, the meatballs at IKEA's downstairs hot dog stand get the same treatment.

Wild Mountain Honey

2010-06-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

Have noticed a few people selling this moss-covered grainy amber substance on the streets lately. I walked over and asked the vendor what it was.

"Honey, wild honey" she said, pointing out the crystallized body of a bee. Her accent was really strong (Tibetan?) but I made out that it was wild honey from one of the surrounding mountains.

Since our local honey has been in the food safety news lately, and because I was curious and the stuff was cheap (ten yuan per pound), I bought a chunk.

The vendor said to mix it in water or into baijiu, which I never touch, so I am trying to figure out how to use it....maybe adapt a shortbread recipe?

Dim Sum at Shang Palace

2010-06-10T23:58:00.001-07:00

Shang Palace is an upscale Chinese restaurant on the second floor of the Shangri-La Hotel. The Shangri-La also houses Cafe Z, which I visited last year. The hotel is also home to Mooney's, an Irish pub which is a lot of fun in the evenings when their house band is playing and is bound to be one of the main local gathering spots for World Cup games. Shang Palace is not as popular as the other two places, but when I saw they had a dim sum brunch special I had to check it out.

I was expecting buffet style, but you get a check off menu which lists all the items in simplified Chinese and English. There are over 70 choices, from several types of congee to steamed and fried dishes, local snacks like dan dan noodles, and vegetables.

Cha shao bao, the baked style, came as small tender buns filled with a tangy dark red sauce and just a little pork. Good, but would be better with more meat inside the bao.

Pork liver rice roll. The liver had that heavy metal thing happening that you always get with the liver of a large animal, and the cilantro in it emphasized the heaviness. It was tender and chewy though. Liked it a lot, but would probably try some of the other kinds of rice rolls next time.

Bok choi heart in superior soup (上汤）. The veg was a little tired looking; I would ask for gai lan or something else next time. There was nothing 'shang' about the 'tang' either, unfortunately. The soup's colour was nice but the flavour was too bland and the texture was like it had been thickened with starch.

A very nice shrimp dumpling, with ten pleats. Small, crunchy pieces of bamboo shoot complemented the shrimp well.

After finishing the main dishes I waited again, for several minutes, for dessert. I actually enjoy a leisurely paced serving style, but the dishes arrived much more slowly than they do at a typical dim sum place and some of the other customers were getting antsy.

Steamed salted egg yolk layer cake with coconut. Fantastic, rich, gorgeous. I am glad I didn't just order the egg yolk buns everyone else was eating.

The servers were working hard but were a little disorganized. I was also surprised that many of them lacked English ability. (You can't expect English in Chengdu, even at nicer hotels, but other staff I'd met at this one were always eager and able to converse with customers in English. A server did come up and graciously apologize in English for the delay at one point.)

The restaurant is elegant without being stuffy, comfortable, and best of all non-smoking. Most customers were in business or street casual clothes.

Entrance:

Address: Shang Palace, 2nd Floor Shangri-La Hotel, 9 Binjiang Dong Road
香宫, 香格里拉大酒店 2楼, 中国成都市滨江东路9号

According to their website the dim sum special runs til the end of July: Monday to Friday from 11:30 to 2:00; weekends and holidays from 9:00. The brunch comes to 70 yuan and change per person once you include the service charge, which is decent value. Chrysanthemum tea is included.

Buckwheat Noodles from Grandma Wang's

2010-06-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

There are two locations, that I know of, for Grandma Wang's. One is this one on Yulin South, and the other is in the same complex as the Qingshiqiao da pai dangs. I'd planned to eat at a Hong Kong restaurant the other evening but the weather was so humid and hot I felt like eating something numbing and spicy (ma la), which is supposed to help the body deal with heat and dampness.

Beef buckwheat noodles (牛肉荞面）, made fresh from the press and cooked only for a few seconds.

I also got a bacon rice dumpling (zhongzi). It had mostly red bean and a few tiny pieces of bacon, but for two yuan it was fine.

Their vegetable was boiled lettuce.

While I was eating a woman came up and bought bags of ye'er ba, smooth yellowish sticky rice dumplings filled with ground pork and ya cai, a kind of preserved vegetable.

Address: Yulin South Road, just north of the Yulin Plaza.
玉林南路, 玉林生活广场外

Five Signs You Should Not Eat Here

2010-06-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

As anyone familiar with the food scene on the mainland knows, it's much easier to find satisfying downscale eating experiences than upscale. I am always on the lookout for higer end restaurants that I can recommend to people, but far too often these places are more style than substance, even the big names, and the food isn't good. Before eating at a higher end restaurant I usually stop in, ask to look at the menu, and chat with the servers to get an idea of what customers would experience. A few signs that warn me to eat elsewhere:

Every price on the menu ends with multiple 8s. The point is to impress your guests with the amount of money you are spending. The food is irrelevant.

Aspiring fashion model robot servers. Young, tall, beautiful, and completely expressionless.

Crass ostentation, culinary style. Shark’s fin, abalone, bird’s nest, or other luxury ingredient in some pointlessly expensive preparation. Orchids perched on every plate, or in your glass of juice.

A huge, heavy menu. The size and weight of some menus in upscale restaurants is seriously ridiculous. It’s getting difficult to stand upright while holding them. One menu I looked at the other day had a heavy elaborate metal cover that made me fear for the tabletops.

Overdecoration in grand period Chinese or fusty Western style. Some places have not only cloth chair covers and layers of tablecloths, but add place mats on top of the tablecloths. With water shortages in other parts of the country, the thought of the laundry alone makes me ill.

A restaurant is a business after all, and it's an unfortunate fact that a very successful restaurant here does not have to serve good food. It remains to be seen whether all the forces driving down the quality of the food served in China can be countered. I hold out hope that as standards of living rise ordinary people will eat out more frequently and will demand higher quality experiences from the upscale places as well as their neighborhood restaurants.

See Food and Eat It

2010-05-20T02:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went with some friends for a late night dinner at the da pai dangs* across from the Qingshiqiao seafood market. The plan of action was to arrive late, when the fresh seafood comes in off of the planes, buy items from the market and take them across the street to be cooked. Crates of sea creatures were being unloaded when we arrived.

We ended up buying scallops from the market. (We tried to haggle for salmon which the proprietor said was from Iceland. We were dubious.) We then went across the street to one of the smaller establishments. The vendor had a bewildering variety of seafood available including abalone, a few kinds of shrimp, crabs, and clams. The shrimp were jumping out of their tray.

We ordered shrimp done up spicy as well as not spicy, oysters and scallops on the grill, and stir fried squid.

Empty food trays and shells piled up beside our bowls as we laid waste to everything. Beer, broccoli, mao dou, and egg fried rice rounded out the order. Since the group included expert seafood choosers and people who could haggle in Sichuanese, we ended up paying only about 30 rmb per head. You can end up paying much more especially if you order the more expensive items.

At about one am, as we were finishing, the chengguan who had been watching the street left. (Chengguan are thug cops who keep the city presentable by throwing shopkeepers' wares off the sidewalks and harassing the three wheeled cab drivers.) The block was then transformed, as tables were brought out to the street and began to fill with customers seeking sustenance after a night out singing or clubbing. We concluded that we had come about two hours too early.

The next day when we ran into some of the same friends, we all greeted each other with, 'stomach ok'? Most of us were.

Name in Chinese: 青石桥夜市

*A da pai dang is a modest restaurant set up on the street. They are mostly associated with Guangdong and its neighbour Hong Kong, and tend to have a seafood theme though this is not strictly necessary. Xiamen seems to have scads of them.

Homestyle in an Old Town

2010-05-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

We went out to one of the old style towns that make for a nice day trip outside of Chengdu. There were quite a few likely looking places to eat but in the end we went into this homestyle restaurant overlooking the square. View from inside:

There is no menu; you look over the kitchen stocks and decide with the cook and the server what you want to eat and how you want it prepared.

We wanted to try the crisp skinned soft tofu ( 脆皮豆花), since it's not something you see on too many Chengdu menus. It came in a spicy and sweet sauce that was made with bean paste. Delicious.

One of the local special foods is the Sichuan style bacon 老腊肉. They asked if we wanted it pan fried or stir fried, and I asked which was the best tasting. "Stir fried!" replied the cook and the server in unison. Nothing was on the plate besides the bacon and onions. The fat, which turned translucent but didn't melt, was the best part.

Am I sick of eating amaranth? No, I am not.

As we were finishing the staff sat down to eat their lunch.

I walked over to pay and saw they were eating from a large plate of thick, white strips. I asked what it was and they said 肉皮. That's right, pig skin. They assured me it was delicious.

Another Visit to Xi Da Dou Tang Fan

2010-05-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

This dou tang restaurant has become a regular haunt of mine. Went back recently with a friend in tow to try a few of their homestyle dishes. It was lunch time and the place was packed with some folding tables set up outside. The boss was clearly in his element, taking and running orders and greeting regulars. We ordered a bowl of dou tang each and some dry fried eggplant (干煸茄子）:

The eggplant came out properly smoky. Whoever is wielding the wok here knows their trade well.

Tiger-skin green peppers (虎皮青椒). I like these a little darker, but no complaints:

Gong bao chicken (宫暴鸡丁). Within a few seconds of this hitting the table our chopsticks were a blur picking out the tender chunks of chicken and leek and crunchy peanuts. Really beautiful and the peanuts' freshly toasted flavour added to the dish without making it too much about the peanuts.

We found that with the good but very filling soup it was a bit too much food for two of us, one meat and one veg dish would have been enough.

Mu Dian Ren Jia Noodle House

2010-05-08T05:05:00.000-07:00

Ever been hopelessly lost and really hungry in a strange place and then found a little place to eat that made everything feel all right? I got really lost last week between the west 1st and 2nd rings, trying to find my way back to Huanhuaxi Park, and ended up almost at Metro. I ran into this noodle shop on my way. The menu was really unusual - squid noodles? In Chengdu?

An order of ba ba cai (boiled cabbage):

I ordered a liang of their specialty, yu xiang rib noodles (鱼香排骨面）. Stirring the noodles revealed a stowaway dumpling in the bowl, which met the same fate it was trying to escape by hiding in the noodles.

They also have jiaozi, chao shou, and a few other types of noodles such as hot pepper beef noodles (生椒牛肉面), wild shiitake mushroom noodles (野生香菇面), and spicy eel noodles (鳝鱼面). A few of the items are pictured on the walls. You can add a fried egg to any of the soups, for an extra charge, or get a bowl of congee or a stewed egg to round out your lunch. They also have snacks like sesame stuffed rice dumplings in soup (汤圆）.

Storefront:

Address is 13-14 mu dian lu, but don't ask me how to get there.

Address in chinese: 牧电路 13 号 14

No-flavour Mao Cai

2010-04-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

The soup had lots of red pepper floating on top, Sichuan pepper, cinnamon, and other spices floating in it. The cooked vegetables already had a red tinge. The server mixing up the cooked ingredients with seasonings was worried though.

"It's not going to have any flavour!"

The problem was that I requested no msg or chicken flavouring be added to the bowl. I also asked for hot pepper but less red oil on top.

"I don't know if it has any flavour", she said as she set the bowl down.

And while I was eating the mao cai, which was hot enough to give me the sniffles,

"Any flavour in there?"

Spicy Potatoes

2010-04-29T23:14:00.000-07:00

These are my favourite kind - cut in chunks, cooked on a flat griddle with not too much oil, and plenty spicy. These are from a little stall under a staircase by the west gate of the Nationalities University. It's under an inexplicably popular northeast restaurant, Da Dong Bei.

Qionglai Noodle Soup

2010-04-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

In the mood for Qionglai-style noodles, I debated going out to Dai family restaurant or hitting a more convenient shop on my way home. Convenience won out and I ended up in this little place near Gaoshengqiao:

I got an order of ji tang mao su cai, basically vegetables cooked in the chicken soup, which was delicious, if barely lukewarm. The vegetables were cabbage and a few pieces of winter melon.

And one liang of the noodles. The bowl that came was easily the equal of two-liang servings elsewhere. Their default noodles also come with meat on top, which I didn't quite expect. But they tasted fine, and paying 4.5 yuan for two bowls of soup felt like quite a bargain. The noodles at Dai's are good enough to be worth the trip out there though, and Dai's is cleaner.

Name in Chinese: 邛崃清汤面
Address: 武侯区广福桥北街8-23号

Amaranth - Han Cai

2010-04-22T00:30:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived in Chengdu it was really strange to order spinach out of season, but now we can eat it all year. Amaranth remains a vegetable with seasonal availability,and is just starting to pop up on menus. The red and green leaves have a flavor similar to spinach but pack in far more nutrition, from what I've read. Because it stains everything it touches red, usually it's eaten simply stir fried rather than put in soups or combinations of other ingredients.

In Mandarin it's called 苋菜, xian cai, but locally I've never heard it called anything other than han cai.

Lunch earlier this week, an order of amaranth with dou tang fan. Delicious.

The Spice Market

2010-04-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

Today I wandered into the wholesale spice market near the north train station.

There were enormous bags of Sichuan peppercorns, taller than a person. The red milder variety was there in abundance, as well as the more pungent dark green kind. (I've noticed in grocery stores the red kind is often labelled 花椒 while the green kind is 麻椒)

You could choose many grinds and types of hot pepper powder (辣椒面 or 辣椒粉)

While red pepper, Sichuan pepper, and dried spices were mostly on offer you could also find pickled peppers (泡椒):

The spices were gorgeous and very fresh smelling. Star anise (八角), fennel (小茴香), not sure, lotus seeds (莲子)

These were only a small selection of the spices there. They also had many kinds of dried mushrooms and dried seafood in the back corner.

Hai jiao:

Hot pepper is 辣椒, pronounced 'la jiao' in Mandarin. In Sichuanese, hot pepper is 'hai jiao'. This gets transliterated with the ocean character into '海椒'. So, this place is called Chengdu Haijiao Cheng, or Hot Pepper City (海椒城) :

Location: Wukuaishi
Location in Chinese: 五块石

Rabbit Stomach Noodles

2010-04-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

Update: This place is now a different restaurant.

Today I went by the west gate of the Nationalities University specifically to get fried spicy potatoes from the potato lady. Sadly she wasn't there so I ended up in this noodle shop. It's the kind of place that is furnished with mismatched tables and stacking stools, but looks reasonably clean inside. The bowl of noodle water they gave me tasted like the freshly ground flour we used to make from our own wheat at home.

Table setting, with little crocks of soy sauce and vinegar:

I asked the server for fragrant spicy diced rabbit noodles (香辣兔丁面) from their list of dry mixed noodles. She said they were out, so that left me with my second choice: rabbit stomach noodles (兔肚面). She was a little worried. "Those are pretty hot, can you handle it?"

The noodles were spicy as promised, from both hot pepper oil, pickled, and dry peppers. (This combination gives you an initial hit of spice, then it develops, then there is an afterburn. At no point is it overwhelmingly hot, however.) There were large chunks of cooked garlic as well. The little pieces of rabbit stomach had a mild flavour very similar to rabbit meat but were chewier and tender at the same time. Delicious. They cooked the noodles a bit too soft though, and I would ask for less oil next time. My one liang serving of noodles, bowl of well-trimmed boiled lettuce, and gratis noodle water came to 4.5 yuan.

Not sure of complete name; I couldn't read the first character. It's __ 姐面馆, around the corner from Leanna's Bakery. Address is #10-11 Shuhan Jie.

Address in Chinese: 蜀汉街 10号 -11

Afternoon at People's Park

2010-04-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were at People's Park this afternoon. We stopped for you cha, which translates to 'oil tea' and is like a bowl of thick gravy topped with crunchy soybeans and crispy fried strips of dough. You cha fixings:

They were also selling san da pao, a sweet snack whose name translates to 'three big cannons'. The name refers to the preparation method. San da pao is three rice dumplings rolled by hand, then thrown against a wide basket filled with soybean powder. Each dumpling makes a boom as it hits the basket. They are then doused with sweet syrup and sesame seeds. Kids waiting for their san da pao:

These were some of the best san da pao I've had. The syrup wasn't burned and the sesame seeds smelled freshly toasted and nutty:

My friend thoughtfully ordered my you cha without any hot pepper (hai jiao). I like spicy things, but have discovered that ordering things not spicy is one way to avoid getting a slick of oil poured over whatever you are eating. The you cha was pretty good without it anyway:

These are matchmaking ads, which I've heard about but never noticed in Chengdu before. They are usually brought and perused by parents seeking mates for their children. A typical ad read something like: Young girl, 26, bachelor degree, 1.57 m, attractive, working at ------. Seeking 35 or younger, bachelor degree or higher, 1.7 m or taller, man with employment.

Braised Pork Noodles - 卤肉面

2010-04-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

At home we had a great Chinese cookbook whose author insisted on transliterating the 卤 into 'looo', and devoted a whole chapter to describing the technique and the tradition. This 'lu' refers to slow simmering in a flavoured stock. Much attention is paid to the seasonings and the stock is often kept and reused repeatedly. The pork in these noodles, while rather crowded out by the bamboo shoot, tasted really strongly of star anise (八角).

The Tea Museum at Emei Mountain City

2010-04-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

Emei Mountain is one of the main tea growing areas in the province and Zhuyeqing is a large local producer. There are Zhuyeqing shops all over Chengdu and you can buy the tea everywhere. They have a tea park and museum in Emeishan city. Visitors to the museum are greeted with a small cup of green tea and invited to see a tea demonstration. They have a couple of girls do a graceful gong fu ceremony and then a man shows off his skills with the long-spouted tea pot.

Behind the park area was a field with rows of tea bushes. Workers were picking the new young leaves. Tea harvested before Tomb Sweeping Day (this coming Monday) is supposed to be the best.

Inside her basket:

The fresh leaves being weighed:

Xi Da Dou Tang Fan

2010-03-31T08:39:00.000-07:00

After a few short days of hot weather Chengdu has been chilly and wet for the past week, and I've been seeking out dou tang fan - bean soup with rice. Dou tang fan is ubiquitous in Chengdu, but most places make bland versions that are not improved by the shreds of meat or vegetable that are added.Grandma Jin's dou tang fan is without peer, but I find myself eating there less and less simply because I find their servings too large.

Last week I walked into a dou tang fan restaurant that looked newly opened. There were only a few people eating, but several staff were looking after the place and the kitchen workers were all wearing white uniforms.

"You need to try this soup, it's great!" said the boss as he carefully set the bowl on the table. It tasted wonderful, and was a perfect size. I felt like Goldilocks, and ate the soup wondering why higher end restaurants in town so rarely serve customers with such obvious care and pride in the product. The bowl of soup (dou tang) is three yuan, rice (fan) is another one yuan. Besides their specialty, they have an assortment of cooked food in pots that usually gets served with rice (shao cai), and a short menu of homestyle food. The serving of baby bok choi (xiao bei cai) I ordered once came very spicy and numbing, and once with zero seasoning. I expect their spicy dishes are pretty bold.

Dou tang, rice on the side, some pao cai that tasted exactly like sauerkraut, and an order of baby bok choi.

Location: Yiguanmiao. The staff claims they have no address. It's up a small alley just in front of a kindergarten, on the northwest side of the Yiguanmiao overpass.

Snacks at Emeishan City

2010-03-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

The snack street at Emeishan City was dead. I don't recommend coming here outside evening hours. After walking around for a while I found a noodle shop and got served a very good dish of rice noodles (mifen). There was ground pork, red oil, and lots of zha cai (pickled vegetable) on top. Spicy, sour, great.

On the way to the train we stopped by a dou hua restaurant and got a snack of shi mo dou hua, stone ground soft tofu. It's got a slightly smoky flavour and rougher texture. Little bowls of chopped green onion, red oil, and dou ban (spicy bean paste)were provided as condiment. I think this is the best dou hua I ever had, and will keep an eye out for it back in Chengdu.

Fried Dumplings

2010-03-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few places in Chengdu to get shengjianbao, a snack food more closely associated with Shanghai. The secret to getting good shengjianbao is to pass by when a fresh pan is just being uncovered. Wait a few minutes until they cool off enough to eat, then enjoy.

This little shop has the best I've had in the city so far, even though the filling is not as good as the shengjianbao in Shanghai. The browned parts of these bao were very crunchy and the dumplings weren't too crowded so they were browned well up their sides. At four dumplings to one yuan, they are a bargain. The shop also sells things like soup dumplings (tang bao), nest buns (wowo tou), and sticky rice dumplings (shao mai). Whatever is fresh should be good; don't bother with anything that has been sitting off the steam too long.

Location: #7-4 West Guojiaqiao St, which runs south of Chuan Da south gate, between river and second ring
郭家桥西街７号4

Under Construction

2010-03-14T05:02:00.000-07:00

As most readers have noticed, in an attempt to be accessible locally we are now on a new domain: http://www.eatdrinkchengdu.info/ though pictures in old posts are still blocked. For this reason, I recommend continuing to use the various wall-circumventing techniques while visiting.

Pictures should be visible in posts that appear from today on. Patience is appreciated while I figure all this stuff out.

Indian Food at Ito Yokado

2010-03-14T04:25:00.000-07:00

While perusing the offerings at the basement food court at Ito Yokado, I was surprised to see a Cacaja-affiliated Indian food counter. I ordered the masala chicken set meal (马撒辣鸡肉套餐) and a masala chai (马撒辣茶）. The set meal was advertised with naan (烤饼), but came with rice. After I expressed disappointment they replaced the rice with roti (飞饼, or 'flying naan' on the English menu). The server explained that they used to have naan, but no longer serve it since Chinese people don't like naan. Which I don't believe for a minute.

There was a long wait for the food, but at least my roti was nice and fresh.

The tray from top right: some dal, a little pool of chicken in sauce spiced identically to the dal, some very good vegetables in a spicy red sauce, the roti, cucumber pao cai, and fruit. The potatos in the vegetable dish were cut in thin slices, Chinese style, instead of the chunks that I was expecting. There was plenty of spice used, but it lacked the life that freshly toasted and ground spices usually give even the most basic Indian food. At 28 yuan, it also wasn't cheap. Next time I will just order a roti and vegetable by itself. They have an English menu, but keep it behind the counter.

The chai was pretty good and a bargain at ten yuan:

A waffle cone of frozen yogurt from the dessert counter hit the spot after all the spicy food:

Location: First basement level of new Ito Yokado on Jianshe Road near the second ring, right across from SM Square

Pork and Noodles, courtesy Air Chin@

2010-02-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

The exact same two choices as last time I flew - chicken and rice or pork and noodles, ugh. I will be out of the country til mid March, and will resume posting then. Have a great holiday everyone!

Espresso at Lozzi

2010-02-18T11:29:00.001-08:00

Doughnut shops have been popping up like mushrooms ever since Lozzi opened its doors. This is the off-the-menu espresso, which in many coffee places you need to order as 美式 - 不放水, or an Americano with no water. (Lozzi's default coffee is sickeningly sweet.) It's the perfect companion to one of their fresh doughnuts.

Lozzi Donuts
Chinese name: 啦滋多拿滋
Addresss: 锦江区东大街三段85号(近红星路步行街)

Southeast of Chunxi Rd, where Hong Xing Road meets Dong Da Street.

Dim Sum at Yue Zhong Canting

2010-02-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

Before a trip back to the home country, I went on a shopping expedition to Chunxi Road and took along a friend whose fashion sense and shopping skills far outpace my own. By the time her fierce bargaining abilities had saved me hundreds on beautiful gifts we had worked up quite an appetite and made our way to Yue Zhong Canting, a Cantonese restaurant on the seventh floor of the Isetan department store. I'm going to show you the dessert first:

It's the nai huang xi sha bao (奶黄细沙包), a steamed sweet bun with a golden coconut custard 'fine sand' textured filling. We ordered it on the recommendation of our server.

Decadent and gorgeous.

Turnip cake (萝卜糕) is a must order whenever I eat dim sum. Theirs was ok.

These shrimp dumplings (虾饺) were very, very good. Almost no binding and fresh tasting shrimp.

They also have a menu of higher-end Cantonese food. The dim sum menu does not have vegetables on it, so we had to order greens from the high end menu. This order of gai lan was very good, but cost three times the amount of a dim sum item.

They have both the steamed and baked style of barbecue pork buns (叉烧包). This bun was very good, the filling was average.

We also got an order of fish slice congee (鱼片粥) that was pretty good.

The service was a step below the quality of the food, unfortunately. We both had the impression of being upsold while ordering, the staff seemed distracted and was tough to flag down whenever we needed something, and our pointing out a foreign object (hair) in one of the dishes was met with complete indifference. Also, most of the other tables had smokers - it seems like a business lunch destination - and the air quality was bad enough to interfere with one's sense of taste. Although there were some fantastic dishes, I am still on the lookout for really excellent dim sum in town.

There is an English and pictures menu of the higher end Cantonese food, and a limited English and picture menu for dim sum.

Name in Chinese: 悦中餐厅
Address: 锦江区红星路三段伊势丹百货海悦花园大酒店7楼

Spring Forever Cate Feast

2010-01-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

The high class Renhe Spring shopping mall on the west second ring has been open about a month. While checking it out last week I went to the top floor expecting a food court, but was surprised to find a very ambitious buffet restaurant grandly named Spring Forever Cate Feast.

(Cate is a real word, related to catering, but hasn't been in current English usage since about the mid 1800s. Cate means delicacies or very choice food, and is the Chinglish version of '美食'. It often appears on machine translated restaurant signs and menus in China.)

Today a friend and I went to sample the goods at lunchtime.

Natural light fills the room, which is beautifully decorated and appointed. Lamps and ceiling fixtures:

The buffet has many areas: a sushi station, salads and Western foods, cold dishes, dim sum, Chinese stir fried dishes, stewed Chinese foods, a seafood bar, a dessert station, and a fruit and ice cream station that serves real Häagen-Dazs. (I was particularly excited about the ice cream.) The price of entry includes coffee and tea as well as sweet drinks such as soda and milk tea. At lunch, you can get beer but not wine, which is included at dinner.

Dim sum station:

You could ask for seafood to be prepared in a few different ways. We got baked oysters, which were a highlight, and shrimp and razor clams.

Like most buffets, the quality and deliciousness of the offerings varied widely and it took some hunting and sampling to find the good stuff. Tiny dishes of rich mashed potato covered with a golden sauce and crowned with snails were a highlight, as well as pickled beets in the cold food section (I haven't eaten beets for an eternity). There was an absolutely revelatory Cantonese honey roast pork (蜜汁叉烧）, and one outstanding dish that I think was beef tendon and shiitake mushroom. (Many of the dishes were missing labels, or labelled in an illegible handwritten scrawl.) The ready made rolls and nigri on the sushi station were not that great but the salmon sashimi was sliced to order and decent, which means the best I've had in this town. There was sugary, neon coloured 'juice' at the drink station but fresh fruit juice at the fruit station. The dessert station had a lot of the fluffy tasteless style of cake, but also a very good coconut cake.

Saving room for dessert here is not advised. Although it is a buffet, they ration the Häagen-Dazs very closely. You get a ticket for the ice cream which entitles you to a single scoop, served up with a tool the size of a melon baller, and you end up with not even enough ice cream to satisfy a baby.

We got enthusiastic and hospitable service from a very young server who had just worked there for two weeks. The lunch buffet is 98 yuan per person on weekdays and 128 on weekends; dinner will run you 138 and 168 yuan respectively. They have an afternoon tea buffet for 42 yuan per person. Seniors (65+) and children under 12 who are shorter than 1.3 m are half price.

Chinese name: 四季春天美食塔
Address: 二环路西一段 19号仁和春天广场

Huiyuan Mao Cai

2010-01-20T06:41:00.000-08:00

I noticed a mao cai menu at Huiyuan Noodles but hadn't realized it was from their sister restaurant a few doors down. The staff cover both places, and you can sit in either restaurant and order from the other as much as you like.

Their vegetable selection is fresh (though I would like to see pumpkin and a few more green things). They do have lots of meats to cook in the very good, complex flavoured soup: chicken, chicken heart, chicken gizzard, beef, beef stomach, pork throat, crispy fried pork, goose intestine, etc, etc. They also add a spoonful of preserved black beans (豆豉） so you stir things up before eating. It's a little more expensive than most mao cai places, but very worth it.

My vegetarian mao cai, which came out with a few shreds of beef in it, before being stirred up:

Once when I found a bug in my dish they apologized and cooked up a fresh order (after assuring me that kind of bug wasn't poisonous), and comped my one yuan bowl of rice. I won't hesitate to go back.

Chinese name: 惠元冒菜
Address: 红瓦寺街共和村

Pao Pao - Hot Pot for One

2010-01-20T05:49:00.000-08:00

At Pao Pao, customers sit around a bar which holds small hot pots for one or two. This is great for when you want hot pot but lack an eating partner, since it's really strange to go to a normal hot pot restaurant by yourself and even with two people your ordering options are very limited by your appetites. Pao Pao is billed as Taiwan style hot pot.

I pulled up a stool last week. First up was a standard youdie of sesame oil and chopped garlic. It came out with a dusting of msg, and I got them to replace it with an msg-free version. Behind, an order of wood ear mushroom.

They have a good selection of soups but not all of them were available when I went. I chose a suan la (sour and spicy) flavoured soup, an order of shrimp balls, tofu skin, and some vegetables.

The vegetables were all clean and fresh and I was impressed with size of the servings, since most vegetables were only three yuan each. The shrimp balls were the processed fish kind, and I didn't like them at first but once they got soft in the soup they were more interesting. The soup, unfortunately, was like slightly spicy msg water without much flavour. Since hot pot restaurants distinguish themselves with their soup, this is a major failing. Some of their other soup flavours may be worth trying, but on the other hand there are plenty of other great places to eat in the neighbourhood.

Name in Chinese: 泡泡
Address: 红瓦寺共和村商务楼 1-25

Red River Grill

2010-01-10T05:38:00.002-08:00

This cowboy themed restaurant popped up in a Dianping search for the top burgers in town. It's on the second floor of the Great World complex by the Carrefour.

Interior:

House wine was on the drink menu for Y15 a glass (yay), but it was a tiny drop of mouth-drying changyu (boo).

The roll-up-your-sleeves Montana BBQ burger has a lot going on: tomato, lettuce, onion, cheese, barbecue sauce, bacon, and a nicely toasted bun. Despite its heft it was not too hard to eat, staying together surprisingly well. The fries were the kind that come frozen in a bag, but had a bit better flavour than most in town and came hot.

Attractive looking orders of potato skins and pizza also passed by my table.

They have a mob of specials this month: 40% off on Tuesdays starting the 12th of January, and a New Year's special of 20% off from the 13th of January til the end of February. (Discounts are for food totals only.) They will, however, be closed from Feb 11 to Feb 17. But, during this time they will open on Valentine's for dinner. Whew, hope I've got that all straight.

Chinese Name: 红河西餐厅

Address: 大世界广场 2 楼 1 号

San Gu Noodles

2010-01-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

This noodle and homestyle restaurant's main draw is its very convenient location by the Moziqiao overpass, where Computer City meets Kehua North Road. I've always liked the food here, but it used to be one of the grubbiest restaurants I've ever eaten in. A while ago they did renos, and now it looks quite nice inside:

However, I think the place still qualifies as a fly restaurant (苍蝇馆子), since the walls are not attached to anything on top. The ceiling is made of a few tarps whose translucence shows clearly how dusty they are. I probably wouldn't try to eat here if it was raining.

The other day I went in and asked for an order of beef and green peppers (青椒牛肉丝), even though it was not on the menu. They charged me 19 yuan for it, and I had to pay up front. (Thinking, this better be max delicious.)

Beef (or pork) strips with green peppers sounds like one of the least interesting dishes in the world, and I was always puzzled when my local friends frequently ordered it or declared it their favourite dish. When I realized that Sichuanese cooks often prepare the dish with spicy bean paste (豆瓣酱), I understood.

This version also had black beans (豆豉). It was a great combination.

They also serve hot rice now, which is an improvement. (Before it was scooped out of one of those big pails which gets cooler and cooler as the day wears on.) There were a few other customers, and everyone else was eating a fresh fried guo kui and then getting a bowl of noodles.

Qingdao and Snow beer both start at 5 yuan per bottle.

Storefront:

Name: 三顾面

Address:武侯区一环路南二段15号

Le Lai Guo Kui

2010-01-05T06:14:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Day on Chunxi Rd, there were so many people that even in the middle of the afternoon there were lines out the door of many eating places. (It was the first time I have been surrounded by people and stuck, absolutely unable to move, while crossing a street.)

Lots of the window shoppers were snacking on guo kui (which has gotten a bit more expensive since that previous post. One guo kui chain that you find all over town is Le Lai Guo Kui (乐来锅魁). After fighting my way to the front of the crowd around the till I asked for a ya cai and minced chicken sandwich (芽菜鸡米锅魁), and an order of potatoes.

(The setup makes it a bit tough to order if you lack Chinese language skills; I tried to eat here a couple of years ago and only managed to get potatoes. You also need Chinese-style crowd navigation skills to order when it is busy, so it may be best to come here with a local friend.)

Marinated shredded vegetables and tofu, ready to be piled into sandwiches:

Two kinds of meat:

Hot and numbing potatoes. (They look nice, but were some of the worst I've ever eaten, cold and dry in places and far too oily.)

My chicken sandwich, with warmed-up spicy filling stuffed into warm bread, was fantastic. Too delicious to stop and photograph.

People were also devouring grilled meat on skewers. Most of the garbage bags being collected looked like this:

Glamour photography places had their spokesmodels out posing:

Chinese Name: 乐来锅魁

Location: Chunxi Rd, in front of Isetan and Ito Yokado

Three Kingdoms Hot Pot - 三锅演义

2009-12-28T18:52:00.000-08:00

Liu Bei, warrior and statesman, founder and first Emperor of the Kingdom of Shu. (Shu is an ancient name for present day Sichuan.) His tomb is in Chengdu, near Wuhou Temple.

Liu Bei is also the hero of the great historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (三国演义)

'Three Kingdoms' sounds almost exactly like 'Three Pots'. And so, the period decor of Triple Pot, a northwestern branch of a local hot pot chain:

Their specialty is the triple sectioned hot pot (三合锅). Half of the pot is spicy red soup, one quarter is a thin congee style soup, and one is mushroom. The rice and mushroom soup were both very slurpable though didn't do that much for the ingredients that were cooked inside. (Their website recommends cooking dumplings in the mild soups and a raw egg mixed with greens in the congee, which we didn't try.) The spicy soup had lots of seasoning, including a strong taste of cumin. It's very suited to a meat-heavy order:

Most of the hot pot ingredients were standard. The pork meatballs (肉丸) were very good. I really loved the shrimp paste (虾滑), the grey blob in the upper right hand corner of the picture below. We scraped it into each of the pots and it was like a shrimp dumpling without the wrapper. The lamb skewers (羊肉串）, which came frozen, were pretty tough but the thinly sliced fatty lamb (肥羊) was great in the spicy soup.

Their flatbread (飞饼） was very good. We got an order of pumpkin fritters (南瓜饼), which had peanuts and sesame inside, but they had been cooked (or maybe reheated) in way-not-hot oil and were greasy. Service was fine, though it was a busy night and the staff seemed a bit run off their feet. The cleaning staff in particular was having a hard time keeping up.

Chinese name: 三锅演义

Address: 青羊区贝森北路1号

Hong Kong Style Egg Waffles

2009-12-28T08:34:00.000-08:00

The other day I was looking for a warm snack on a chilly afternoon near Gong He Cun and was coming up short. The tapioca lady was not at her post, the congee seller was sold out, and I didn't have enough room for noodles or mao cai. Then I spied a vendor of Hong Kong style waffles (鸡蛋仔) inside the very new and still half-empty shopping complex.

I'd eaten these once before, from a street vendor. That time I got soft, deflated puffs tasting mostly of chemical fake dairy, like the smell of cheap theatre popcorn. I decided the snack was worth another try and ordered a sesame waffle.

The batter is poured into a special waffle iron that flips over. The waffle iron appeared to be Teflon coated, but some pieces still stuck:

I liked this version a lot better than the one I had tried before. The puffs were crisp enough to hold their shape and soft on the inside. They used artificial flavouring though. I would not hesitate to eat them again, even though they are pretty expensive at five yuan per serving.

Address: 红瓦寺街共和村商铺1-08

First floor of the shopping complex at Gong He Cun, a street which branches off of Hong Wa Si street.

Losing Your Soul to Noodles

2009-12-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

"During the Qing Dynasty there was a salt dealer in the city of Zigong named Hu. One day he bought several pounds of pork but carelessly dropped them into the mound of salt. He searched for the meat but couldn't find it. Later, a customer came to buy salt and they discovered the meat in the salt pile. Dealer Hu felt it would be a shame to waste the meat, so he chopped the meat into tiny pieces and mixed them into a large pot of noodles. The fragrance drew all the neighbors around to enjoy the new delicacy. Later Dealer Hu's business fell on hard times, the salt market closed, and he passed away.

However, Dealer Hu's son had learned the art of making soul hook noodles (勾魂面) and opened a shop styled 'Hu Style Soul Hook Noodles'. The taste was unique and the texture was wonderful. Business was so good that it continues until today. However, the Hu family technique is not shared with outsiders, so people outside Sichuan have little chance to taste this delicacy." (roughly translated from the Baidu encyclopedia)

Soul hook noodle shops are found all over Chengdu, and a few are called 'Hu Style Soul Hook Noodles'. I finally tried them the other day. The last thing I expected to see on top was rou song - pork floss.

However, once mixed up you couldn't really tell there was rou song.

These noodles were a little bland and soft, actually. I prefer ran mian, sujiao, zajiang, or any of the dozen other kinds of dry mixed noodles that can be enjoyed. However, I hope that I will taste a bowl of soul hook noodles worthy of the story some day.

The Yo Bar

2009-12-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

The new complex at Gong He Village, down Hong Wa Si Street is starting to fill in with small shops and restaurants. One of the new tenants is a place that claims to sell European style yogurt.

A cup of yogurt with diced melon:

The yogurt was pretty good, tangy and creamy. If you have been eating spicy noodles, mao cai, or barbecue at one of the establishments across the street this would be a refreshing place to stop afterwards.

Storefront:

Chinese name: 优蓓酸奶

Address: 武侯区红瓦寺共和村商业楼A1-13

Gong He Cun branches off of Hong Wa Si street.

Straight from the Horse's Stomach

2009-12-25T09:06:00.000-08:00

They had horse stomach at the mao cai place last time I visited, so I had to give it a try. They put my regular order of vegetables in the soup to boil for a few minutes, then added the horse stomach just at the end so that it didn't cook very long.

Horse stomach mao cai (马肚冒菜) and a side order of egg pancake (鸡蛋饼):

(This one is at an address-less stand in another city, so no address.)

The Hot Space - Ma La Kongjian

2009-12-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

Ma La Kongjian is a hot space in more ways than one; it's an extremely popular hot pot restaurant just west of the Sua Du restaurant and entertainment complex. The slick red, black, and yellow decor seems to intensify the buzz that always hangs around a popular hot pot restaurant. The army of servers in flame-splashed black uniforms look like a pit crew and work almost as quickly.

Yuanyang soup, white broth nice and rich and not too salty, red with a mild kick that got stronger as the night wore on:

The standard youdie of garlic in sesame oil shows their attention to presentation:

Some of the order, clockwise from top: beef, quail eggs, cilantro meatballs, shrimp dumplings, duck intestine. The meatballs and shrimp dumplings are not their strong point, but the beef and duck intestine were very good.

A bit more of the order. This picture is more jumbled, but I'll try clockwise from top again: enoki mushrooms, pumpkin, lotus root, tofu skin (under the lotus root), wood ear mushroom, feng wei, potato noodle, potato slices, cauliflower. We also got an order of shao fen (potato starch noodle) which swells up in the spicy soup and gets slippery and sticky and elastic all at once. Tough to grab with the chopsticks, but very delicious.

The standards of hygiene were noticeably higher than average; the fully equipped bathrooms were kept very clean and vacated tables were being cleaned with a squeegee.

Storefront:

Name: 麻辣空间
Address: 通慈路39号一江城花2楼

Mao Cai

2009-12-06T06:22:00.000-08:00

This mao cai place (not the one I previously posted) had something rather unusal on the menu.

"What does the horse stomach taste like?" I asked the proprietor.

"It's a lot like beef stomach. We're out today though, come back another time".

So I put together a standard vegetarian mao cai, but promise I will report on the horse stomach mao cai if I get a chance to try it. The mao cai pot during lunch rush, full of seven orders being prepared:

Kaffestugan

2009-12-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

This is my new favourite cup of coffee in town, in a nicely appointed and thoughtfully decorated coffee shop across from the Hong Wa Si theatre complex.

It's billed as a Scandinavian coffee shop. The menu, in both English and Chinese, is short and sweet and does a good job of explaining the offerings. There is a good selection of coffee and desserts, a few sandwiches, and some homestyle and vegetarian dishes. The coffee is decent quality, and the cake was served with real cream that was unsweetened. This felt like a miracle.

Clove studded oranges, part of the old school seasonal decorations:

Storefront:

Address: 成都市一环路南一段 9 号凯悦新城 2 楼 9 号

Stuff over Rice - 盖浇饭

2009-12-06T01:21:00.000-08:00

'Gai jiao fan' means a single serving of stuff over rice and is a typical offering of quick meal (kuai can) places. I recently noticed the phrase 'any stuff over rice for seven yuan' in fine print on the menu of one of my favourite homestyle places, which makes it much easier to order for one person.

A rough but good plate of Beijing-sauced shredded pork (京酱肉丝） over rice, a dish that turns up in many places in China.

Red Cooked Beef Noodles

2009-12-06T01:10:00.000-08:00

When you have ten yuan in your pocket and have to eat quickly, a noodle shop like this one on Qingyang Da Dao is exactly what you need. Unfortunately these places are getting rarer and rarer in the more developed areas of the city.

A very generous one liang serving of su jiao za jiang noodles, a side order of boiled cabbage, and a gratis bowl of noodle water to drink completely hit the spot for a total of four yuan. (This kind of noodle is 素椒杂酱面, 'red-cooked beef noodles' in the post title is the name of the shop.)

Address: 青羊大道 152 号

High Connections Coffee

2009-12-06T00:53:00.001-08:00

High Connections is a neighbourhood coffee place north of SWUFE and Metro. The light, art, and soundtrack combine to make the cosy space good for lingering, and small and large tables on the upper two floors mean you can come solo or with a few friends.

Their drinks and prices are all average. I haven't tried the food there, with so many very good local options in the area. Espresso:

They have English corners on Wednesday and Saturday nights so if you go then it's normal to have local people ask to share your table and talk.

Address: 成都市双清南路6号附A-20

Yong He Soy Milk

2009-11-22T03:25:00.000-08:00

Yong He Soy Milk is a chain with several branches in Chengdu that serve up basic and quality Chinese food in a comfortable, informal atmosphere. I don't often bring tourists here, but it's one of the first places I introduce to new residents. Since soy milk is their specialty, they open early and are very busy for breakfast and lunch. You can see many locals dipping youtiao (long, not-sweet doughnuts) into steaming bowls of soy milk at breakfast, or eating pot stickers and dumplings or fried eggs. Table sharing is very common at the busier branches.

At lunch, about a third of the tables seem to have an order of stewed ribs and rice (大排饭）. The meat is tender with just the right amount of richness, and you get half a stewed egg and greens with the order. They often run out.

The vegetable soup (素菜汤） is always a great indicator of kitchen quality. Note the fresh and clean greens, and how they use real soup broth instead of water.

An order of green pepper and beef fried rice (青椒牛肉炒饭). Not greasy, and with an excellent stuff/rice ratio.

This is the branch on Xi Da street, (2nd floor of Golden Hawaii building) showing their red and white logo and writing in traditional Chinese characters:

They charge not quite double what you would pay for the same items in a local place but the cleanness and quality of the food, served up by well-trained staff, make the prices very worth it. However, they are not always consistent between branches and I suspect a few are copycat restaurants. The above location on Xi Da Street is a solid choice. The one on Fang Cao Street is one of my favourites (they used to burn their soy milk a lot but have been better lately). The Kehua North Road branch is good and has the most gorgeous, silky soy milk ever. The branches on the east and south first ring and the branches in the Auchan supermarkets can be skipped. However, if I find myself hungry in an unfamiliar area of the city, I am pretty happy to catch a glimpse of that red sign.

Name: 永和豆浆

Addresses for a few of their locations:

Yanshikou, downtown: 锦江区东御街19号人民商场B1楼

Kehua North Rd: 武侯区棕北小区科华北路46号

Fang Cao Street: 武侯区芳草西二巷22号

Xi Da Street: 青羊区西大街84号金色夏威夷2楼

Guanghua Village Snack Street

2009-11-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

The busiest and most delicious snack streets are often located near schools and universities. The Guanghua Village snack street is just adjacent to the Sichuan Administrative College, and opposite the second south gate of the Southwest University of Finance and Economics. It extends a longs ways back from the street and is lined with small restaurants, sweet shops, and food carts.

Everyone on the street seemed to be munching on a ball or two of tang you guo zi (糖油果子）along with whatever else they were eating. I've never been a fan of this sweet, but these were served piping hot and were miraculously crispy outside and soft inside.

You can see the attention to detail just in how the raw dough is laid out. There are actually two manning this cart, one guy cooking and the other tossing cooked balls in sesame and taking orders. The guy with the wok was paying close attention to the temperature and condition of the sweetened oil, which was uncommonly clean. They were only 1.5 yuan per stick.

One of the specialties of Sichuan is 'iron plate' barbecue. You choose your items on skewers just like for regular barbecue, but then they are cooked on a flat metal grill. They are often partly deep fried first. Waertie barbecue, the shop with the greasy green sign, uses the deep fry method and then arranges your selection nicely on one of the trays. I picked up pea shoots, herbs and pork wrapped in tofu skin, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, zucchini, konnyaku, and some thin and very sweet sausage.

This is the after-school crowd, at about 5:30 in the evening. Later on the stinky tofu vendors and barbecue carts come out.

Location: Guanghua Village street, just beside main gate of Sichuan Administrative College
青羊区光华村街56号四川行政学院小巷

Back to the Tea Market

2009-11-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

Early this week I went back to the Wukuaishi tea market, in search of something to drink in cooler weather. I was specifically on the lookout for pu-erh tea and Yunnan red. On this trip I realized I'd only seen a tiny corner of the tea market before. It does span several streets and buildings.

One of the many tea culture sculptures in the area:

Workers picking through Tie Guan Yin in front a shop specializing in this kind of tea. We tasted some but thought the prices quoted were a bit high for the quality.

Tea Joy, which I referred to in a previous post, seemed way more expensive than before. If you come here, bargain hard.

Some bags of small pressed Pu-erh; Tibetan brick tea on lower left:

Besides tea there are all manner of flowers, herbs, and fruit for steeping. My friends bought rosebuds, lavender, and sliced licorice root.

Location: Wukuaishi Tea Market, close to Wukuaishi bus station.
五块石茶叶市场

Ladies and Gentlemen....

2009-11-04T22:36:00.000-08:00

May I present,

Dry-Fried Green Beans!