chinatown

My girlfriend has always said that she doesnt like Chinese food. What she means by that has been the answer to an ongoing quest of mine for the past three years. Besides her very early childhood, she’s been in areas of the country with a significant Chinese population. Areas with rich concentrations of Chinese restaurants and exposure to Chinese food. While she was born in Vermont, she spent some of her adolescence on the West Coast, in the Bay area- dense with Chinese. She has spent the majority of her life in New York, specifically downtown Manhattan and Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She’s also been to mainland China and dined out there. When pressed on the matter (by me), she can pinpoint the flavor combination of ginger, garlic and soy sauce as the reason for her not-quite-aversion to that cuisine. It’s a combination that has brought me consistent satisfaction throughout my life.

I, also, spent the majority of my childhood and formative years in New York and I remember being deeply happy going to the Hunan Palace or the Szechuan Garden with my parents and sitting down to a meal - gloppy egg drop soup, greasy egg rolls with rivers of duck sauce, pork or shrimp fried rice, beef with broccoli and KungPao chicken, and of course the fortune cookies at the end, usually on a plate with orange segments and the bill. This later metamorphosed into pint containers of lava-like hot and sour soup, more greasy shrimp rolls and a combination platter of four chicken wings (fried hard) on a bed of pork fried rice, all doused with hot sauce. This would be packaged in a brown paper sack and carted off to my bedroom and devoured as fast as possible.

For at least half my life I thought this was Chinese food. Heavy with salt, fried, laden with MSG, thick with corn starch. And it is, to a very real extent, in alot of cities . It wasn’t until I became a cook that I began to be exposed to the different permutations of Chinese cookery, and then only slightly so. I started to seek out alternatives to the take-out joints all over every borough and made my way to Chinatown in New York. Mind blown. By the smell of fish and the sight of frogs in barrels and the sound of cleavers rending carp in two. By the shops along Grand Street, full of herbs and vegetables and fruits I’d never known. I’d wander in the streets in my rubber Birkenstock clogs buying stuff. And I was bold so I ate a lot. I found 69 Bayard Street and Wo Hop and Great NY Noodletown and the Nom Wah Tea Parlor on Doyers Street. All classics I think. I also found the Fuzhou houses on Eldridge and the dumpling spots on Elizabeth. There’s alot of different places and I tried to eat at all of them. And at all the ones I went to the combination of ginger, garlic and soy is used.

And I use the combination- in marinades for steak and fish ( I have a very good memory of being fed a steak by Chris Beischer at the Mercer Kitchen after a trail there and being surprised at how delicious the NY strip was. It had a ginger garlic soy sauce and I’m sure it still does.) I use it in dressings. I like the way the flavors combine in a pan reduction with a little palm sugar. Or orange juice. To me it tastes great. I avoid using slurries (corn starch thickeners) when I make anything resembling a stir-fry and I find that I don’t miss it. This texture is another reason my girlfriend attributed to her dislike of Chinese food. We don’t order take-out but I find that I can recreate the majority of the aspects that I crave at home while avoiding the ones that are unpalatable to her. Win, win.