Szechuan Restaurant

Szechuan Restaurant
Street 136
Right off Monivong, on the way to the Central Market.

There is a row of Chinese restaurants very near to Phnom Penh's Central Market. There are probably six or seven of them - I have not performed a full count - and they are all pretty popular with the city's Sino-Khmer population, and with Chinese business travelers. They all look about the same but you can tell the good ones by the number of patrons inside of them. The patrons will be drinking Chinese whiskey and shouting at one another regardless of the time of day, in the standard fashion of Chinese lunches, and they will probably be smoking, which I feel I should warn you about.

I seem to rotate my business between three establishments: Shan Dong, Tian Fu, and the Szechuan. I work nearby to the Central Market. And Chinese restaurants remind me of home. I am from Northern California, and it is a curious fact that inexpensive Chinese restaurants the world over look pretty much the same, down to interior decor, patrons, and menu choices. I step inside these places and instantly feel as if I am out for lunch with my father somewhere where we are the only white people and will get stared at. (I remain the only white person in these places, usually, but the getting-stared-at has lost all of its surprise for me whatsoever). I think the Shan Dong is the best of these, for somewhat sentimental reasons, but more on that later.

I will start with the Szechuan because I feel like it.

There was an elderly and fat Austrian man with white hair sitting at the round table with me. This was normal because Chinese restaurants have no qualms about seating strangers with one another. This is in the interest of commerce and not sociability, I think, but it is there all the same. I spent a moment or two trying to prevent eye contact since I was feeling antisocial but soon gave up. We began talking.

"I am on my holiday," he said, 'but I don't live here. My girlfriend - she is Vietnamese, and she lives here."

The menu was text-book size and there were two of them, some with old and over-exposed photographs of the food and some with a list. I felt pressured into ordering quickly and got rather nervous. I ordered some Chinese greens and a soup that I could not immediately identify the nature of, except that I felt a bit ill and decided I wanted soup. He chose Szechuan beef on a hot plate and some other kind of soup. We were both offered a small dish of very spicy cabbage - this was Szechuan food, after all, the spiciest of the Chinese cuisines - and some peanuts, as are offered at all the restaurants on this strip.

I supposed I had to speak with him.

He ordered a pitcher of beer, which was not all full, and he sent this back and got huffy, which was, I suppose, something an Austrian would do. The girl came back to rectify our order, confused and insolent about her confusion, but brought back the right amount of beer in the end. "I have been coming here for 15 years," the man said, vaguely, "to Cambodia. And always, it is getting worse. Perhaps the people are a little stupid, but before - they were genuine. And now they are just stupid."

I tried to imagine Cambodia 15 years ago. I thought of a New York Times article I had recently read about Phnom Penh not too long after the bad old times, with bones bleaching away in people's side-yards and a central market where no one could even get any soup, and livestock in the streets and a curious aura of deathly silence everywhere, as if half the people had left the room and decided they wouldn't come back any longer (but of course it was more horrible then that).

Probably it had been better 15 years ago, but still, it had been closer to the Thing, the Thing I often tried to think about when I walked around town holding a Diet Coke and looking for something to eat.

"Maybe they aren't stupid," I offered, "but only more comfortable."

"That may be so," he said. "All these tourists." (We who live in a country or visit it very often derive great pleasure from moaning about tourists. It is our shared and greatest pleasure).

"And how about the Chinese New Year?" I said, because it was that weekend.

"Everything is shut," he said, "and my girlfriend is with her mother. It is very dreary."

"Has she been to Austria?" I said.

"She has been," he said. The food had arrived.

"And did she like it?" I asked. The soup turned out to be a seaweed and tomato and egg concoction. It did not look very appealing, but I had ordered it and I would eat it. I found that it had a lovely, delicately briney flavor and was just the thing for someone working on a cold without much of an appetite, which I was. I fell to.

"Did she like it!" he said, as if this was a silly question. "Why, she loved it."

"But it was during the warm months," I said, my mouth full of seaweed. It was the kelpy kind without a lot of chew to it, the kind I really loved. The egg was egg, but not objectionable, and so were the tomatoes.

"Yes, we do not like the cold weather," he said. A royal "we."

The Szechuan beef he had ordered was an enormous serve in the cow-shaped metal dishes the Khmers fancy: it was very good. It was made of sliced beef with a lot of different kinds of peppers in it, including red ones, red bell peppers, and a green and not superlatively spicy one that reminded me of Spain's little pimientos de padron. There were also shitake mushrooms and onions and some other things, and the whole combination was a nice one. The Austrian man shared his food with me: he was friendly, in his way.

He was fairly deaf and could not really understand anything I told him too well, so I mostly listened. Mostly he told me about how Cambodia had degenerated and how his girlfriend was lovely. The food of Vietnam was better then it was here, and the people were kinder as well, but it was cheaper here, and this was his girlfriends home - so what could he do?

The peppers were making him sweat. The girl waitresses talked on their cellphones and remained insolent looking. (Having been to a lot of Chinese restaurants to the room, I should add I hold them to a different service standard then most. If no one slaps me in the face or blows smoke in my eyes when I am in the middle of my meal, then I am fairly content with Chinese restaurant service. But that is just me).

I began feeling sicker, almost a bit nauseous. At least the soup and the greens had helped. "I had better go to work," I said. He looked surprised. I had told him I worked here but I do not think he had heard me. "Yes, I'd better leave," I said. "Ket loy." (Change).

We split the bill without making eye contact - I did not want to pressure him - and I went out the door. I laid down on the couch at the office but felt all right again within an hour or so. I thought of his girlfriend, and being Vietnamese in Phnom Penh, and the small green peppers.

I would go back to the Szechuan Restaurant but I hoped I wouldn't have to talk to anyone next time, all the same.

Chinese Noodle Restaurant, Phnom Penh, Monivong Boulevard

Chinese Noodle Restaurant
Location: Street #278, Monivong Boulevard, Phnom Penh (Past the Caltex station. Keep your eyes open. You can figure it out).
Vegetarian Friendly: Enh. Sort of.

Chinese Noodle Restaurant is kind of a Phnom Penh institution. It makes sense: take a budget-fixated community and some cheap, good Chinese food and you've got true love. It's open pretty much all the time, is casual as anything, and attracts an interesting assortment of Chinese-Khmers, locals of all varieties, and the occasional tourist who thinks they are being edgy. It's good people-watching.

The menu is simple and, shockingly enough, revolves around noodles. The noodles are of the justly-beloved hand-pulled variety, and you'll see a somewhat disgruntled looking kid doing the pullin' near the doorway while you eat.

There's vinegar, soy sauce, and Beijing-style chili oil on the table for constructing your own dipping sauce. They will bring you free, tasty iced jasmine tea in an indifferently clean mug while you wait for your food. Everything in here is indifferently clean, but such is the nature of Chinese resturants. And much of China, if we're being brutally honest here.

A bowl o' duck noodles will set you back $1.50 and will fill you up for a while. The noodles taste fresh and are offset nicely by the broth, which has a good rich flavor this is even better when perked up with chili oil and some black vinegar. The duck is fine, albeit a bit sparse. If you're into duck skin, like most rational humans, you'll be satisfied.

I am a huge fan of Chinese stir-fried greens. This will become apparant if you read this blog. They make up about 80% of my daily diet. I am shockingly healthy. These are really excellent - they chop them up in into manageable pieces so I don't have to perform Hilarious White People With Chopsticks tricks for an appreciative audience, which often happens with immense and slippery chunks o' bok choy. (I am good with chop sticks, real good, but even I occasionally encounter unclimbable peaks).

$1.20 for a plate of dumplings? Yeah, I can do that. We went boiled this time. They are pretty good: plenty of leek and pork filling. I thought the wrappers were a little thick and chewy, though. I'd rate Zeppelin's delicate little pork n' leek dumplings higher. The pan-fried variety may change my assessment. Next time.

And there will be a next time, for I am impoverished, like this kind of food a lot, and the restaurant is really close to my place of employment. There will be many next times.

Red Lotus: Billy Ngo Makes Dim Sum Cool

Red Lotus Kitchen and Bar
2718 J Street
Sacramento, CA 95816-4314
(916) 231-0961


Red Lotus is the latest Midtown venture of Kru chef Buu "Billy" Ngo, whose fascinating riffs on Japanese food have won him a not-inconsiderable following at his J Street sushi joint. Red Lotus represents Ngo's decison to apply his creative hand to dim-sum, an Asian food genre that hasn't quite managed to transcend the old carts-and-Cantonese-verbal-abuse dynamic. (Course', that's part of dim sums charm for some of us infidels, but, regardless). The menu features a bunch of old dim-sum standbys updated for the late-night hipster army, alongside some specifically Ngoesque dishes. The result is a fun and undeniably interesting evening out on the J street strip, albeit with the ambience of P.F Changs done through some sort of hipster filter. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes we want to eat upscale dim sum in a nice clean place where no one will shout at us in machine-gun bursts of Cantonese while we desperately attempt to hold onto chicken-feet with plastic chopsticks, okay? Is that really so wrong?

(Good lord, the entire culture is obsessed with hipsters, my generation is obsessed with hipsters, we engage in hipster witch-hunts although it is entirely a given that we are all hipsters, that our status is both unchangeable and endlessly embarrassing. How sad.)


Green papaya salad with ika, carrot, mint, water cress, and fish sauce (6.50)

This is the kitchen's version of the dearly beloved som tum. It's a lovely palate-cleansing dish, but this ultra light version was barely there, both in terms of portion size and taste. I really do hate to use this phrase in polite company, but perhaps Red Lotus should contemplate kicking it up a notch. You know how we do.


Silken organic tofu with baby shrimp, avocado, snow crab, rice puffs, wasabi, sweet chili sauce, and a soy reduction (8.00)

Silken tofu doesn't exactly get most folks palms sweaty, but this was the standout dish of the evening. The creamy block of tofu melded perfectly with the salty baby shrimp, the sweet snow crab, and the creamy avocado. The various sauces on offer mean that every bite of this "salad" is different from the next, producing a real adventure in texture and taste. The soy reduction sauce should rightly be sold in bottles so fans can spread it on anything they desire, from fairy cakes to pliable Argentinean pool boys. Delicious.


Spiced beef marrow bone with Chinese red vinegar, Sichuan pickles, mustard, and crispy five spice flatbread (11.00)

Marrow bones have experienced a helluva revival thanks to the ongoing Offal Revolution, and Red Lotus is serving up the tastiest version I've found in Sactown. The fatty, chunky interior is seasoned with five spice and cooked until bubbly and delicious, served with various accompaniments and condiments. You're supposed to spread the marrow on the flatbread crackers and doctor it up with pickles, vinegar, and mustard, but I'm perfectly happy to denude these bad boys straight. You are doing it/Red Lotus wrong if you fail to order this dish. (I'll be in my bunk. With the marrow bones).


Salt and pepper soft shell crabs (11.00)

Salt and pepper soft shell crabs are beautifully presented in this dish, and they tasted pretty good too. Lightly fried and obviously fresh, I enjoyed the creamy and spicy sauce pool the little crustaceans were served in. They came out hot, which is the usual horrible and depressing downfall of soft-shell crab dishes.


Chinese broccoli in garlic oyster sauce (7.00)

Chinese broccoli sounds fairly pedestrian but is among the foods closest to my heart - the sort of thing I seem to cook on a tri-weekly basis to devour in front of my laptop in my college apartment. (Good lord, those days are over). Red Lotus serves it up with a soulful and extremely strong house-made garlic oyster sauce, and the result is pretty old-school Chinese delicious. Avoid if you're not the sort of person who does backflips for in-your-face servings of oyster sauce.


Mongolian glazed oxtail (7.00)

Oxtails are done beautifully in Chinese cooking, and these sweet-glazed oxtails were a lovely specimen of a classic dish. Very rich and very meaty, these guys justify the foodie world's recent and single-minded allegiance to less-charismatic animal parts. Tasty.


"Yee Sang" thinly sliced albacore with popcorn shoots, Chinkiang vinaigrette, and crispy garlic (12.00)

I think the Sacramento City Council actually shuts down your restaurant and breaks your knee caps if you fail to include at least one raw tuna dish on the menu. It's true.

Regardless. This was a perfectly fine Raw Tuna dish, and the addition of popcorn shoots (whatever those are) lent it an interestingly grassy flavor-kick. There's more interesting stuff lurking on this menu, though.


Pork and shiitake dumplings "Siu Mai" with soy cured salmon roe (6.50)

We decided to have some siu mai for dessert, served in the traditional and adorable little bamboo steamer. The kitchen brings out vinegar and Chinese mustard in twee serving devices for these little guys, which tasted no different from other dim-sum parlor siu mai I've had. This is by no means a bad thing.


Billy Ngo has done a fine job of domesticating dim-sum, turning China's beloved Sunday morning-scrum cuisine into refined bites suitable for both J Street-crawling foodies and those hipster palates only slightly dimmed by endless, endless packs of Pall Malls. (If you've been to China, well, you've seen how they smoke). The menu is interesting, and due to the restaurant's extreme youth, will doubtless be changing in interesting ways over the next year or so. If Ngo's creativity and competency at Kru is any indication of Red Lotus's upcoming trajectory, the future is bright indeed.

SINGAPORE CHILI CRABS: OH GOD YES

Singapore style chili crabs are my favorite food in the world. The confluence of fresh delicious Dungeness crabs, spicy-ass chili sauce, and snappy green onions is magical for me, pure alchemy, the sort of thing I can see myself chomping through endless servings of in some unnamed and undefined Elysian Field after I am dead and gone. I am considering a journey to Singapore for the primary purpose of eating crabs until I am throughly sick. I badger my poor long suffering father constantly to make them for me whenever I am home.

This has taken on the ken of ritual, to me: the visit to the local Asian market, where we jockey for position at the aquarium table (the one with the tank of live frogs) to get our live crabs, the purchase of a long French roll from the bakery next-door. The rustling of the live crabs in the plastic covered brown paper bag we receive them in. When we come in with the crabs and put them in the fridge, my mom inevitably repeating the old story about her cook in Hong Kong long ago, who enjoyed placing the crabs on the kitchen floor then going to get the family cat (always named Sam, as was family custom), who would become petrified with fear at the sight of enormous crustaceans on his very own kitchen floor.

















My dad boils the crabs until they stop scrabbling at the sides of the stockpot, of course, that's something you can't avoid. I'd like to believe there's something elemental there, like what a hunter supposedly feels after stabbing a wild boar to death or whatever, then sitting down for a nice dinner of its prepared and deliciously braised flesh. But I suppose it isn't really the same, with crabs from the Asian grocery store. Not really.



SINGAPORE CHILI CRABS


Dungeness crabs (as many as you'd like)
Onion
Red bell pepper
Green onions

SAUCE:
Tomato sauce
Sambal chili-garlic sauce (not sricha)
Garlic
Sugar
Salt
A little bit of corn starch


















To make the sauce, combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. This is a very subjective thing, so tweak ingredients according to your taste and personal proclivities.

Boil the crabs until they dead, then take them apart. The Chinese style of "whacking apart with a cleaver" works tolerably well in this instance.

Get out your big-ass wok and add the garlic, the onion, and the red bell pepper. Cook for a while until soft and fragrant.

Add the crabs en-masse. Stir-fry until they're just done (you don't want to overcook them). This usually takes around four or five minutes, but keep an eye on things. Once that's achieved, add the sauce ingredients and stir well. Finally, add the chopped green onions and serve.

I usually make Chinese broccoli, greens, or stir-fried long beans with pork to accompany this dish. Fried rice would also be a delightful addition to the menu. Serve with sake or beer, and don't forget to spread out some newspapers - you won't regret it.

Hoicin Cantonese Restaurant: Pea Shoots and Crab! Oh boy!

Hoicin Cantonese Restaurant
9555 Folsom Boulevard
Sacramento, CA 95827-1207
(916) 369-8915

Hoicin Cantonese Restaurant is an outpost of authentic Chinese food away from the usual Sacto strongholds of Broadway and Stockton boulevard. I'm glad its there: the menu is extremely interesting, the family who runs the place is friendly, and the space is unusually salubrious for a Cantonese joint. Prices are higher then bog standard for Cantonese food, but I think on the whole, its worth it.



On our recent visit, we decided to sample the steamed scallion chicken, a delightfully subtle Cantonese speciality. I've made it before, and it's not a tremendously difficult thing to prepare: the trick is boiling it with the right combination of spices, just long enough. I like the subtle anise-scallion-ginger-soy flavor infused into the chicken meat, and the yellow, unctuous fattiness of the skin - it's all gravy to me. In classic Chinese style, the chicken is whacked apart into about fifteen thousand pieces prior to serving. Don't bite down too fast.




This is the spicy eggplant seafood casserole ($12.49), your standard Cantonese style hot-pot in a claypot. This one was composed of prawns, scallops, squids, eggplant, ginger, and scallion in the restaurant's speciality sauce, and was about standard-issue for this dish. For me, I like this kind of dish but it gets a little greasy for my personal taste: in any case, Hoicin's version is high quality and full of a lot of different stuff.



Steamed pea-greens with crab meat egg white sauce ($14.49), one of my favorite vegetable dishes. Something about the combination of leafy greens and sweet crab meat with a bit of egg is delightfully comforting, possessing the particularly Cantonese combination of squashy and crunchy and oily in one dish. They give you a rather gigantic amount of vegetables and crab for your money, which is always nice (and reminiscent of mainland China, where ginormous portions are pretty much de-rigeur). It's a seasonal dish, so nab it quickly.

Keep Hoicin in mind if you find yourself seized for a desire for Chinese food away from the oases of Midtown and Stockton. I believe they do take-out as well, which means you've got no excuse for failing to upgrade from the usual chow mein and sweet n' sour emporiums that dominate the area.

New Station Chinese Food

New Station
1800 Broadway
Sacramento, CA 95818
(916) 446-6688

New Station is one of Broadway's Divey Ethnic Places, a restaurant genre near and dear to my heart, perhaps nearest-and-dearest. A tiny and bare-bones Chinese restaurant with late-nite hours and a long, odd menu, it's one of my favorite options when you just want some damn Chinese food sans pretension, preferably at a late hour. There's seafood tanks if you want the fresh stuff, hot-pot dishes, a nice selection of Chinese veg dishes and all the other accoutrement of authentic Chinese food. By no means fine dining, but hits the spot. It's in a bit of a rough area. Don't leave valuable stuff in the car.


Gigantic bowl of hot and sour soup. They do a pretty nice one here: lots of "stuff" in it, a good combination of vinegar and meaty flavors, not too gloppy or padded out with cornstarch.


Seafood in X.O sauce on a bed of bok-choy. X.O sauce is the chopped dried-seafood sauce developed as a luxury item in 1980's Hong Kong- it is named after the expensive cognac brand. I like the salty umami flavor of it and order it often. This was pretty good, though I would have preferred more scallops and shrimp and less squid-bits.


Chili shrimp - meh. We obviously wandered by accident onto the American-style Chinese food portion of the menu with this one. Ketchupy and sweet sauce with jalapenos and some canned Chinese water chestnuts, as well as some slightly fried and beheaded shrimp. Skip it.


Pea-greens. These delicate spinach like guys are fantastic when cooked in a light garlic sauce. A nice rendition. They contritely told us they "only had the big ones" but they served me just fine.

New Station is a nice, quick choice for real Chinese food on Broadway - and a small and intimate departure from the nuttiness of New Canton on a busy night. FIsh around the menu and pick the stuff that looks interesting, and you'll have a late-night meal for not a heck of a lot of money.

Just don't make eye-contact with the homeless guys outside. They don't like that.

New Canton: Sunday Dim Sum, Human Existence is Secured

New Canton Restaurant
2523 Broadway
Sacramento, CA 95818-2658
(916) 739-8888

Dim Sum on Sunday's is delightful, something natural. I remember going for dim-sum when I was 8 years old or so in Atlanta: there were cart-ladies, shrimp toasts with sesame seeds stuck to them, big squashy pork-buns, spareribs, on and on. The dining hall functioned at a volume normally restricted to air-force bases, and it was huge, at least to my underexperienced eyes. I have enjoyed dim-sum ever since. I've had it in one of the soul-centers for the stuff - Hong Kong - and was delighted to find the Sunday dim sum tradition is not particularly dissimilar from place to place. (There was nearly a riot over chicken buns at the joint in Hong Kong, of course... "They're from the country, they don't know better," our table mate informed us with a derisive wave - but riots are not a neccessity for dim sum enjoyment, not at all.)

New Canton is one of Sacramento's few dim sum outlets, and it does a pretty good job. There are the requesite carts, the crowds of loud shouting people, the fresh-fish tank, the jellyfish salad and steamed chicken feet and thousand-year-egg congee. Roast pork and duck are of course available for the masses.


Chicken feet, always about the goddamned chicken feet (fung zau).. They're pretty good here: large, flavorful, dipped in sauce. They are a total bitch to pick up with chopsticks, but one learns the technique eventually. You may recall the recent news story regarding the Chinese indignation that we might curtail their chicken-foot supply: American chickens have such "big, fat" feet.



Minced scallops in a fried dumpling. Pretty good, and thankfully served warm enough. Chilled fried stuff that's been circumnavigating around on carts for the past hour is never good.


Shrimp dumplings or har gau, a perennial favorite. Quite good here. They're one of those things that no one dreams about but are unavoidable in practice.


Seaweed salad and some sort of glutinous thing flavored with sesame I cannot identify. I happen to deeply enjoy glutinous things flavored with sesame, so this was a hit for me. Nice to have something chilled to go with the other dishes.


Fried salt and pepper shrimp (椒鹽蝦) head-on, the way God made em'. Very nice, and hot enough - don't bother if they are not piping hot. If you don't eat the heads, you're missing out on a delicious, fatty treat. Same principle as suckin' crawdad heads.


Fried dumplings with crab inside and an extremely crispy interior. Pretty good, though skip the sweet n' sour sauce, there ain't no excuse for that.


Spareribs with black bean sauce (pai gwhut). Bony, fatty, oh-so-comforting. Can't have dim sum without em'.


Char siu, or BBQ pork. New Canton does very good BBQ pork and duck - it's one of their specialities -and this was no exception, with a nice smoky flavor and a carefully balanced ratio of fat to meat.

Serve all this with copious amounts of tea, and all is right with the world. We found that going at noon beats the AM rush - a good idea if you're not interested in fighting to be heard over a sea of excited Cantonese conversation. On the other hand, sometime you are.

Capital Tea Garden: Midtown Chicken Feet!

Capital Tea Garden
Sacramento, CA
1110 T Street
Sacramento, CA, 95814
916-448-1218

The Capital Tea Garden is a diminuitive Chinese joint in downtown Sacramento. The menu sets it apart from its chow-mein and orange-chicken slinging compatriots by the addition of some authentic Chinese dishes. There's even dim-sum, available any time of the day, although you'll have to do without the carts. The decor alone lets you know you're visiting an authentic Chinese joint- as my friend Kevin said about the place, it is profoundly Hong Kong hash house in there.


A very hefty portion of chicken feet. I love chicken feet, although they're a real bitch to pick up with chopsticks. These were just okay. The black bean sauce was definitely not enough in evidence. But the phenom of being able to order a mega-huge portion of poultry feet in downtown Sacramento is a pleasing one.


Pea greens cooked in a simple ginger-garlic sauce. God, I love these suckers. They're fairly seasonal - can't get em' all the time - and they must be pounced upon and devoured when they are in. The flavor is a combination of stalky spinach and broccoli, with a verdant, fresh snap.


Mixed seafood in X.O sauce. X.O sauce, in case you were wondering, is a salty and umami ridden Chinese condiment, made of dried chopped seafood with chili, onion, and garlic. Formerly a prestigious condiment for Hong Kong's very rich, it's trickled down to the plebes, and is often marketed in the same fashion as French liquor in Asia (!). I highly recommend giving it a shot. It's only a teeny bit funky. This was a pretty good rendition, though the flavor of the X.O sauce could have been stronger.


Salt toast shrimp and asparagus, a perennial favorite around here. Sadly only okay. Why in the sam hill did they remove the heads? Don't they know those are the best part? I also thought there was too much batter going for what can be a charming ethereal dish. Still would be good if one is hungover. I suspect hangovers make up a healthy portion of the Capital Tea Garden's business.


A claypot with salty chicken, eggplant, and Chinese sausage. Aside from the obvious non-claypot status of this dish, it was quite tasty. I'm always big on Chinese casseroles, which tend to have a delightfully intense, unctuous flavor. Good and rich, although as always heavier on the eggplant then on the other stuff.

On the whole, the Capital Tea Garden is a pretty good choice for authentic Chinese food in the Midtown area. With cheap prices and a no-atmosphere sort of atmosphere, I can see myself returning again.