EatingAsia

Chengdu: Fire in the Kitchen

Well, that was quick -- or so it seems, anyway. We're back in Kuala Lumpur after ten days in Chengdu, more convinced than ever that this southwestern Chinese city deserves to be the next gastronomic "it" destination. (In March UNESCO awarded Chengdu the designation of City of Gastronomy.)

On this trip, thanks to an assignment Dave was working on, we had occasion to sample the food at a few of the city's finer (and more expensive) restaurants. We sat at beautifully laid tables, were treated to a few breathtaking presentations, and dined on some very well-prepared dishes.

I'm thankful for the opportunity. But those kind of places just aren't where our hearts lie.

This is what thrilled us when we visited Chengdu last January, what drew us back this time, and what has us already planning our next trip: a low-slung structure of unfinished bricks capped with a corrugated metal roof, on a quiet alley lined with iron rice bowl-era low-rise apartment blocks. Inside: a lone cook making magic one dish at a time.

His equipment: a single wok, a spatula and a ladle, and one burner.

Places like this are called "fly" restaurants. The term isn't much used outside of Chengdu, and it refers to the less-than-hygenic kitchens and dining areas of places like this. But we didn't find fly restaurant conditions to be any more distasteful than those at your average casual southeast Asian eatery or street stall. 

What fly restaurants do have is plenty of soul. These are the places to find real, honest-to-goodness jiachang cai (home-style cooking).

This is Mr. Zhang in his fly restaurant kitchen. Mr. Zhang prepared many meals for us; on some days we ate both lunch and dinner at his place. We hung out by Mr. Zhang's side, watching and listening and peppering him and his wife with questions. Mr. Zhang's been working his single burner for 11 years. He's a master.

Our first taste of Mr. Zhang's prowess:

 

La rou (Sichuanese pine bough-smoked and air-dried pork belly) with Chinese leek shoots and black beans, dofu gan (dried bean curd) with leeks, dried chilies, and Sichuan peppercorn, and qingjiao roupian, slices of pork stir-fried with fiery green chilies and garlic shards. Each dish was so deeply flavorful it could have stood on its own, accompanied by nothing more than rice.

And this was just Meal Number One. It only got better.

  

Now You See It, Now You Don't

In a couple of days we'll be heading back to Sichuan. I've been going through my notebooks from our January trip, and today I'm thinking about a lunch we ate in Chongqing.

Chongqing was a spur-of-the-moment sidetrip inspired by tales of deliciousness, and just plain curiosity. We never made it to Chongqing when we lived in Chengdu in the mid-80s (we never cruised up the Yangtze, either). But as a doctoral student in the late nineties I spent hours in a drafty archives building in Nanjing, reading scratched microfiche of documents which emanated from the city, which served as the provisional capital of the Guomindang-run Chinese Republic from 1937 to 1946. From these documents, and my readings on Republican China during its Chongqing era, I had a vision of an industrial coal smoke-saturated city tumbling down steep hills to the mighty Yangtze.

I wasn't too far off the mark. The air is probably better now than it was then, but the city -- or at least the part of the city that we stayed in -- appears to be permanently covered in soot. It was January, cold and grey and rainy and its streets, which really do wind down steep hillsides, were slick and uninviting.

Chongqing is re-developing rapidly and, as with most other Chinese cities, unattractively. But by accident we ended up staying near one of the Chongqing's oldest neighborhoods, whose twisting lanes and alleys hide a late Qing-era post office and a Republican customs house, among other historical treasures. And that's where we spent much of our two days there.

Two hours after dropping our bags in our hotel we found ourselves at a little shop on the edge of the neighborhood. I doubt that it had any pedigree, but it did boast a sort of ambassador, a friendly elderly busybody who'd been living in the neighborhood for decades. While we ate she drifted over to our table and away again, checking on our progress ("Oh, you really aren't afraid of chili, are you!") and then reporting back to the folks hanging out at the neighboring shops and to others who'd just been passing by when they noticed a couple foreigners feasting on noodles and stopped to investigate.

The lady running the shop was a superb cook, and the dishes on offer were just different enough from much of what we'd been eating in Chengdu to be interesting. We ate daoshao mian ("knife-cut" noodles) two ways: in a spicy broth with plenty of leafy greens and the same yellow peas we'd enjoyed with our "palm" noodles in Chengdu, 

 

and stir-fried with bean sprouts and chunks of lamb.

The noodles were a pasta-lover's dream: thick, uneven, and rough-textured with lots of elasticity and chew, fantastic in soup but even better stir-fried, having sucked up all the smoky flavor of the wok and the richness of the meat.

The food in Chongqing is said to be even more fiery than that in Chengdu. We certainly warmed right away to the lajiao (chili paste) served with our noodles. It was extra chunky with a definate roasted, almost burnt edge and a hint of black vinegar sourness. We added it to our noodles in pingpong ball-sized spoonfuls.

 

Over lunch Dave and I congratulated each other on this find. This little eatery, we knew, would be a place we'd return to on our next, hopefully longer, visit to Chongqing. The city, ugly on the surface, was seeming more and more intriguing.

 

As we were leaving I asked the shop's ambassador for a street address.

"It doesn't matter, this restaurant won't be here next week," she told me. "Didn't you notice that many of these buildings are vacant? The whole area is scheduled for redevelopment."

 

I suspect that if we make it back to Chongqing this time what we'll find in its place is a massive hole in the ground.

It's China: now you see a neighborhood, now you don't.

For Photo Buffs

I know some of you (many of you) out there are into photography, so I thought I'd alert you to Dave's review of the Ricoh GRD III, which he's been testing out for the past few weeks in a variety of situations. Dave has not been a point-and-shoot guy for years, but he's impressed by what this little camera can do.

Read his low-down on the machine's pros and con here.

1 Coffee Shop in George Town

This Los Angeles Times article about 1 Malaysia, the Malaysian government's ongoing campaign for national unity, brought to mind a conversation I had last week with a young Malay from KL. I mentioned Penang, and he -- who hasn't spent much time there -- said, somewhat dreamily "I have this image in my mind of Penang as this place where 1 Malaysia really exists."

Penang is no La-La Land of racial and religious harmony. (Is there a place in the world that is, these days? Certainly not my home country.). But in some respects this young man's misty water-colored image of the place isn't completely off the mark. In Penang there is a certain air of live-and-let-live, and a level of social mixing that sometimes appears to my (yes, foreign) eyes absent this far south. Coming from KL, Penang feels different.

I don't know if this can be pinned to history or location (a Chinese proverb about how being far from the capital allows for thinking and acting outside the 'party-line' box comes to mind) or a sort of island mentality. Maybe it's in the water. But Penang-ites recognize it themselves.

"We're not like those [Fill in Race, Religion, Political Party Affiliation, etc. Here] down south," I've been told by many a local. "No one tells us how to think. We do things our own way."

 

On the most superficial level you see it in places like the ground-floor coffee shop of the Rio Hotel, at the edge of George Town's Little India. Three hawker stalls run by a Malaysian-Indian Muslim and two Malaysian-Chinese husband-and-wife teams, mee jawa and mee goreng cooked up within sniffing distance of char koay teow and sliced pork-topped wonton mee (Penang-style, with deep-fried wontons).

 

The coffee at the Rio is good (though not as good as Toon Leong's) and the pleasant proprietor, son of the shop's original owner, always asks if we want 'sweet milk' or 'regular milk' when we order kopi peng (iced coffee) -- a nice touch.

The large and airy corner space attracts cross breezes and a mixed crowd -- folks in shirt-and-tie on their way to work in one of the nearby banks, elderly couples who've been patrons for decades, domestic tourists, housewives, gaggles of retirees in exercise togs on their way back from power-walking the circumference of Fort Cornwalis. And occasionally you'll see wonton mee-slurping Chinese elbow-to-elbow with Malays indulging in a plate of greasy (but delicious) mee mamak and Indians supping on char koay teow. 

 

Long before we moved to Malaysia I read an article which quoted a Malaysian thus: "We have our differences but we can always come together at the table." I don't see that sentiment in action often here in KL. But you don't have to look far to find it George Town.

Granted, it's just noodles. Sharing a coffee shop or even a table won't change minds or erase prejudices, or solve whatever troubles the nation. But perhaps it's a start?

Where School Farms Aren't Such a New Idea

A Victoriano de Costa student shows off his schoolyard-grown daikon

(I've just been going through some old files and photos. You'd be amazed at the number of posts that slip through the cracks. I'm going to try to post one a week. Here's the first.)

Long before Alice Waters introduced the concept of students growing their own food in Berkeley kids were putting hoe to soil at schools in the Philippines. School farms in the island nation go back at least to World War II. Many were, and still are, born of necessity. Others are started not only to feed kids but to teach them life skills and engender a respect for farming.

Didn't know about this? I'm not surprised. We wouldn't know about the Philippines' own 'edible schoolyards' either had we not stumbled upon the farm at Victoriano de Castro Elementary School in Santa Rita, Pampanga province while on assignment there in December 2007 for Saveur magazine.

We were in Santa Rita to observe the laborious, time-consuming process by which young rice is transformed into the Pampangan seasonal specialty duman.

On our way from the paddies from which the rice was harvested to the shed where it would be threshed, roasted, and pounded we passed a U-shaped school building whose entire center courtyard -- and all of the concrete planters fronting the classrooms -- was given over to vegetable beds. It wasn't yet 7:30 in the morning and in amongst the rows enthusiastically digging, weeding, watering, and harvesting were dozens of uniformed students.

V. de Costa's mini-farm occupies its entire courtyard

What a sight! And certainly not one we're familiar with from the United States. We entered the schoolyard, began nosing around, and were eventually introduced to Head Teacher Carazon Yaya and agriculture studies instructor Ergado Yaya, who were happy to show us around.

Concrete planters are also devoted to edible plants

V. de Castro was founded in 1959 and built on land donated by the owners of an agricultural bank in Santa Rita. At the time of our visit the school's farming program had already been in existence almost twenty years.

Even though Pampanga is a largely agricultural province (rice and sugar are the main cash crops) "many of our children here at the school do not come from farming families," Ms. Yaya told me. "But we want to be sure that they learn to respect the land and the farmers who work so hard to grow our food."

The school has a room dedicated to agriculture classes. Its rear window looks over rice paddies stretching to hills beyond. There, the kids learn the names of vegetables and grains and herbs, talk about rotation and fallowing and seasons and weather, and plan the next planting's crops.

All of the work on the V. de Castro mini-farm -- from preparing the land to washing the just-harvested vegetables -- is done by the students, except for school holidays when teachers and other community members may lend a hand.

The students do all the work on the farm, and take fresh produce home to their families as a reward

The kids' reward for all this hard work? A pleasant break from sedentary book work in the form of time spent outdoors engaged in physical activity. The pride in literally seeing seeds that they've sown bear fruit. The freshest possible produce to take home to their families.

 

And in December 2007 there was another possible reward in the offing: V. de Costa was up against two other schools in a competition for the Best Farm School in the Philippines (unfortunately we never learned whether or not V. de Costa claimed the prize).

We left the school with a gift: bunches of perky mustard leaves, long, skinny eggplants, shiny green bitter melons, and a few taut-skinned daikon radish.

 

The vegetables turned up later, as lunch.

Daikon radish and mustard were made into a piquant pork sinigang (sour soup), the bitter melon and eggplants were blanched and ready to dip into balo-balo (pungent fish fermented with rice -- an acquired taste but absolutely addictive once you're 'there'), and more mustard leaves were served fresh, for wrapping around more balo-balo and bits of crispy fried tilapia.

(This meal might serve as a rebuke to those who deride Filipino cuisine for its 'lack of vegetables'.)

In two weeks of over-the-top fantastic meals, most from the kitchen of a skilled Pampangan cook, this was among our memorable meals. Seeing V. de Costa's students diving so whole-heartedly into the work at hand certainly put a feel-good sheen on the vegetables that made up our lunch.

But there's no doubt that it was some of the most flavorful produce we've eaten anywhere, ever.

 

Victoriano de Costa Elementary School's students cum farmers in their 'fields'

Where Breakfast is THE Meal of the Day

Say 'cheese' - otlu peyniri (herbed cheese) is the centerpiece of the Van kahvalti

When we headed to Turkey we had vague notions of making it to Van, in the far east. Those thoughts took on a certain urgency after we sampled the breakfast spread at Van Kahvalti in Cihangir (in Istanbul's Beyoglu district).

Turkish breakfasts are enormous, and wonderful, to start with. Van kahvalti (Van-style breakfast) is just that much huge-er and more over-the-top (cheese and clotted cream in the same meal). At the center of any Van kahvalti are local cheeses, and first and foremost among these are otlu peyniri, a lovely white cheese flavored with herbs foraged in the spring and preserved in brine.

We did make it to Van, and we're dying to go back. We delve into the Van kahvalti phenomenon, visit Van's cheesiest market, talk otlu peyniri, and ponder the Istanbul's relatively recent Van kahvalti craze in our latest piece for Zester Daily.

There's a slideshow of course. And info -- with a recipe for kavuk (a delicious wheat flour concoction) -- on how to breakfast the Van way. Read it here.

An abridged Van kahvalti, delivered: kaymak and honey, bread, warm milk, cheese (wrapped)