For some reason, I’ve always had more of a soft spot for southeast Asian food. Chinese always seemed sort of blah, run of the mill. But I think these misgivings come from the fact that Portland is no mecca for Chinese food. At 16, my first job was bussing tables for a Chinese restaurant called Hunan Garden. My knowledge didn’t extend much further than kung pao chicken and egg foo young. I got hooked on what I thought were fancier things like hot and sour soup and mu shu pork. I also went a little nuts collecting fortune cookie fortunes, which I still have in a bag somewhere.
I used to have to pour boiling hot sweet and sour sauce into little plastic take-out container after little plastic take-out container back in the hardly-up-to-code kitchen. To this day, the smell of bleach and sweet and sour makes feel kind of nostalgic (bad smells have a way of doing that–whenever I think of wet dog/Juicy Fruit gum/cigarette smoke, my grandma comes to mind. No, the woman isn’t dead.). I also used to get sent across the street to Donut World to get my boss cups of coffee with five sugars (we didn’t make coffee). This is where Rusty, one of the many high school pariahs worked. He was a pimply, hefty guy who always wore camouflage (I can’t remember if he was in the ROTC of if it was a fashion choice). He asked me to the prom on one of these coffee runs. He’s the only person who ever asked me to a school dance, and yet I still couldn’t say yes. Life is rotten that way–the ones you like shoot you down and then in turn you must become the shooter. All this fun, and for $3.35 an hour.
What I’m getting at is that since I’ve been in NYC, I’ve figured out that Chinese food is pretty interesting (and that first jobs are never ideal–or the second or the third…). Sure, there’s an unremarkable hole-in-the-wall take out place on every block that does 90% of their business making fried rice and chicken wings. But then, there are all the other gems (often holes-in-the-wall, as well) with amazing delicacies. Crispy roast duck, suckling baby pigs, salt-baked soft-shell crabs…and NOODLE SOUP.
I’ve become so addicted to New York Noodle Town it’s not even funny. I just happened to end up there on Chinese New Year and figured that the insane crowd was due to that fact. I’ve since discovered that it’s always packed and for a good reason. I can’t stay away from the roast pork wonton noodle soup. Every bit of it is tasty, the pork, the noodles, the tiny bits of broccoli, the bulging wontons stuffed with shrimp, even the broth itself. And at $4.50 for a huge bowl, it’s hard to beat. I know there must be other noteworthy noodle shops in town, but when you find something you like it’s hard to branch out into the unknown.
I was intrigued by the donut-like things people were eating with their soup and congee. They appeared to be long crullers. It didn’t seem like non-Asians ordered them and I didn’t want to look like a rube by asking for them the wrong way, and I didn’t know what to call them since they weren’t on the menu. I finally broke down one night and asked for “that long bread.” The waiter said in a heavy accent that made it really absurd, “fried dough!” So, I guess they call it fried dough–it’s the simple things, you know?
Then this obnoxious Dutch oaf at our table (you almost always have to share tables, which can be hit or miss depending on the company. This particular night we had a rude, beastly Dutch couple to our left and some bratty know-it-all Asian food aficionado college kids to our right. The two groups became engaged in raucous conversation showing their flair for foreign languages and kept sharing and passing food over us. I almost lost it) decided he should have fried dough too and didn’t even end up eating it, which I thought was blasphemous. I’ve since discovered it’s really called youtiao. Not surprisingly, fried dough is pretty greasy and nothing too special, but you feel pretty cool dipping a doughnut in your soup.
I’ve always been curious about what people must eat for breakfast in foreign countries. I don’t have definitive answers on every country, but this Breakfast in China site is a start. And of course fried dough plays a role.
Comments