Dozens of white-coated cooks work in a display kitchen, pulling and pleating half-dollar-size circles of dough around large pink balls of ground pork. By contrast, Din Tai Fung, situated in a modern mall, is a sleek restaurant with comfortable booths, caricatures of Asian entertainers-presumably patrons-sketched directly on the walls, and an English-language menu. In Shanghai in 2003, however, we have only to hail a cab to get to the home of the ultimate soup dumpling.Ĭhina’s cities and villages are full of dumpling joints, usually scruffy stalls that open directly onto sidewalks or lanes. In the early 1960s, after immigrating to San Francisco, California, she opened one of the first Mandarin Chinese restaurants in the United States. In 1943, she and her sister walked, half starved, 2,500 miles across China ahead of the Japanese occupation. She is no stranger to long journeys and challenging quests. My guide is food maven Cecilia Chiang, whose nose for the tastiest morsels on the planet remains undiminished in her eighth decade. The site of this glorious epiphany is Din Tai Fung, a wildly popular restaurant in a developing commercial district about a 30-minute drive west of central Shanghai. I’ve eaten scores of different dumplings all over Asia, but nothing comes close to these, my first xiao long bao: tender, dainty, Shanghai soup dumplings. Then I polish off the velvety pork meatball and the resilient yet gossamer skin. Rich, searing hot juice gushes out-a surge of intense broth, a pure meat essence that mysteriously feels light on the tongue, like my grandmother’s best chicken soup times 10. I carefully lift one with the sides of my chopsticks onto a flat Chinese spoon, sprinkle it with mild, black Chinkiang vinegar and a few ginger threads, and take a tiny bite out of its noodle-like wrapper. A harried waiter slaps onto our table a bamboo steamer with eight small dumplings nestled coyly inside.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |