NEW CHINESE DISCOVERIES AWAIT ADVENTUROUS DINERS
When I was growing up in Nepean decades ago, our idea of Chinese restaurant food was fried rice, chow mein and chicken balls.
Now, there are myriad choices on Merivale Road for more authentic and varied regional Chinese cuisines. Yes, you can still get burgers, shawarma and chain-eatery staples. But neighbouring businesses offer not only now-familiar Cantonese fare but also newer-to-the-neighbourhood Chinese hot pot cuisine, sweet and oily Shanghainese food, hand-pulled Lanzhou noodles and more.
Most recently, in the Merivale Market mall, I’ve come across the Chinese Dragon BBQ, which, in spite of its mundane name, serves some harder-to-come-by food, including dishes from Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province.
A few kilometres to the east in a vintage Prince of Wales Drive mall, a time-worn eatery has become Delicious Sichuan Cuisine, where customized hot pots are just one specialty, along with dishes that are more common (kung po chicken, hot and sour soup) and less common (spicy pork kidney and small intestine, fried corn with salted egg yolk).
I’ve eaten at both of these restaurants in the last few months, and I single them out this week not because they’re excellent, but because they are interesting, different, uncompromising and reflective of the most prominent demographic shift that I see on our restaurant scene, in Nepean and beyond. Goodbye, chow mein and chicken balls, hello Xinjiang lamb skewers and stewed pork belly with tofu.
Chinese Dragon BBQ opened in January. It’s a new, 50-seat eatery with a few bright yellow walls and faux brick surfaces, plus a TV screen that usually shows Chinese pop videos via YouTube. The kitchen is out of view, but not out of mind, as the roar of burners firing up beneath the woks sounds like there is indeed a Chinese dragon in the kitchen. The disconnect between the kitchen noise and the pop videos can be a little surreal.
The “BBQ” section of the restaurant’s menu teems with more than 30 choices. Lamb, a favourite in northwestern China, was a crowd-pleaser here, whether we had skewers, chili-flecked and cumin-y and almost as fatty as they were meaty, or so-called “chops,” which seemed more like a flap of bone-in breast meat, but was toothsome and robustly flavoured, with more sesame and sweetness figuring in its mix. While we’ll have to try barbecued beef heart, beef tendons, clams or sweet potatoes at a future date, I can vouch for barbecued eggplant and potato slices that were pleasantly seasoned and commendably cooked.
Harbin enjoys a reputation for tasty dumplings, and Chinese Dragon BBQ acknowledges that with three choices. I’ve only tried the dumplings described as seafood, which were at least as pork-y as they were shrimp-y and Chinese chive-y, but they were impressively flavoured and juicy, with fresh, thick skins.
My homework told me that Harbin is also known for its sausages, and so I ordered some. It turned out my research was a little superficial, as Harbin sausages at the Chinese Dragon BBQ were cold, mild, garlicky and very similar to eastern European sausages. Had I delved a little deeper, I would have learned that the Chinese province of which Harbin is the capital borders on Russia, and in the early 1900s many Russians, Poles and Lithuanians escaped turmoil in their countries and relocated to Harbin, where their cuisines, including their sausages, now figure.
Based on the Chinese expats ordering beside me, the point of going to Chinese Dragon BBQ isn’t to go all out on barbecued items, dumplings and sausages, but rather to have a few skewers along with more rugged, massively portioned and quickly dispatched stir-fries and the like.
Sichuan noodles did not strike us as all that spicy, but they were hearty and well-made in a shortorder way. A more meaningfully spicy stir-fry of clams contained much tender seafood. A special from the white board, soft-shell crab fried rice, did not skimp on the crustacean and was high in salty oyster sauce flavour.
A dish of ribs, which we guessed had been baked or boiled
and then stir-fried, let us down, striking us as more salty than spicy. Better was a stir-fry of pork and eggplant.
The restaurant is not licensed, and it does not serve desserts.
At Delicious Sichuan Cuisine, which has a winding, practically windowless and a bit down-at-heels dining room, the food that sped out of the kitchen was similarly rustic and prone to big and even brusque flavours.
At lunch, I thought highly of the Chinese pork burger, with sandwiched cumin-y shredded meat in a house-made flatbread, and a small but umami-rich bowl of seaweed and egg drop soup.
At dinner, we enjoyed picking at the meaty morsels of the sir-fried lamb with cumin and the deep-fried spicy chicken with garlic and chili. Thick, salty and rib-sticking was the dish of stewed pork belly with squidgy, texturally pleasing knots of tofu skin. In a bowl of seafood with gluten, the shrimp and squid were tender and the green onion pancake was a fresh, if oily, snack.
Mutton and vermicelli soup was as rustic as it gets, with its opaque, peppery broth and unadvertised tripe as well as shreds of lamb. Ma po tofu delivered a big seam of heat in a one-note fashion, and could be more complex or more savoury.
The restaurant is not licensed and the dessert options are negligible. I wouldn’t go to either of these newcomers looking for refinement or even consistently pleasing meals. But they should reward adventurous diners keen on the thrill of discovery, who prefer real-deal Chinese food over chicken balls and chow mein.