Out of the pot & into the steamer
Oakland’s Tastee Steam serves up easy, engaging food
Hot pot restaurants, featuring boiling cauldrons of broth centered on the table for cooking meat, seafood and vegetables, seem to be the rage. In January, Chronicle staff writer Jonathan Kauffman detailed the impressive growth of the hot pot restaurant in the Bay Area in the last three years. Every trend seems to beget another, and now it may be the steam restaurant.
Tastee Steam Kitchen opened in January at the edge of Oakland’s Chinatown, one of the first to capitalize on a trend that reportedly started in Guangdong and moved to Hong Kong and Singapore several years ago. The only other restaurant I know in the Bay Area that specializes in steam cooking is Fresh Elements in Daly City, which opened about a year ago.
Here’s how a steam restaurant works: Each table has a Plexiglas dome at its center that covers a perforated platform set over a bowl filled with rice. Throughout the evening as ingredients are steamed by waiters, the juices drip down and add more flavor to the porridge, which is eaten at the meal’s end. Each table has a built-in timer so each item is properly cooked.
Diners are presented with a doublesided laminated menu, and they use a special pen to place an X in front of their choices. The first decision is to choose one of the six rice mixtures (that will be the base to create the porridge), such as pork rib with pumpkin ($12/$16); cordyceps flower with chicken ($12/$16); dried oysters with black moss ($13/$18); or blue crab ($20).
Diners also choose from a half dozen dipping sauces, including sesame, satay, hoisin, onion ginger and — my favorite — soy spiked with dozens of tiny dried chiles. Waiters also present a stainlesssteel caddy often seen at a steakhouse where it holds the baked potato fixings. Here, however, it holds condiments for steamed dishes: sliced scallions, jalapeños, red pepper flakes and toasted garlic.
The good thing about steam restaurants, unlike hot pot restaurants, is that diners don’t have to do anything except choose what eat. The waiters handle the rest, punching in the required time and then serving the dish once it’s ready.
Choosing can be a challenge. The menu lists more than 60 items, from vegetables to the live prawns and geoduck displayed in tanks in the rear of the large restaurant.
Napa cabbage, okra, asparagus or spinach (all $6) are simply stacked on the plate. Other items require some preparation in the kitchen, including what turned out to be some of my favorites: squid, cut in ribbonlike strips tossed with lily buds; spicy Sichuan beef ($11); and ginseng-marinated yellow chicken ($16).
It’s impressive to see everything you've ordered lined up on the doubledecker cart at the end of the table. One by one, the waiter steams each item, generally starting with the seafood and ending with fresh vegetables.
A variety of ingredients can be steamed, and they come out better than I expected, especially the marinated meats.
Frozen pork dumplings (10 for $6) are steamed 10 minutes. They were fine, but not nearly as good as what you’ll find at many dim sum restaurants. What surprised me was the quality of the pork buns (four for $5) with their puffy exterior and the gooey, juicy barbecued pork in the middle. They were better than what I’ve had at some dim sum restaurants.
Some ingredients don’t take as well to steaming, such as beef rolled around long clusters of enoki mushrooms ($12). The eight packages were impressive on the rectangular platter, where the bright red raw beef wrapped the bottoms of the long, delicate mushroom stems, looking like a bouquet in a vase. When steamed, the beef turned gray and needed seasonings, and the sauces didn’t help much.
What was called a meat pie with lotus root (eight for $11) was actually thick slices of the raw vegetables thickly smeared with a ground-meat mixture that looked and tasted like shu mai filling. The meat was done, but the lotus root needed more than five minutes in the steamer.
Sure bets are any vegetable and seafood, because steaming brings out the unadulterated essence of these items. These include rock cod fillets with black bean ($12), which need just three minutes to bring them to succulence; razor clams with scallions ($13); and shrimp with Chinese yams (eight for $13).
At the back of the restaurant are aquariums that hold the shrimp that weigh in at about a quarter of a pound each, and long-neck clams, which are sold whole (price varies) but are prepared in the kitchen where the flesh is sliced paper thin so they need only one minute in the steamer. They are spectacular and would be just as good raw.
The live coral prawns ($38 a pound) are still squirming when placed on the platform and covered with the clear dome. As things heat up they try to escape. Fortunately, the steam soon blocks the view, and the next thing you see are the bright red crustaceans ready to be eaten.
It’s a continual parade of ingredients with each having a prescribed cooking time: a mountain of spinach that can barely be contained under the dome takes five minutes, ears of corn cut in pieces and daikon sliced into wide ribbon are ready in nine minutes. Pieces of raw chicken take only six.
Waiters will often tell you some offthe-menu items that are available, such as a whole bass ($18 a pound), with its roe intact. It was ready to eat in about six minutes. When finished, the waiter moved it to a platter and poured on a soy sauce mixture with threads of fresh ginger.
It’s clear they have worked out the timing, because in just about every case the food was perfectly steamed.
The sauces are the biggest letdown. With the exception of the soy with chiles, they all needed more punch. It would be better if more dishes were accompanied by different sauces like the whole fish.
After trying them all, I stuck with the spicy soy with added scallions, which went really well with just about everything.
The restaurant has an expansive, if incongruent, appearance with wood floors and terra-cotta colored walls. The brown leather booths that dominate the restaurant look impressive, but are so far from the tables that most diners have to perch on the edge.
The juxtaposition of dozens of motorcycleand car-related plaques — including a Route 66 sign — seem out of place, especially in relation to the fuchsia velvet high-back chairs with rhinestone buttons in front of some tables.
Monitors playing Chinese videos draw attention to the bar in one corner of the dining room. The wine list is modest, and there is beer and a half-dozen small bottles of sake.
Tea is served throughout the meal, replenished from a coffee carafe often seen in diners.
Rarely do you see tables with fewer than four people. This style of cooking generates a very communal feeling, which is great for family get-togethers.
Plus, while it may seem expensive in terms of some other Chinese restaurants, it is reasonable for a larger group, especially if you avoid the large prawns and whole fish.
While cooking over steam has a boring, good-for-you reputation, after my first visit I thought: Who knew it could be so good?
Plus, at the end each diner gets the bonus of a steaming bowl of porridge, flavored with everything that was ordered. With a couple dashes of soy sauce, it’s warming and satisfying.
Tastee Steam Kitchen proves that steam cooking is indeed tasty.