Surprises from northern China
Noodles, buns, crepes well-made at Xiang Zi, and the won ton soup is a delicious knockout
I was fortunate to have had lunch at Xiang Zi this week with a friend who can read Chinese characters.
It’s not that I’d have been lost without him. The half-year-old restaurant has a bilingual menu that lists items in Mandarin and reasonably good English. But the handwritten marginalia on its photocopied pages gave me extra incentives to order a few dishes, including a bowl of won ton soup that struck me as right up there in the annals of all the won ton soups I’ve eaten, both home- and restaurant-made.
“The bowl is very big and has lots of wontons in it,” my friend translated, happily reading the menu’s forthright annotation. Not only was that description accurate — the $8.99 bowl was easily shared among three — but the soup was simply a knockout. It contained more than a dozen pork dumplings that were meaty and thin-skinned, its broth was splendidly savoury yet light, and its atypical-to-me ingredient was a generous scattering of seaweed that sent the soup’s umami level deliciously soaring.
Seaweed is something I hadn’t come across during decades of devouring won ton soup. But it wasn’t the only surprising or unique aspect of Xiang Zi.
A small, minimally adorned but handsome place in the corner of a crowded parking lot’s mall in Parkwood Hills (the Latin Bistro was formerly here), the restaurant is run by Northern Chinese expats from Beijing and Tianjin, a large city about 150 kilometres southeast of Beijing. They offer a nicely contained menu of very affordable items. Here, the emphasis is on made-to-order steamed buns, a common street food in Tianjin, and noodle dishes, but other intriguing dishes are worth trying too.
During my three visits to Xiang Zi, we’ve enjoyed some unpretentious but well-made dishes with appealing, direct flavours.
We’ve tried just two of eight cold appetizers — a small dish of sugared, vinegared cucumber slices ($3.49) and a mound of bean-curd-skin “noodles” with a lightly sour dressing ($3.49). Both were refreshing, but weren’t must-orders. Maybe the beef shank and tripe appetizer, or spicy pigs ears, would have impressed us more, but truth is, we were prioritizing buns, noodles and more.
All the more reason to go for the dumplings is the fact that the first thing a customer sees upon entering Xiang Zi is the workspace, behind a window, where staff make dumplings to order.
We’ve tried several varieties of steamed buns, all containing porky stuffings augmented with green onions, minced leeks or sour cabbage or a bit of shrimp and leek ($11.99 to $13.99). Arriving piping hot in their steamer and eight to an order, the buns were fluffy-doughed and tasty, and a dip into a saucer of black vinegar, perhaps spiked with chili oil, added extra zing. For those who like crispness, the buns can also be ordered panseared for an extra dollar, but they then are also less fluffy and more chewy.
We can recommend both generously portioned noodle dishes here. Beijing noodles ($11.99) were thick and ropy and came with an array of accessories — bits of pork belly in a pungent, salty sauce that relied, I think, on fermented black soybeans, minced raw garlic, coriander leaves, julienned radish and cucumber, and more soybeans. The hodgepodge was hearty and filling.
Much thinner and pliant noodles, available hot or cold, came doused in a creamy sesame sauce ($8.99), and with strips of chicken as an option for an extra dollar. There was a bit of Szechuan pepper sting to the sauce, but only in passing.
The sesame sauce appeared again as a dip for items ordered from their own menu page for what struck us as a more modest, dry version of the hot pots served at other Chinese restaurants. We enjoyed vermicelli, wide, bean-curd-skin noodles, deepfried tofu puffs, shrimp balls and black fungus, seasoned with bits of chili and Szechuan pepper, but gently so.
Because a recent New York Times article expounded on the “joys of jianbing,” based on a roving reviewer’s samplings of the griddle-cooked Chinese crepe, I was keen to try Xiang Zi’s jianbing ($3.50), which is a rare example of the dish in Ottawa.
Like the dumplings, the crepes were made in view of customers, and it was a fun to watch close-up, from seats beside the window on the workplace. A staffer — in fact, on three visits it’s always been the same woman — swirled a scoop of batter onto a circular griddle and then broke and spread an egg on it. Hoisin and chili sauces added sweet and spicy layers of flavour respectively, while green onion and cilantro contributed vegetal brightness. Then came, fried won ton wrappers, for crunch. If you order optional sausage, you get — surprise! — pieces of hotdog, not that we complained. Once it’s ready the crepe is folded and brought to the customer.
The Times story and other reports online make it seem like jianbing is a foodie trend waiting to happen, with food trucks and the like North Americanizing the Asian staple with more deluxe fillings. We liked but didn’t love our jianbing at Xiang Zi, but we look forward to trying other renditions. Above all, we thought that the crepe needed to be eaten quickly, before sogginess set in.
Stir-fried Chinese “salted” pancakes ($9.99) came as a bowl of substantial, savoury, doughy strips in a flavourful brown sauce, mixed with bits of pork and cabbage. Here, “savoury” might have been a better word than “salted” on the menu.
Millet congee ($2) was a small bowl of simple-as-it-gets porridge. It made us think of couscous in water. I knew people who had a similar, rice-based slurry as a meal-ender, but at Xiang Zi, rightly or wrongly, we treated it as a palate cleanser.
The restaurant’s friendly servers have tried to answer questions about dishes, although with mixed results. Of course, I’d have received better answers had I queried in Mandarin.
Xiang Zi is not licensed and it serves no desserts. The sound system has played Chinese pop music, including in one instance, a song set to the strains of Auld Lang Syne, which was yet another pleasant surprise at the premises.