Old Town Taste raises bar for Chinese food
As you’ve probably noticed, gardens and produce stands are overflowing with the warm season’s finest: zucchini. So let’s celebrate by whipping up some delicious and easy recipes for zucchini and yellow squash. If you grow your own zucchini, you’ll likely have an endless supply for the foreseeable future. (Home gardeners are rumored to leave baskets of zucchini on doorsteps and run.) ❚ On the other hand, if your idea of “gardening” involves selecting summer squash from the produce bin at the grocery store or table at the farmer’s market, you’ll find it’s hard to pick one without a few tumbling onto the ground.
As the Chinese community in the East Valley grows, so too does the California-Arizona connection.
It’s been a wild few years, but on the grand scale, Phoenix is still getting acquainted with regional Chinese fare. Meanwhile, Southern California is becoming awfully crowded with the same. ❚ So, when it comes time to open his own restaurant, what’s the manager of a Sichuan joint in Irvine, California to do? Go east, young man. Xiaohan “Bear” Xu had heard of the growing Chinese restaurant scene in Phoenix. He’d also heard that much of it was subpar. So together with his wife, Janice Yu, and his business partner, Zuhao Wang, the trio chose south Tempe as the location for their first restaurant. After a few months of renovation, Old Town Taste opened on April 6.
Ho hum, another day, another new Chinese restaurant in the East Valley, you say.
Stop right there. You’re going to want to pay attention to this one.
On the southeast corner of Broadway Road and McClintock Drive, tucked into a strip mall two doors down from BP Street Café, Old Town Taste is making
some impressively refined Sichuan and Beijing-style food.
How the owner ended up in Arizona
“Bear,” as Xu likes to be called, hails from Shandong, a coastal Chinese province just south of Beijing. He first came to the United States as a high school exchange student, later studying economics at Michigan State and finance at Pepperdine.
Ditching a white-collar career to go run a restaurant may be an industry trope, but it’s rooted in truth and it crosses cultural boundaries. Studying finance was his family’s wish. Cooking and welcoming customers was his.
In the end, Bear’s dreams won out. He found himself managing a pair of Chinese restaurants in California, and looking to open his own.
Given Bear’s background, it should come as no surprise that Old Town Taste shows an unusual level of polish.
This is a snappy room — bright and gleaming with aqua banquettes, dark tables, and chairs and walls depicting a rural Chinese town.
What’s on the menu at Old Town Taste
The menu is deep and will take some time to explore. Cold Sichuan appetizers are on hold for maybe a month. The team is seeking just the right chef to spearhead that effort. But the rest of the menu is very strong, and the kitchen is already turning out some serious gems.
On the Sichuan side, they’re bringing the fire.
The house special spicy pot is one of those chaotic, throw everything in the pot creations, with ingredients like glass noodles, bean curd, lotus root, quail eggs and thick slabs of spam, all swimming in soupy ma la fire. A little more refined, if in the same wheelhouse, is Chen’s saute chicken, a dish of braised chicken wings with peppers and onions in a thick, rich gravy that hums with spice.
The Chongqing style spicy chicken may be one of the Valley’s best. Available with or without bones, the little nuggets are deftly fried to a volcanic crisp, buried in a pile of frizzled chiles, Sichuan pepper, garlic, scallions, and ginger. Eat some of them hot, but save some of them for later in the meal — the flavor changes completely as it cools.
Crisp lotus root is similarly treated with Sichuan spice, plied with slivers of sweet pork belly and served in a flamefired dry pot.
Highlights also include ‘gentler gems’
But while chiles are well-represented, the menu is also chock full of gentler gems, including a true stunner: the fishflavored eggplant strips. Yu xiang eggplant, as it’s also known, doesn’t involve any fish (a long story for another time). Rather, long Chinese eggplants, split lengthwise, are stir-fried with ground pork and a vinegary sweet sauce, heavy with garlic and ginger. This is one of the best versions singed to a I’ve had in some time, delectable, caramelized
crisp.
The squirrel-shaped fish, so named for cross-hatch cuts made to its flesh, is fried and doused with a bold sweet sour, suffering no lack of sugar but very wellbalanced. And a section of “iron wok” dishes includes a hearty, homey offering of spareribs — slippery, tender morsels paired with green beans in a thick, sweet, soy-forward gravy and served with flat corn cakes.
Barely a month into its run, succinctly stated, Old Town Taste is a place to watch very, very carefully. And hopefully the bar will remain high when the team heads back west — it wouldn’t be the first time a California Sichuan restaurant has dipped in quality after a sizzling start. But this much is already clear: if California wants to help build our local Chinese restaurant scene, more spots like Old Town Taste will be entirely welcome.
Old Town Taste
1845 E. Broadway Road, Tempe.
11:30 a.m.-2:45 p.m. and 5 p.m.-9:30 p.m. on Tuesdays through Sundays.
Cold starters $4-$7; mains $11$16; dry pots $10-$14; iron woks $21$27; specialty dishes $12-$30; vegetables $9-$13.
480-702-7101.