If you love Chinese food....

Being of Chinese descent, I am often asked which Chinese restaurant is the best.

And being of Chinese descent, I counter with another question, "What do you mean by the Best?"

Indeed, I continue, it is "not very Chinese" to even ask which is the best Chinese restaurant.  For one thing, there are so many kinds of Chinese cuisine, as many types as there are provinces.  Do you mean the best Hainanese? The best Cantonese? The best Shanghainese?  For another, unlike Western cuisine that has much room for innovation, Chinese cuisine, like Chinese Art, premises perfection upon mastery of the original recipe created by court appointed cooks and handed down through generations.

On further thought, at the level I have been exposed to, that is say, middling between peasant and merchant stock, it matters more if a Chinese restaurant uses genuine, authentic and only the FRESHEST ingredients. (No bouillon made stock allowed.)  It matters more too that a dish is cooked well, and SERVED PIPING HOT. ( If it's not going to be hot, why cook it at all? Why not eat it raw?) It matters most if it tastes good but DOES NOT COST A KING's RANSOM, but only a princely sum at most. (So goes the Chinese theory of relativity.)

Conventional wisdom also has it that a Chinese restaurant is worth it's weight in gold if it is frequented mostly by Chinese patrons, perhaps because most Chinese would seem to know if the basic criteria are met...authentic, freshly harvested ingredients, well cooked, served hot, priced well.

Well, I could name a few restaurants in Manila that meet these criteria for certain dishes, but I wonder if I am doing a disservice to Chinese cuisine as a whole by generalizing my comments.

Perhaps, instead of telling you which restaurant is best, let me tell you of the meals my father introduced to me as basic dishes which a Chinese cook worth his salt, and by extension, a restaurant that seeks discerning and well heeled patrons should be able to do well, to merit continued and loyal patronage by the discriminating, and extremely fastidious Chinese palate.


My father lectured to me, that in Chinese cuisine, all it took was a handful of certain dishes by which the Chinese rated a teahouse or restaurant on how well and faithfully it prepared them according to how they tasted "in the old country". (Furthermore, he reasoned, "If they couldn't do these basic dishes well, how could they possibly be expected to do the bigger dishes?")

A typical meal, he averred, as distinguished from a lauriat, consisted of a soup, a vegetable dish, a meat or seafood dish, and of course rice or noodle.

Soups of choice included, spinach seafood soup, wintermelon soup with dried scallops or bamboo pith, hot and sour soup, depending on what time of year it was...and what the weather was like.  One special soup was shark's fin, now frowned upon and not politically correct, but once upon a time, considered a prized elixir of youth.  (When I asked my father why it was considered so special, and why it was an elixir of youth, he dead panned, 'Have you ever seen a wrinkled shark?')

Vegetable dishes ranged from simple greens like polonchay or broccoli, or kailan, or bokchoy sautéed in high heat with lots of freshly chopped garlic.  There was of course, the more sophisticated lohanchai, named after the monks called the lohans, for whom the original dish was named and prepared, an all vegetable, vegan dish.  There also was tofu, fried, steamed or braised, on its own or combined with meat or seafood.


Meat dishes were usually sweet and sour pork or tiem shuen gee yok,  or beef tenderloin, or steamed soy or white chicken.  Seafood dishes of choice were usually the crystal prawns with shrimp sauce, or steamed garoupa ( or grouper)  or if you wanted to get a little experimental and fancy, braised boneless eel or sea mantis sautéed in special or XO sauce.

And of course, steamed rice, glorious rice!  We rarely had fried rice with the viands, finding steamed rice a better way to savor the flavors of the dishes.  With apologies to birthday noodles, the litmus test was beef or seafood with hofan, flat noodles that resembled oversized fettuccine.

I learned that most Chinese dishes are cooked quickly over very high heat.  Preparation is just as quick, with long cooking times only for broth and deep braised dishes like Pig's Leg, herbal soups, to name a few. And looking at it in hindsight, Chinese cooking looks deceptively easy.  Yet perfection is a well orchestrated confluence of so many factors, including the way the ingredients are cut. All Chinese dishes involve bite size cuts of ingredients, since repasts must be shared only with friends, not enemies.  Hence only blunt ended chopsticks and porcelain soup spoons are placed on the table.  Forks and knives resemble sharp weapons that one did not use in the company of friends.  The broth base had to simmer for hours to get the full flavor. The fire must be strong, or food will not be properly cooked, only warmed to no effect. Cooking must be fast, so the food will be served very hot and very fresh, the perfect yin to a yang disposition or vice versa!


And that's how I learned to eat and order Chinese food. By trial and error, by frequenting all the restaurants possible, by trying out the short roster of staple dishes my father briefed me on to see how well they were prepared according to the standard taught in turn to him by his father. And after I learned to appreciate the basic dishes, I tried the bigger, fancier dishes like Peking Duck, Crispy Suckling Pig, and the like, and of course, dim sum!

Now here, I go out on a proverbial limb to share my personal, strictly unprofessional choices.

For dim sum, especially Siew Mai (or Siomai) and Har Gaw (hakaw) and the fine taro puff or Wu Guok, and the new favorite, Xiao Lung Bao, my personal choice is Summer Palace of the EDSA Shangrila Hotel.  The portions are quite respectable, the ingredients generous,  and the taste of each morsel can be divine, practically melting in the mouth!  It is however priced more dearly than the Hen Lin kiosks, but worth the difference!!!


For congee, I have always gone to Taza de Oro Yakimix on Madison Square on Ortigas Avenue, in Greenhills.  The congee is made of well milled rice, and enhanced by choice cuts of sweet potato for taste, good digestion, and ability to fill the stomach.  But what is splendid is the assortment of little dishes that make each spoonful of congee a tasty mouthful...radish omelet, pickled salty vegetables, salty fish, and so many more besides.

A small restaurant I find myself going back to is Hai Kang on Wilson Street in Greenhills.  Though it is almost plain in its ambience and decor, it has been most consistent in its taste and preparation and ingredients.  It does the basic dishes that my father taught me well...and it has not caused me an allergic reaction to mono sodium glutamate. (By request of course, I ask them to use sugar instead of msg.)

For wanton noodle, I used to hie off to Alonso St. in downtown Manila near the Aranque market to the original Ling Nam noodle house or to Dragon Seed in TM Kalaw.

But all this is just the tip of the iceberg, or the chopstick, more appropriately.  There is so much more to Chinese cooking than this little list.  Hundreds of cuisines, as many as there are provinces at least, proliferate in China, and by extension through overseas Chinese and emigrants, to the rest of the world.  But hopefully my little list primes the pump to initiate you into the world of exploring, experiencing, and enjoying Chinese cuisine.

Hao!

Picture Resources Taken From: 

http://www.eatingchina.com/recipes/hot-sour-soup.htm

http://630dwarven.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/what-is-dim-sum-anyways/

http://www.recipemama.net/chinese-broccoli-recipe/

http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/venus-chinese-seafood-restaurant-seattle?select=-5vxTk4b3GyXsUSeQFPLgw#-5vxTk4b3GyXsUSeQFPLgw

http://www.tastespotting.com/tag/chinese+steamed+fish 
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/crystal-shrimp-238276