Inside My Table #91 | Excerpt
Dining Without Borders—Something from Restaurant A, Something from Restaurant B
By Dennis Abrams
It’s a Saturday night in Houston. Friends Laura, Shannon, Maureen and I are dying for Chinese food – you know, the kind of craving that can only be satisfied by a trip out to Bellaire Boulevard. So we pile into the car, stopping to pick up some wine (since a fair number of Chinese restaurants are BYOB) and head out to Chinatown in search of an eating adventure.
There is just one challenge: Where to go? None of us had a particular place in mind; we just know we need Chinese food, now. After much spirited discussion, we settle on a solution. We decide to just pick a shopping center at random—Bellaire, as you know, is lined with them—and see what we find. The one game rule: We wouldn’t go to any shopping center that any of us had previously tried.
After driving up and down Bellaire several times, we settled on 9888 Bellaire—“888” meaning “three times the prosperity” in Chinese numerology, as it turns out—the Sterling Plaza shopping center. There is a high density of restaurants to choose from, available parking, lots of patrons coming and going—just what we are looking for.
We decide to stop first at Lucky Pot. I remember reading something about their green onion pancakes, which sound like the perfect starter.
They are. The rest of the menu is extraordinarily tempting as well, mixing dishes unknown (what could Pothered Mustard with Shredded Pork possibly be?) with dishes we want to try immediately. We all agreed on House Special Slice Beef—cold slices of tender beef shank, cooked in a braising liquid that definitely contained a goodly amount of star anise. The meat, nearly gelatinous in texture, was like some kind of ideal Chinese sandwich meat. Any leftovers would have been fabulous taken home and served on a crusty roll with wasabi mayonnaise. But there would be no leftovers tonight: By the time we got done with it, the plate was sparkling clean.
Cowpeas with Szechwan chilies was a little less successful. To me, “cowpeas” is an old Southern term for black-eyed peas, and I was curious to see how my favorite New Year’s Day food would translate into Chinese. Alas, they weren’t black-eyed peas, but a kind of very thin green bean cooked with pork (always a good thing) and a more-than-generous amount of salt. Not so much salt that we didn’t continue nibbling, washing the beans down with cold white wine, but salty enough that we continued to comment on the saltiness as we ate.
Back on the plus side: the eggplant with garlic sauce. Rich eggplant cooked within an inch of its life, was richly oily and garlicky with enough pork to keep things interesting—it was perfect comfort food. It was even tastier scooped up with the green onion cakes, which, as it turns out, aren’t really cakes but more of a fried flatbread stuffed with green onions. It was a good start to the evening.
I was just about to ask the waitress for a menu so we could order another round of food (and open another bottle of wine), when it occurred to me: Why do we need to eat the entire meal at Lucky Pot? We were in a shopping center with at least a dozen dining establishments begging to be tried—so we decided to take a chance.
Turning right as we left Lucky Pot, we went straight into the next restaurant down the line—Xiong Cafe. It turned out to be one of those places where, the moment you walk in, you just know the food is going to be extraordinary.
Wooden benches and tables line the walls; at the back an older Chinese woman is cleaning greens. We’re the only non-Asian customers in a place crowded with eager diners. The fact it felt like a long-established restaurant buried deep in the hutongs (alleyways) of Beijing only added to the good vibe.
You order at the counter. Not a lot of English is spoken there, but after consultation with the order taker, I settle on cold Szechwan noodles, pan-fried pork dumplings and spicy beef noodle soup. We settled in to wait, opened another bottle of wine and toasted our potential good fortune.
First to arrive at our table were the cold Szechwan noodles. The first thing we notice is, well, they weren’t cold, they were warm. But other than that bit of false advertising, they were pretty good. A nice sauce which, while not as fiery as I would have liked, was still delicious, with nicely textured noodles and lots of crunchy vegetables.
The noodles were just a hint, though, of what was to come. Arriving together were the spicy noodle soup and pork dumplings. Wow. I’m telling you, they are worth the trip alone. The dumplings were perfectly fried on both sides, enough to brown them and give them a simultaneously crunchy/chewy texture, an ideal casing for the well-seasoned, slightly coarse minced pork. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, but the dumplings weren’t sealed at the ends. Instead, they were sort of tubular and open on either end—rather blintz-like, if you know what I mean.
Just as good was the spicy noodle soup. A dark broth had all the spice and fire that the noodles had lacked. In it bobbed not noodles, but dumplings (this time in a more traditional dumpling shape), which squirted juice and broth with each bite. Honestly, my mouth is watering right now just thinking about it.
In an ideal world, we would have been able to soldier on with our eating adventure, but after three dishes at Lucky Pot and another three at Xiong Cafe we were all stuffed. However, if we had been able to continue, there is a nearby Chinese halal restaurant called Xinjiang that features kebabs and other street foods from Western China, as well as Jangkum Tofu House, a Korean tofu restaurant that is definitely worth investigating. Next trip.
LUCKY POT
9888 Bellaire, #158, bet. Corporate Dr. & W. Sam Houston Tollway, 713-995-9982
TIP BYOB for sure. And if you should be brave enough to sample the “Pothered Mustard,” please let me know.
XIONG CAFE
9888 Bellaire, bet. Corporate Dr. & W. Sam Houston Tollway, 713-771-8448
TIP BYOB, cash only. My guess is that anything involving noodles, dumplings or soup is worth having.
