Inside My Table #95 | Excerpt
Back To the Mall
By Dennis Abrams
Several issues ago, I wrote about the dining adventure that resulted by simply driving into the parking lot of 9888 Bellaire in Chinatown and picking restaurants at random, selecting one dish to sample at restaurant “A” and a couple of others at restaurant “B.” Our food was so good – I still dream about the green onion cakes at Lucky Pot – that I decided to push my luck and repeat the experiment. What other treasures might that particular shopping center have to offer?
After doing a reconnaissance run around the periphery – Korean tofu? Asian pizza? Sweets? – we settled on two restaurants: Cafe Yummy for Japanese food (it’s nearly impossible to resist a place with such a whimsical name, although I do still regret my selection years ago of Finger Licking Bukateria) and Chinese Halal Cuisine.
First stop was Cafe Yummy. Physically, it doesn’t fit the typical Chinatown shopping center restaurant mode: It’s all cool wood with a really nice feel to it; it’s a restaurant where you might want to linger longer than it takes to consume your meal. It actually feels hip – the kind of place you can imagine Asian club kids coming to hang out late night.
The menu has plenty of variety: hot pots, hot stone grilling, stir-fries, noodles and such. We focused on the yakitori menu, and were very happy we did. For just a couple of bucks per selection, we dived into lovely cumin-scented pork belly, perfectly cooked squid and, perhaps best of all, chicken wings impaled lengthwise on their skewer (convenient for eating) grilled to an almost caramelized lusciousness.
For a touch of elegance, we also enjoyed the beef sashimi – tender thin slices of beef filet floating happily in a spicy sauce.
The only dish we didn’t really love was the “special” pancake, whose name, as Pauline Kael once observed in a different context, represents unjustified optimism.
Our next stop was Chinese Halal Cuisine, a place that had caught my eye on our previous visit. The decor? Standard Bellaire Chinatown mess hall, functional if hardly decorative. The food? Extraordinary.
The food is that of western China, the land of the Uyghurs, pork free (it is halal cuisine after all), heavy on the lamb and spice (especially cumin), and very unlike most Chinese food we find here in Houston. China’s Xinjiang province borders Afghanistan and several other Muslim countries, hence the halal-style of cooking.
We ordered way too much food. Tomato soup, which while not necessarily exciting, was comfort food par excellance. The lamb and squash pan-fried dumplings were extraordinary, with moist tasty filling surrounded by a nicely crisped dumpling wrapper. They were assembled like it seems all the dumplings are in this part of town – that is, open on the ends rather than folded up closed.
Chicken with garlic sauce and eggplant with garlic sauce were both perfectly prepared, the chicken moist and flavorful, the eggplant cooked down to the ideal rich melting stage. Our favorite dish, and one worth making the trek to Chinatown alone, was the Xin Jiang Special Lamb – sliced lamb, some pieces still moist, some almost crispy, cooked with chilies, Szechwan peppercorns and cumin. Honestly, my mouth is watering just writing about it.
Green onion pancakes were good, perfect for scooping up pretty much everything on the menu, even if they didn’t quite match the perfection of the ones at nearby Lucky Pot. The one disappointment was something described on the menu, under the column headlined “Flour,” as a lamb flour bun. All I have to say is that it was a lot more flour than lamb.
I do, however, have a bone to pick with Chinese Halal Cuisine. When we sat down, four non-Asians in a sea of Asians, we were presented with nicely laminated menus from which to order. Not knowing any better, I placed our order and a few minutes later went up to the counter to get a take-out menu to make notes on. To my dismay, it was about five times the length of the menu we were given, with dishes I would have loved to sample if only I’d known about them.
Fortunately, I was able to get in an order for the Lamb and Squash Dumplings (not on our menus). But Ox Tail with Chinese Herb? Duck Gizzard with Hot Pepper? Okay, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to persuade anybody at my table to try Lamb’s Liver, Kidney and Heart with Brown Sauce, but I would have liked the option to do so. Why is it that so many Asian restaurants think that non-Asians are afraid of real Asian food? Let us decide for ourselves, please!
But enough of my rant. Both of these restaurants are more than worthy of a visit as quickly as you are able to get there. Go to Cafe Yummy to check out the scene and dine on terrific yakitori. Go to Chinese Halal Cuisine to sample Xinjiangese food – it will expand your definition of Chinese food. But when you’re there, be sure to order from the take-out menu. Sometimes getting the full experience means taking things into your own hands.
CAFE YUMMY
9888 Bellaire, #118, east of Sam Houston Tollway, 713-777-5599
TIP Open late to attract an after-hours club, Cafe Yummy (unlike most restaurants in the area) has a full-service bar.
CHINESE HALAL CUISINE
9896-A Bellaire Blvd., east of Sam Houston Tollway, 713-773-1670
TIP Different address, same parking lot as Cafe Yummy. Given its halal nature, no alcohol is served, but you’re welcome to BYOB.
