Birds of a Feather

Thanks to 77 Square for a good laugh this morning. In her review of a new Chinese restaurant, Samara Kalk Derby quotes a friend of hers who had ordered braised vegetable with shiitake mushroom only to find that the dish featured the requisite fungus with but one vegetable, bok choy.

“When I think of vegetables, bok choy is the last vegetable I think of,” said my friend...

Why am I not surprised that Derby, who was shocked to find giardiniera on an Italian beef ordered "hot", has a friend that is flummoxed by being served bok choy in a Chinese restaurant? Did this person just fall off the turnip truck?

The "bottom line", Derby tells us, is that the place serves "authentic Sichuan food". I have to ask whose judgement this is because I don't trust Samara Kalk Derby to have the first inkling of an idea of the differences between Sichuan and, say, Cantonese cuisine. She notes that the chicken with spicy and sour garlic sauce has Bell peppers in it while the shrimp with black bean sauce features red peppers, broccoli, and zucchini. I'm certainly no expert in Sichuan cooking but my warning klaxon starts ringing when I am told that a bunch of vegetables, native to the Americas and Europe, are in some way authentically Chinese.

If reading about one person suffering the indignity of being served bok choy in a Chinese restaurant and another proffering the dubious claim that authentic Sichuan cuisine involves a medley of New World vegetables wasn't bad enough, the review says precious little about how any of the food at the establishment (called Ichiban, BTW) tastes.

Take that bok choy-laden disappointment. Derby uses exactly zero words to give the reader any idea of how it tasted. We know it had only mushrooms and bok choy and that it was, to her taste, "monotonous". So the reader gets a bunch of whining about quantity but nothing about quality. Did the did have a sauce? What kind of liquid was used in the braising? Am I expected to extrapolate every other flavor in this dish from the fact that it had a lot of bok choy in it?

The chicken with spicy and sour garlic sauce is the exception here with the sauce being described as "thin, orange sauce with a few pieces of hot red chili peppers and a welcome hint of ginger". More writing like this, please.

Now we can look forward to Derby reviewing a German restaurant and complaining that the Hackepeter is undercooked.