: Master Yap :
I found a new Chinese take out place yesterday, one that actually makes authentic dishes that I'm used to having all my life. I define authentic as closely matching either the food my former family in Houston used to make, or similar to the restaurants we went to back then. The thing is, we always used to go to the same 3-5 restaurants in Houston, so I got very accustomed to a certain style of Chinese food which is not always that easy to find. It's not necessary better or more expensive than other styles, but there's a certain kind of homemade quality that usually has to do with cooking efficiently and consistently that is hard to duplicate.
I think you can tell an authentic Chinese restaurant by how many typos are on the menu. If the menu is devoid of errors, you're probably in a sanitized, white-bread restaurant where the cooks follow charts and diagrams posted on the wall. The more errors in the menu, the more likely it is that the restaurant owner 1) is actually an immigrant and 2) puts more effort into his food than his marketing and 3) has a steady stream of regular customers who don't have to read the menu to know what they want. Oh, and if the restaurant has a Web site, you can forget about it being authentic. Plus, it seems that the quality of the food tends to be inversely proportional to the cleanliness of the bathroom, but that's not a consideration with takeout.
So this restaurant, named Master Yap Express Chinese Restaurant, has some of the classic blunders, like Mountain Due and Mo Po Tu Fu (should be Ma Po Tofu, a spicy tofu dish made with chili bean paste). Another sign of its authenticity is that it sells whole roasted duck or soy chicken (which is not a chicken made of soybeans, but rather a whole chicken marinated in soy sauce). They also sell a lot of noodles, both Cantonese and Singapore style, which are not commonly found at most restaurants.
The dish I was most happy to find is one of my favorites, sauteed eggplant with garlic sauce. I haven't always been an eggplant lover - in fact, up until about 10 years ago, I hated eggplant and probably never ate one in my life. But at some point I discovered Mediterranean cuisine, and fell in love with baba ganoush (roasted eggplant dip) and stewed eggplant with pomegranate, garlic and lemon juice. And after that, I discovered Japanese eggplant used in Chinese cuisine like the dish I mention above, which is a longer, thinner vegetable than the traditional rounded eggplant found in grocery stores. In Houston, one of my favorite dishes was this Japanese eggplant (which turns bright purple when cooked) sauteed with ground pork in a thick, rich garlic sauce - only one restaurant could really get it right, and I really miss that dish. While the version I found near my office is essentially the same sauce and eggplant, they don't put pork in it, which is a pity. Maybe I'll ask them to do that for me next time I order it.
I think you can tell an authentic Chinese restaurant by how many typos are on the menu. If the menu is devoid of errors, you're probably in a sanitized, white-bread restaurant where the cooks follow charts and diagrams posted on the wall. The more errors in the menu, the more likely it is that the restaurant owner 1) is actually an immigrant and 2) puts more effort into his food than his marketing and 3) has a steady stream of regular customers who don't have to read the menu to know what they want. Oh, and if the restaurant has a Web site, you can forget about it being authentic. Plus, it seems that the quality of the food tends to be inversely proportional to the cleanliness of the bathroom, but that's not a consideration with takeout.
So this restaurant, named Master Yap Express Chinese Restaurant, has some of the classic blunders, like Mountain Due and Mo Po Tu Fu (should be Ma Po Tofu, a spicy tofu dish made with chili bean paste). Another sign of its authenticity is that it sells whole roasted duck or soy chicken (which is not a chicken made of soybeans, but rather a whole chicken marinated in soy sauce). They also sell a lot of noodles, both Cantonese and Singapore style, which are not commonly found at most restaurants.
The dish I was most happy to find is one of my favorites, sauteed eggplant with garlic sauce. I haven't always been an eggplant lover - in fact, up until about 10 years ago, I hated eggplant and probably never ate one in my life. But at some point I discovered Mediterranean cuisine, and fell in love with baba ganoush (roasted eggplant dip) and stewed eggplant with pomegranate, garlic and lemon juice. And after that, I discovered Japanese eggplant used in Chinese cuisine like the dish I mention above, which is a longer, thinner vegetable than the traditional rounded eggplant found in grocery stores. In Houston, one of my favorite dishes was this Japanese eggplant (which turns bright purple when cooked) sauteed with ground pork in a thick, rich garlic sauce - only one restaurant could really get it right, and I really miss that dish. While the version I found near my office is essentially the same sauce and eggplant, they don't put pork in it, which is a pity. Maybe I'll ask them to do that for me next time I order it.
