A lucky break

After a desultory and largely unsuccessful effort at being productive at work this morning, lunch time – and the perfect opportunity for a foodie diversion – intervened.

I decided to visit a restaurant I’d read about, which serves authentic Dalian style Chinese food but all I could remember was that it was at 700 and something Dominion Road.

I spotted a small restaurant at number 704 and wondered whether that was the Dalian place. There was no English on the signage and the only patrons were Chinese. You can’t get more authentic than that, so I decided to try my luck.

They had some menus in English and I quickly surmised that the food was fairly bog standard northern Chinese fare – with nothing from the Dailan cuisine, so far as I could see. My dilemma over whether to stay was quickly resolved when I spotted ‘Wang Wang Special Soup’.

In my experience, many Chinese dishes are pretty ‘special’ to Western tastes, so I was intrigued to find out what could be so unusual about this soup that even the Chinese would label it as special.

The waitress was obliging but not particularly fluent in English. She managed to convey that it had no pork, contained tofu and potato, had something else that she didn’t know the English for but whatever it was, she advised, it wasn’t rabbit.

She also told me that she thought I wouldn’t like it. So what else could I do, but order some?

As I waited for the soup to arrive, I started to worry. What say ‘wang wang’ was Chinese for ‘intestine’ or other really icky bit? Worse still, what say it referred to an appendage with a similar sounding English name?

The waitress had warned me and I’d ignored her. No matter what wang wang might be, I’d have to save face and – for the sake of all other Westerners who despair when given Westernised versions of ethnic food – I’d have to eat it.

Fate was kind to me today. Wang Wang Special Soup was what I’d imagine Chinese invalid food to be. It was based on a thickened, slightly oily, faintly sesame flavoured stock and contained very finely shredded: cucumber, carrot, black fungus and tofu skin. Delicate fronds of just set beaten egg waved gently amongst the other ingredients.

Deliciously, it was topped with a pile of deep fried very finely shredded potato sticks, which provided a crunchy counterpoint to soup’s soft, unctuous texture. How clever! I’m going to borrow that idea for use on a Western style thick winter soup.

As for the Dalian place? I almost got it right: for the record, it’s two doors down at number 708.