Food and Drink

Kaleidoscope of inventive flavors

By B.W. Liou (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-05-18 08:25

Guizhou-style restaurant offers diners an impressive range of culinary delights

It is soft and gelatinous when cooked and looks a lot like beef penis when not cooked. It's been called the new pork belly but without the layers of fat and you can find it in American, southern Chinese and Vietnamese stews. When it's done right, it is melt-in-your-mouth good, full of flavor and richness.

It is beef tendon and it's a marvelous piece of fibrous tissue that connects muscle to bone. It's also the key ingredient in my favorite new dish in Beijing and one of several brave, unique plates at Da Gui, a charming Guizhou restaurant in a Jiaodaokou hutong.

Guizhou food is mostly a combination of spicy, sour and sweet flavors from the southwestern province of China. It's loosely similar to Shaanxi cuisine in its liberal use of salty pickled vegetables. But even with that scant amount of background information, Da Gui's combination of ingredients comes as quite a shock.

Take, for instance, the restaurant's "suan cai chao yuan xiao". Who would ever have thought of frying sticky rice dumplings filled with sweet black sesame paste to a thin, brown crust then stir-frying them in the aforementioned pickled vegetables with roasted chilies and chopped green onions? There's the initial delicate crunch from the dumplings, the sandy, sweet gooeyness from the sesame paste followed by the heat from the vegetables and chilies. This is a pinball machine of textures and flavors.

Next came the misleadingly named "rice tofu with minced pork". Sticky rice is formed into squares and fried (resembling tiny deep-fried tofu) and then stir-fried with cured pork belly chunks, more green onions and more chilies.

The smokiness of the pork lightly coated the cubes of rice, which were a bit too saturated with oil from all the frying. Nonetheless, the rice had a hint of sour and savory, the result of Da Gui's laborious process of soaking it in water for a day, stirring until thick and adding the juices from the pickled vegetables before cooking.

And then there were the tendons. Da Gui is known mostly for its suan yu tang (sour fish soup), which I didn't try since many publications have raved about it, but many were on the fence over its beef dry pot, which is essentially a stew of tendons in an iron pot of simmering oil.

No, there's no fleshy meat in this dish, just gooey and unctuous sinews cooked for long hours over a low heat. To me, this is the standout dish of the early year, especially for meat lovers. By the time I finished groaning over this dish, a thin layer of collagen had formed around my gums and teeth. Gross to some, great to me.

There were a couple of misses at Da Gui, notably its eel on fire. The skewers of eel were far too salty and dominated by chili oil and chopped peanuts to notice the gamey fish. But it did go down well with Da Gui's Da Great rice black wine, another one of the restaurant's kaleidoscopes of flavors. It was slightly tart, bitter, sweet and salty, making one feel right at home in this serene restaurant.

Located just beyond the hustle and bustle of Jiu Gulou Dajie, Da Gui is a perfect respite from the honks, elbows and cigarette smoke in your face. Ten or so red lanterns cascade over a bright red facade that is fading in some spots. Inside, you'll find a short, brick-lined corridor leading to the main eating room, where if you're lucky, you'll find the laoban hunched over a small TV watching ping-pong on his makeshift desk.

A large orange and white painting of sour fish soup is hung on the wall to the right, while detailed instructions on how to make the soup can be found on the left.

But Da Gui is much more than soup. It's a restaurant with the know-how to throw a multiplicity of flavors at you as well as dishes that are far simpler, namely its fantastic beef tendons.

China Daily

(China Daily 05/18/2011 page)