Beef and broccoli chow fun ($12), another of my Chinatown favorites, is a more upscale take on the original, with spicier and higher-quality strips of steak, and the sweeter Chinese broccoli. The flat, soft noodles are the apotheosis of pasta in gravy, but I do like them a little better with some char. No such problem with wok-charred vegetables ($7). These are sort of side orders, but any savvy vegetarian could make a meal of two or three. We had Hakka eggplant ($7), which was hot, greasy, peppery, garlicky, and full of eggplant flavor. The Hakka are a South Chinese ethnic minority with Northern dialect and origins, and their food is very popular in China. Gai lan ($7) is that Chinese broccoli, which doesn’t flower much but is so much sweeter and yummier than European broccoli that I often doubt they’re related. Clams in black-bean sauce ($9) was the one dish for which I’d prefer to hike back to Chinatown. These clams were amusingly tiny, but the sauce was more of a broth, so it was hard to pick up on the fermented-bean flavor.
As I was writing this, I noticed that three of us ordered entirely Chinese food, ignoring the Thai and Vietnamese dishes from chef Alison Hearn. I usually try all corners of a menu, but I guess my relationship with Chinese food is special.
Myers+Chang has a wine list, and with some dishes wine could work. We had a glass of Chateau Leboscq ($10), described by our server as cabernet-merlot, though I think that’s mostly cabernet franc in this secondary Bordeaux. The wine, in a stemless glass, had dark cherry-berry fruit and some length of flavor. The beef chow fun was the best match. A better accompaniment for this food, however, was Tsingtao beer ($5), or Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale ($8). Hitachino is an oddity in Japan, a microbrewery that tends toward experimentation, using ingredients such as red rice in Belgian-style strong ale. It looks cloudy and reddish-brown, but the flavor is clean, citric, and wine-y, with some malt richness. It’s perfect for this food.
We asked about dessert, and got a complimentary bit of hot tapioca pudding with toasted coconut on top. I think that was our Thai dish. No fortune cookies, no pot of weak tea on every table.
The room wraps around an open kitchen, and could be really, really noisy with many large windows facing Washington Street. It isn’t, thanks to decent table spacing. The walls are mostly mirrors with aphorisms (not from fortune cookies) and food “graffiti” in red. The front windows feature a small logo of the restaurant’s name and very large red carp, as in a traditional cutout. You could drive right by without noticing it, and it won’t help to mention that Oishii Boston (which has no external signage at all) is directly across the street.
Once inside, the most salient feature of the décor is that the place is dark. There is a no-frills element here, with menus, chopsticks, and forks in a cylinder on every table, and a campy element, with torn-up sheets of Chinese-language newspapers for placemats. The background music is pentatonic electronica, very effectively both hip and Asian. The crowd, at least on a weeknight, resembles more the customers of Joanne Chang’s Flour Bakery than those at Christopher Myers’s Radius restaurant, or even at his Via Matta. I could pay half as much in Chinatown and eat pretty well, but not this well.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
