Los Angeles Times
Review
"Mr. Leek Cake, I Presume"
By Jonathan Gold
Kim Chuy Restaurant
The best-known part of Chinatown
might be the smartly pagodaed stretch of grand restaurants and back-scratcher
emporia at the northern edge. But the pulsing heart of the area might lie a few
blocks south, in the great arcade that stretches between Broadway and Hill.
Here you’ll find one of the better
Chinese barbecue shops, the original Mandrin Deli and the best branch of Pho 79,
as well as places to buy tea and medicinal herbs and pink-tinted Vietnamese pork
tartare. When fresh bamboo shoots or Shanghainese hairy crabs come into their
brief season, they are sold out of boxes from the area in front of the big
import market at the Broadway end of the arcade, and people cluster six-deep to
buy them.
At the head of the arcade is the
bustling noodle shop Kim Chuy, with a splendid motto painted on one window-“King
of Chiu Chow Wonton”- and a gallery of noodle photographs posted on the other.
Kim Chuy specializes in the noodle dishes of the Chiu Chow people, more or less
the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the words Chiu Chow appear helpfully
before nine-tenths of the items on the menu, just in case you happened to forget
what kind of restaurant you were eating in after the first 15 or 16 entries.
Elderly women totter out of the place clutching big bags of peppery fish balls
to go.
The food crowd frequented Kim Chuy
at the beginning of the first wave of authentic Chinese food in Los Angeles,
raved about the jellyfish and the
noodles with spicy beef, and then
sort of forgot about the place, though the restaurant has never lacked for
customers. I used to go to Kim Chuy a lot 10 years ago when I worked at an
office downtown, and though I hadn’t been back in a while, the proprietor still
remembered my favorite order when I walked through the door.
“Hey there,” he said, beaming.
“You’re Mister Leek Cake. It’s been a long, long time.”
On the tables are an incredible
array of condiments: soy sauce, fish sauce, two or three kinds of chile sauce,
black vinegar, squeeze bottles of sweet bean paste, dried red-pepper flakes and
those pungent Thai pickled chiles. I miss the sugar-bowls of crushed roasted
peanuts that used to be my favorite garnish here. I am happy that they still
serve the smoky imported Sriracha chile sauce as well as the fruitier domestic
brand.
Chiu Chow shrimp and crab balls
involve shrimp, fake crab and diced taro root, wrapped in a sheet of bean-crud
skin and fried crisp. The appetizer is served with a sweet, gingery dipping
sauce whose known and loved. And although the crab and shrimp balls may seem at
first glance to be something you would not eat on a dare, they are quite
delicious.
Chiu Chow leek cakes are
flying-saucer-shaped capsules of rice noodle, filled with rather intense-tasting
sautéed leeks and seared to an oily, crisp-edged chewiness. The Chiu Chow fried
fish cake is not unlike a heavy-ish Thai tod mun; the Chiu Chow cold jellyfish
is properly crisp-tender, but drowning in an over-sweet sauce. I’m fond of the
Chiu Chow-style rice porridge with shrimp, brothy and shot through with fresh
ginger.
But the basic deal at a Chiu Chow
noodle shop is, of course, Chiu Chow noodles, slippery rice noodles the width of
your little finger and firmer squarecut egg noodles that resemble bouncy
linguine, submerged in broth, garnished with things like boiled duck legs and
sliced pork. The Chiu Chow special noodles include duck and shrimp, squid and
cuttlefish and four kinds of fish cake, also floppy, herb-spiked won ton if you
ordered it that way. The Chiu Chow beef stew noodles come with melting shanks of
tendon and hunks of long-simmered chuck, and the broth has an interesting anise
top note. Chiu Chow spiced beef noodles come in a gritty, spicy demi-curry,
almost crunchy with ground nuts, another missing link between Chiu Chow cooking
and Thai.
Fried noodles-with chicken, with
beef, with mixed seafood-are passed through an ultra-hot pan, smoky but still
soft, served not 10 seconds after they are cooked, and fully possessed of that
elusive quality that Chinese call wok chi, special wok energy that is
possible only in restaurants as small and informal as this.
At noontime, Kim Chuy is jammed,
people spilling out into the mall, people crammed into restaurant’s narrow
aisles, and you will probably be asked to sit at a table already occupied by
people eating lunch. You will also probably see three sets of customers come and
go in the time it takes you to get through a bowl of noodles, because people eat
more quickly than you can imagine.
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Kim Chuy Restaurant
727 N. Broadway, No. 103, Chinatown, (213) 687-7215, Open daily 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Cash only. No alcohol. We validated 30 minute lot parking with every $8 purchase.
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