Chinese food, and the possibilities of life in Buenos Aires

For me, love comes with familiarity. So it was only in my second week in Buenos Aires, and my third week in Argentina, that I really began to love the city. I knew at least a few of the major bus routes leaving off of Avenida Santa Fe. I could carry a vague map of the city in my head. I had my favorite café, where I could drink a café cortado and eat medialunas all day and even plug my laptop into an outlet. (New Yorkers love Buenos Aires because it shows them life in a big city doesn’t have to be quite so hard.)

But what really moved me to love Buenos Aires, and to be able to imagine living there for more than a week or two, was the discovery of great Chinese food. Yes, Buenos Aires has great Chinese food. Great Chinese food is a good thing, wherever you are, but it’s particularly noteworthy when you’re in a country where the culinary standard seems to be a serious aversion to garlic, spices, and heat. (I try really hard to accept a country’s food on its own terms, but a Korean girl has her limits.)

Chinatown in the leafy, outer neighborhood of Belgrano turned out to be just a few blocks, but like all Chinatowns around the world, there were gold and red tchotchkes for sale and tourists and Argentines looking for exotic thrills.

The kind of thrills Zizou* and I were looking for, we happily found at a place called Lai Lai, from a Chowhound tip. It was very “Chinese,” to be sure—red lanterns, red walls, red light. There were postcards of Taiwan lined up in right above the tables all around the room, that made me wonder what the owners longed for, especially when Zizou, whose family is from Taiwan, told me the staff were speaking Mandarin with a Beijing accent. Unlike many of the restaurants we normally go to in San Francisco and New York, this restaurant could not be bare-boned. It had to prove its Chinese-ness to its non-Chinese clientele.

At the same time, the menu was oddly reassuring in its Spanish translations. There was very little in the way of bird’s nest soup or abalone, and the chicken, beef, and pork that was there was translated in a way that claimed, “This is very much like this that you already know.” Tofu was “queso de soya” or “soy cheese”; wontons were “raviolines.” It made me realize how flexible American culture is, that we happily learn new words for the new foods we eat, even if we might mangle their pronunciation. We say “panna cotta,” not “Italian custard,” and “taco” instead of “Mexican pancake stuffed with meat.”

In the end, what we loved about the food wasn’t that it was just like the mapo tofu I’ve had at Grand Sichuan in Chelsea, or the dumplings we’ve had at Koi Palace in Daly City. Everything we ate was a little unexpected, a little surprising, and all good.



Our appetizer of spicy dumplings was served in a hot, oily broth, rather than the pool of chile oil we expected, but the broth was so tangy and restorative, we spooned it up.



The lamb with scallions was a little tough with gristle, but the taste of the scallions was a joy, like chewing on springtime after all the vegetable-less dishes I’d eaten. The beef with Chinese broccoli had an intense flavor of star anise, but it was curious and interesting because it had a flavor that wasn't one of the three dominant flavors in Argentine food.



The best part, though, was the mapo tofu. Not only was the tofu slightly firmer and more resilient than usual, it tasted of beef! Not pork! I’ve seen recipes for mapo tofu that call for beef, not pork, but it just seemed so appropriately Argentine to replace the most common meat in Chinese food with their beloved beef. We first were concerned it wasn’t red enough, but then we realized the red light of the restaurant was hiding the amount of chiles in the sauce. It was absolutely delicious.

At one point, Zizou asked me, “Do you think this would taste as good if we were in New York or in San Francisco?” Probably not, given that the food tasted the way I imagine manna tasted to the starving Israelites, but in a way, it didn't really matter.

It was Chinese food, the Argentine way. And that is how I fell in love with Buenos Aires.

*Zizou, the alias of my privacy-seeking friend and traveling buddy.

Har gow and tacos and chaat, oh my!

My friend Lina asked me recently if I’d gotten tired of my blog. I protested that I hadn’t, but I think I had, just a bit. But I recently spent a long weekend in San Francisco and got reinspired. I didn’t have any culinary epiphanies, despite the city’s reputation. In fact, I got seriously annoyed that my favorite bakery, Tartine, is no longer a place to have a quiet breakfast with a paper on a weekday morning. I think it was having an intense, packed weekend of opportunities to share good food with people I love, who I hadn’t seen in so long. One of those friends even ended up taking me on an all-afternoon eating tour of the East Bay.

"Zizou" (as she prefers to remain anonymous) did preliminary research, and as you can see, provided a full write-up as well. So I’m not going to repeat everything she said, just highlight my most lasting memories.

1) We went to eleven places!

2) We only ate at eight. The remaining three, we picked up food to eat later.

3) Zizou packed a cooler for stop #3, the meat counter at Café Rouge. She always carries a cooler, “just in case.”

4) I had ice cream that rivaled Il Laboratorio del Gelato and I do not say that lightly. The Catalan flavor at Ici, started by the pastry chef from Chez Panisse, was so good, I didn’t want it to end. It had a curious flavor that I didn’t recognize immediately, a mixture of anise, lemon, and something else that made it special and absolutely inimitable. I ordered it in a cup, to which Zizou said, “What! You want the cone. She’ll take the cone,” turning to the laughing ice cream scooper. She was right. The hand-rolled cone had a nugget of chocolate at the bottom.



5) Vik’s Chaat is as good as I’d hoped all that time I lived in San Francisco and never went there. I especially loved the chapati that came with the hyderabadi fish special—simple, flavorful, chewy, everything a flatbread should be.



6) Tao Yuen in Oakland’s Chinatown had crispy, not at all greasy, tofu skin rolls that I would never have believed could come out of a take-out dim sum place. I think they were 50 cents or something equally obscene.

7) We found at the Cheeseboard a bigger, pizza-only place next door to the cheese shop, with an elderly musical trio performing and young, happy Californians spilling out of the restaurant and just sitting on the grassy median in the middle of the busy two-way street. Pizza as excellent as ever. I love San Francisco when it just does its own thing and doesn’t worry whether its pizza crust lives up to some NY/New Haven ideal.



8) Taco trucks are the best, always.



I did eat dinner afterwards. I told Anne I had to eat vegetables, and she, former Midwestern carnivore, suggested we go to Greens, where I had a very simple and refreshing salad of greens, celery root, cheese, and butter beans. I was embarrassed that the waiter might think I was the kind of woman who only orders salad, but he praised my choice, saying, “Beautiful! That’s my favorite salad!” I was in such a good mood, I only giggled quietly and was thankful for all that the Bay Area had bestowed upon me that day.

It's sizzling!

Raj tried to warn me. “A lot of the sauces all taste the same. Some of the dishes taste better the next day!”

After almost a year of trying to get to Tangra Masala for Indian-Chinese food (the Indian take on Chinese food, the way chop suey is the American take on Chinese food), Raj and I finally made it to Sunnyside, Queens last Wednesday. The friends we had invited to come along had bailed at the last minute, pleading that Queens was too much, even Raj’s friends who live in Queens. I think Raj was worried that I would be disappointed, after all of the hullabaloo. He said, with great earnestness, that Tangra Masala reminded him of better food eaten elsewhere.

But how could I be disappointed, when I was presented with this?



True, as much as the chili paneer sizzled, it didn’t make me swoon. The vegetable tangra masala turned out to be vegetable fritters in gravy, the “lollypop chicken” to be fried chicken drumsticks in an adorable shape, but with a batter that was a bit too bready. Everything had that yummy, salty, satisfying flavor of take-out Chinese, but with nothing that would make me take the G train to the 7 train for on a weekly basis. Maybe every couple of months or so.

Still, I was so happy to be eating something I had never eaten before, within city limits even. And such video!

My Friday ma po tofu lunch

Oh God, I'm going to make ma po tofu every week. If I had known the hardest part would be buying the ingredients in Chinatown, I would have done it years ago. I couldn't stop eating, it was so good, until I remembered I would get to eat it again for lunch tomorrow.