Jurors' Meals in Chinatown
Now for me, Chinatown is full of memories. A couple of years ago, before I had left New York for a stint in Washington, DC?a city where the Chinatown consists of two blocks of restaurants, an Asian market and a big Confucian-style gate over the street?I was living in Manhattan with a young woman two generations removed from Canton. And on Sunday afternoons, we would hop on the 6 train bound for Canal St. and meet her family (who came in from their New Jersey suburb after church to shop and pick up supplies for the week) for dinner. There were a few places we'd go?all on Mott St.?depending on the family's mood, but by far my favorite was a little dive, just down the street from the big Catholic church, called Hop Kee's. And, now that I'm back in the neighborhood so often in the evenings to help out my friends' legal battles, Hop Kee's is where I'm taking them.
From the outside, Hop Kee's is nothing much. Really, this is not an exaggeration. It's basically a lighted sign and a flight of stairs leading to a warren of basement rooms where the storeroom for a street-level restaurant would be. And the decor is nothing special either, with linoleum floors and crummy tables and chairs. But, as with so many "food finds" (as they put it on the increasingly obnoxious and unwatchable Food Network), the swankiness of the ambience is in inverse proportion to the quality of the food. Oh, and one more thing: although they used to sell beer, they've lost their liquor license for some reason, so you've got to head down to the deli just across East Broadway to pick up a six-pack or a jug of plum wine before sitting down, something the restaurant encourages, offering bottle openers to those who don't happen to have one on their key rings.
Once situated, customers are given two menus?a big plastic job offering all the typical beef-and-broccoli fare one would expect at any Chinese restaurant this side of the Pacific?and a laminated list of "today's specials," a document that hasn't changed in ages, or at least not in the three years I've been eating at Hop Kee's. This is the list you want to order from?because this is where you'll actually find the real-deal Cantonese specialties that will leave you unable to order a pile of General Tso's Chicken from the local Golden Dragon or Panda Wok ever again. There's very little one needs to know about Cantonese food. The spices and ingredients are pretty basic; many items are steamed in black bean sauce, and other dishes are done in similarly simple but delicious sauces.
The night before writing this, I went there with one of my many plaintiff friends, a vegetarian, and after picking up some Tsingtao beer, we sat down to eat. We ordered three dishes (a good rule of thumb for ordering at Hop Kee's is that three dishes really fill up two hungry guys): crabs Cantonese, steamed mussels in black bean sauce and shrimp in walnut sauce. Within minutes, a trio of platters was brought to our table, and we dug in as best we could while the little girl at the next booth kept popping up from behind her seat and whacking me on the head, sending my dining companion into fits of hysterics. The crabs were served in a great sauce I honestly couldn't identify, and couldn't inquire about either, due to the thick language barrier, though it took a hell of a lot of work to get any meat out of them. The mussels, meanwhile, were the fattest, plumpest, juiciest mussels I've had in a long time, and were steamed and served in the black bean and scallion sauce that is the basis of so much Cantonese cuisine?kind of a Chinese answer to the French moules mariniere.
But the crowning achievement of Hop Kee's kitchen was, and always has been in my opinion, the shrimp in walnut sauce, which is by far the most expensive item on the menu at $18.95, and worth every penny. Imagine shrimp fried in the lightest, most crispy batter possible?there's nothing greasy or Red Lobster-ish about them?and served with broccoli, walnuts and a tangy white sauce. It may sound like an odd combination to the uninitiated, but each morsel is somehow both light and fresh and rich and creamy, all at the same time. We wouldn't let the waiter take that plate away until we had both picked up every piece of broccoli and walnut and smeared it through the sauce with our chopsticks. And the best part was our bill, which barely topped 40 bucks for the two of us, and came with a pair of souvenir Hop Kee's pens?"Happy holidays! So you remember us!" announced our waiter as he presented them.
In meals past, always with the constant of the shrimp, I've ventured around the menu, and found that it's pretty hard to go wrong, no matter what one orders. Seafood-in-a-basket is a nice assortment of goodies assembled in the traditional style; clams or snails (yes, snails) in black bean sauce are also always a treat, though the latter requires a lot of work with toothpicks to get the meat out. And for carnivores, Peking-style porkchops are sliced and cooked up in a sweet sauce, and come to the table tender and bite-size?two adjectives that so rarely apply to American interpretations of porkchops.
Meanwhile, over in a little shopping alley off Elizabeth St., about a block away, is the May Villa?another Cantonese restaurant specializing in seafood that is, for me, a more recent discovery. On a recent night at May Villa, which is a small place that seats maybe 40 or 50 people, tops, three separate Chinese families were having full-on banquets at huge round tables, with waiters bringing platters of lobster and whole fishes to the tables, as the kids ran around looking at the fish tanks mounted in the wall, which presumably contained the next evening's special. A friend and I had a mini-feast of our own, ordering fried oysters (which were simple and tender, though I normally believe that that particular mollusk is a dish best served cold), shrimp and walnuts (a disappointment, compared to Hop Kee's interpretation, with a white sauce that was a dish of what tasted like Hellmann's mayo) and a whole steamed flounder in soy sauce, the highlight of the meal. I'd never tasted flounder?which I consider to be a bland, flaky fish?so good. It came to us steamed with a little light broth, and the waitress poured a dish of a soy-like sauce over it with a flourish when she brought it to the table. And again, the bill was cheap?around $50, including a few bottles of Budweiser.
The thing about eating at these places is that it completely changes one's taste for Chinese food, and everyone whom I've taken to these places has had the same awakening I first did with my girlfriend's family three years ago?namely, that American-style Chinese food is, for the most part, lousy and inauthentic, though it came from an understandable desire to please local palates in a time when most people thought a tiki bar was the height of exotic dining. But no matter?this is a case where the culinary truth definitely sets one free. After winning a moral victory in Small Claims against a deadbeat former employer or spending a hard day waiting to get to send someone to the chair, I can think of no better way to celebrate or unwind than with a meal at one of these restaurants. There's even a street map in the juror's lounge to show you how to get there.
Hop Kee's, 21 Mott St. (betw. Mosco St. & Bowery), 964-8365.
May Villa, 14-18 Elizabeth St. (betw. Canal & Bayard Sts.), 240-9112.