The first such operation, the forthrightly named Fried Dumpling, happens to be right across Allen Street from a restaurant I patronize, Congee Village, which means that Congee Village is the only place where I welcome the news that a table will not be available right away. The wait presents an opportunity to nip across the street for a dollar’s worth of hors d’oeuvres. At a rival establishment nearby—Dumpling House, on Eldridge Street—I broadened my horizons from dumplings to egg and chive pancakes (which are actually more like empanadas) and then to something called beef with sesame pancake—a sandwich on what looks like a slice of sesame focaccia. Not having tried the much-celebrated new restaurants recently opened by famous chefs at the Time Warner Center, I can’t say categorically that Dumpling House’s beef with sesame pancake, which costs a dollar and a half, tastes as good as anything they have to offer, but that is my suspicion.
Put in the context of Shandong province, David Jaggard’s all-caps exultation about the dumplings didn’t seem surprising—which made me all the more eager to try Yang’s version. Since David and Nancy live in a very small apartment, I was restricted to a tiny guest list compared with Apple, who had at his disposal more than 50 places. I began with a policy of including no ambassadors at all. Then I asked some friends who live in Paris and three people who would be facing the music at Chez L’Ami Louis the next evening. Two of the Apple celebrators were Alice Waters and her daughter, Fanny. The other one was Joseph Lelyveld, who, until his retirement, was a longtime colleague of Apple’s on The New York Times. What I thought made Joe a particularly appropriate guest was that in the ’70s, when Times management was getting signals that American newspaper bureaus would soon be permitted in Beijing, he was sent to Cambridge, England, for a year, to study Mandarin. (When the signals turned out to be premature, he became the bureau chief in Hong Kong, where people speak Cantonese.) At the Times, Joe distinguished himself at a number of posts, including the editorship of the paper, but he was apparently not a gifted student of Mandarin. His accent problem was so profound, he has said, that when he finally got to the mainland some years later and tried using what he’d learned at Cambridge to make an innocuous remark about the weather to a man sitting next to him on a riverboat, the man replied, “Sorry, I don’t speak English.” But I figured that it would all come back to him when he tasted Yang’s dumplings.
I like a chef who brings her own cleaver. Yang was slicing fine disks of lotus root with her own cleaver when I arrived at David and Nancy’s apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up near a fine market street called the Rue des Martyrs, in the 9th arrondissement. David and Nancy have what the French call a cuisine américaine—an open kitchen—so Yang would be preparing and cooking right next to where we’d be eating. The other implement she’d brought along was a rolling pin, although it looked like a small dowel; she would be using it to roll out individual dumpling skins. The lotus root, done with sugar and vinegar, was one of the three cold dishes we began with, once we crowded around the table. The others were cold spicy chicken and a sort of salad that included dried tofu and what David called “your weight in garlic.” I believe the guests thought of the cold dishes as the lead-in to the dumplings; they seemed to indicate that by eating just about everything on the table. As it turned out, though, the dumplings were a long way down the road. First, we had something that Yang calls Big Pot, a soupy dish that came in, well, a big pot and included angel-hair noodles and cabbage and faux ham. That was followed by an egg and chive dish that tasted remarkably like the filling of a Dumpling House egg and chive pancake, which is a fine thing to taste like.
Then we had stuffed eggplant fritters—pockets of eggplant that were crammed with a pork mixture, battered, and fried on a high heat for so long that Alice Waters, who was standing at the stove observing Yang in action, had to restrain herself from calling out a warning that they might be burning. They weren’t. They emerged looking like small croque-monsieur. As each batch came out, it was put on the table, so no more time intervened between pan and plate than it does in a first-rate tempura restaurant in Japan. I was disappointed when the fourth batch turned out to be our final go at the stuffed eggplant fritters, although my disappointment was mitigated by the way Yang had prepared a grouper. Then, finally, she started rolling out the dumpling skins, and we prepared for the main course.
Fried pork dumplings. Steamed pork dumplings. Fried vegetable dumplings. Steamed vegetable dumplings. They were all spectacular. At some point, I realized I couldn’t hold any more dumplings. “I now regret having the fourth stuffed eggplant fritter,” I announced to the table. “I wish I could bring myself to say that I regret having the third stuffed eggplant fritter, but, in all honesty, I cannot.” Then, relieved by the confession, I found room for one more steamed vegetable dumpling. Joe decided he would attempt a particularly elegant sentence he knew in Mandarin to express our appreciation to the chef—a sentence that translates roughly as “Our fortune in eating has certainly not been small.” He directed it to Yang. Looking completely puzzled, she glanced over to Nancy for assistance. Nancy looked puzzled. Then, everyone applauded. Yang beamed. So did Joe.
Pinterest
