Saw an interesting photo of Razor Clams on the instagram of our cherubic Pulitzer Prize winning food critic recently. Yelp shots of very legit looking Sichuan and Seafood, and an especially lovely (looking Mapo Tofu)
Are razor clams “hot” in the 626/714 right now?
Razor clams are kinda of a thing in NYC’s Chinatowns for quite awhile.
Had a family friend who lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and those razor clams are some of the best seafood I had.
The thing to get here is the House Special Dungeness Crab (香辣大肉蟹) and Yellow Tail fish soup (酸湯小黃魚).
Avoid the Dan Dan Mian. Just no.
They no longer prepare this one.[quote=“ipsedixit, post:4, topic:5692”]
House Special Dungeness Crab (香辣大肉蟹)
[/quote]
And this one was quite good.
Everything else was pretty average-to-bad with very little Sichuan Pepper numbness and far too much reliance on massive slugs of garlic as the main flavoring.
Reminded me of a bad mash up of a Boiling Crab type joint, and a proper Sichuan restaurant.
Though they have beer on tap none of the taps were working.
I asked the server if we could open the wine we brought and he said, “Sorry, no license for wine.”
I pointed out that the beer and wine license was for both. He insisted they can’t, “Too strong.”
Finally I said “The wine we have is not Bai Jo, we want to open Hong Jo, OK?”
He smiled and said, “Oh. No problem.”
I googled before asking this question, but the only reference I could find was to Hong Jo, a Korean football (soccer) player.
What is Hong Jo?
Others, who know more, will correct me I am sure, but these are important (if you ever travel to Mandarin speaking lands) Pinyin rough pronunciations for different types of alcohols:
Hong Jo is roughly what we call red wine (but I believe it pertains to what we call white wine as well)
Bai Jo is a real firewater - hard, hard burning liquor (but is most correctly translated as white wine, hence the confusion last night)
Pee Jo is beer
That would be 紅酒 (red wine)…
A literal phonetic English translation of “red wine” in Mandarin.
Pißwasser
the hotaru ika, a riff on the rattan boiled fish, was uhhmazing, but was literally sent back by the crowd:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUh-hWaFnt_/?taken-by=latimesfood
The AK king crab “cold brewed” style, ~7+ lbs, $298.88? is often all that a table would order:
The fresh fish filet (ask for sole, if they have it) spicky pickled cabbage soup is bomb:
and if they have ho-fun, ask them for some. The chef is obsessed with plying her man with Canto ingredients. Also I think this thing made me drop 2 lbs of water weight this morning so that always makes me thankful.
Gold review out today
He seemed to like it but almost everything we had not very good and not very Sichuan.
Any recent experience here?
Gold not only reviewed it but featured it on KCRW’s Good Food
It was fairly terrible when we went.