Nick,
the only Chinese I’ve liked in the Chicago area is Chef Ping in Rolling Meadows. His cuisine is Mandarin/northern Korean, though.
Chinatown sucks in Chicago. Whenever you try a dim sum place, it’s always starch and meat, no veggies.
Chinese/Asian cooking in general is much more refined in its ingredient preparation… rarely would you see a slab of meat… or a whole something… (except fish).
Usually meat/veggies is cut up to small pieces and cooked… the cutting is part of the skill of the preparer.
Before the influx of western influences, my Chinese relatives couldn’t understand why anyone would eat an entire slab of meat… does the cook not know how to use a knife? 
well…imo, it’s difficult to be more “refined” than a whole steamed lobster. Simplicity and purity, for me, are the ultimate “refinement”.
And…with some main courses, even the introduction of sauces…is counter to “purity”…
I understand your point…but it’s largely a matter of expectations/what you value/expect, as you say. And, theater with food…is not something I particularly value. (FWIW, I do use a cleaver with lobster when I cook it in Maine, but…I usually regard chopping pieces and putting them on a platter as less desirable, visually, and reward-wise than a whole bug on a plate.) I’m not arguing which is better/more refined, etc…just that expectations and criteria for that vary with the beholder…as does beauty in general.
Having said that, whenever I am in a good Vietnamese cuisine restaurant, my head is constantly turning at the beauty of the platters of food and their visual appeal.
So…is the lobster dead or alive when the cleaver does its “5 seconds” of work/damage?
Alive.
However, there are methods where you briefly steam or poach before chopping and finishing in the wok.
Thanks.
ouch!
Funny,. Growing up I felt it was a waste of lobster to just boil and dip in bland butter. Why do that when you can have such a much tastier version such as the one below. Lightly battered, fried, and sautéed with onions, jalapeño, and roe. So flavorful, sweet, and tender I can’t fathom why anyone would just boil and dip in butter. The below restaurant (chain actually) is well known to have one of the tastiest lobster preps in LA.
wonder why we don’t do a wine dinner at Newport. They allow wine too, the SGV one that is
Man. . . just had lunch but that picture has gotten me hungry all over again. That’s some good lobster!
We have no decent Chinese food in DC. Well, we have this place http://www.aj-restaurant.com/main.html which is pretty good, but I am very excited that Peter Chang has announced plans to open within 60-90 days in Arlington. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/dining/where-peter-chang-cooks-they-will-follow.html?_r=0
Can’t wait!
Different strokes…I guess. To me a “great lobster dish” is an oxymoron. Anything added is adulteration, including butter, which I do…Nature’s perfect food…other than pizza.
And, it’s funny…when I was a kid (wont’ say when, but a while ago), lobster was my favorite food. So, my family would always order “lobster cantonese”, which was, in my memory, akin to “shrimp with lobster sauce”…lots of cornstarch. I thought it ruined the lobster…and made it slimy to eat. Frying lobster…jeez…
Now…I wouldn’t turn that stuff down…but I wouldn’t order it, either…
I see what you’re saying… i was more talking about refinement in cooking technique/skills…
it doesn’t take much skill to throw a lobster in a pot, steam for x minutes, take it out and slap it on a plate.
to cut/fry/season/stir fry, all while not overcooking/undercooking takes much more skill.
The other skill is in cutting it - it makes all the meat accessible without really needing to crack the shell… i’m getting really hungry…
Because Vietnamese-Chinese food doesn’t go with burg? ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
Slimy. That sounds like some Americanized lobster sauce version. That’s like Mark G. equating general tso’s chicken and moo shoo pork with Chinese food. Like going to Pizza Hut and equating that with authentic Neapolitan pizza.
I implore you to try a good version. If someone drank 2010 grand cru Burgundy at age 5 and proclaimed it nothing special, wouldn’t you want them to try it the way it’s “supposed” to be?
Thanks…I’ve moved way beyond the '50s in the intervening years.
Then, Chinese food was all chow mein/egg foo young; Italian food was all pizza and meatballs and spaghetti; indian food wasn’t yet invented; vietnamese food was not even at war yet; and…McDonald’s was a one-store operation. (Oh, Burgundy was Gallo “Hearty”, though I was way too young, so it was Manischewitz…once a year, watered down.)
But…sauces and lobster, to me…are always overkill. Sorry…
FWIW, for the last couple of years I have been very intrigued by the local Xi’an cuisine restaurant in Philadelphia…though my wife isn’t, so…
I always eat lobster grilled with a squeeze of lemon juice. No butter. Great with Raveneau.
Thanks Chae. That’s pretty far for me but I’ll try to arrange a pilgrimage. We do go to Katy’s dumplings when we can and lately my wife has been getting carry out from a restaurant in the Asian Market that’s pretty good.
Like Stuart, I grew up on Americanized Chinese food - this was back in the 60’s and 70’s in Los Angeles before the big wave of Chinese immigration hit and transformed the SGV. Back then my Chinese meal consisted of fried rice and chow mein. Our family would go have “China meishi” at this little place called Ho Sai Kai near our house where Rosie, the waitress from Hong Kong, would always take care of us and let us know what was on her mind.
These days the food has changed a great deal. My wife is Chinese and we have dinner frequently with her family at NBC, which is just down the street from Elite. I make her cringe by telling her that for me, “real” Chinese food is from Panda Express, and also by using the terms my folks used to use way back when. Like “pakkai” for sweet and sour pork, or “hom-yu” for this nasty fish porridge that I refused to eat. She tells me there’s no such words in Chinese and I say yes there is, we used to order that stuff!
Well there are many dialects in the Chinese language which are generally mutually unintelligible to each other. So your wife is probably mainly a Mandarin speaker, while the restaurant workers in your past probably mostly spoke Cantonese.
I can’t figure out what pakkai could be…although “pai-gwut” is pork ribs/spare ribs. “hom yu” literally means salted-fish, and Canto folks make porridge out of hom-yu.
Actually my wife is Cantonese, born in Hong Kong. I’m Japanese-American so maybe that’s just how the Japanese started naming the Chinese stuff, but it’s always been “pakkai” to me. My wife says the same thing you do - at least it sounds like “pai-gwut” to me. She’s used to me mangling the language… like I call the whole crispy chicken “Georgie-guy.” I think maybe the hom yu confusion is that whatever my folks called hom yu is not the same thing as what Chinese people think is hom yu.
Rickie. Really funny but my really good friend in wine is also a Japanese American named Rickie m in monterey park