Meishan Restaurant

Meishan Restaurant @ #1018 4500 Kingsway in Crystal Mall

Crystal Mall is right next to Metrotown. It's the Asian version of Metrotown, with a decided focus on food. There must be at least 20 different restaurants, in addition to numerous bakeries and vegetable and fruit stands. The mall itself has an interesting annular/donut-shaped layout, with an open circular court in the center:

There are restaurants and shops selling rice cookers and Hello Kitty merchandise all along the length of the inner mall, and the second floor houses a very nice 100% Asian food court with stalls specializing in food from all sorts of regions - Yunnan, Shandong, Taiwan, Wenzhou, etc.

But it's this restaurant facing the court that was the goal of our visit today at lunch:

This was our fourth time coming here. It's really far, so we don't come here often, but we find the food particularly good and authentic, so we make a beeline for this place when we're craving a certain type of authentic Chinese food. They're our favorite source for this one dish of sliced fish in boiling oil that we usually get whenever we go.

It's a tiny place seating max 30:

I don't think I've ever heard a word of English spoken in this restaurant by the visitors or staff, except maybe "Hello." When we place an order, the waitress doesn't even bother looking at me or speaking in English. She just ignores me and speaks directly to Kweepo in Mandarin. That's the way it is.

Though my initial reaction is for it to rub me the wrong way, I rethink this reaction quickly, because, in fact, the whole reason I come to this place is because it's so steeped in the native culture. I want to eat at a restaurant where the staff don't have to worry about catering to westerners, in both manners and cooking. For good or ill, it's precisely this attitude of staking a fence of Chinese culture and language around the area, to the exclusion of the encroaching English culture, that gives this area its appeal as a source of authentic Chinese cooking. It suggests to me the catch 22 that a certain hermeticity of culture is required for authenticity, but that hermeticity makes it hard for outsiders who seek that authenticity to enter the milieu. This is why I so appreciate restaurants like Lucky Noodle and Peaceful that act as the pioneers bridging the two cultures by catering openly to both languages and permitting people on the other side of the divide like me to learn about the food, instead of just catering to their own in an exclusionary way.

The sign outside evokes the notion of offering dishes from every region of China ("North, South, West, East, it's all there!") but the menu inside, of which you can see two representative pages below, contradicts this somewhat by stating "Tianjin and Szechuan Restaurant". I think they offer a menu that is a balanced selection of the Mandarin staples, with an emphasis on the staples of the aforesaid two regions. Indeed, the spicy food here is quite spicy. The fish in boiling oil can be scorchingly intense if you order it spicy, as the heat is amplified by the hot oil.

And yes, it's that dish that we came for here today, so we got it yet again. We can't seem to get enough of the:

Sliced Fish with Assorted Vegetables in Boiled Oil ($11.99)

We're not up to the level of native Szechuanese in terms of being trained for spiciness, so we ordered the mild version, and in fact it was just the right spiciness level.

It's a great dish. The broth is great, though of course it's very oily and not very healthy. You don't drink it, so it doesn't matter. The fish is big and tender. Eating it with rice helps tune down the spiciness. The downside is that when you first see the dish, it looks like a huge helping of fish, but in fact the fish is mostly covering a huge serving of veggies. You run out of the fish pretty soon, and you're left with a bowl full of tasteless veggies. This is precisely the sort of thing I was thinking of in my last post on Lucky Noodle when I complained about tasteless veggies in fish-in-broth dishes and insufficient fish to cover you throughout the duration of the dish. In view of this, the price too high, especially considering they offer lunch specials for $5.99. However, while it lasts it's a wonderful dish, the best of its kind I've had. I've sampled the same dish at some other places, but this one's the best.

Kweepo got the above. I got the following. I wanted to try something I'd never had there before, but not something boring like Tan Tan noodles or fried rice. So I got this noodle dish, which seemed like something I've never tried before.

Rice Noodle & Minced Pork in sour soup ($5.99)

This was really delicious. Also a little bit oily, but not excessively so. Not too spicy. The noodles very tender, almost to the point of melting in your mouth. The broth excellent and full of flavor. The small bits of veggies crunchy and with a great pickled flavor rather than the tasteless flavor of unpickled veggies. The only minor complaint would be that I wish the pieces of pork and veggie were bigger so you could taste each piece more, but very minor complaint. This was absolutely great and I'd get it again at the drop of a hat.

We also bought a bucket of rice and a coke. All together, the meal came out to about $25. If we'd stuck with the lunch special it would have been much cheaper. This would be a great place to come to for an affordable lunch if they were closer to me, as they have a fairly large lunch special menu, with more than 20 items between $5.99 and $7.99.

They have a number of cured meat dishes in the vein of the cured meat dishes at the Hunan Lucky Noodle restaurant, so I'm curious to come back and try these some time. This restaurant was also the first place I tried shredded potato in vinegar, and as I recall it's the best I've had so far.

After lunch we went upstairs to the food court and marveled at all the different types of Chinese food on display. We wished we weren't full already! The very definition of gourmandise. We'd go on eating different types of Chinese food all day if we could fit them all in our stomachs.

Even though I was full, when I saw the photo of this, I just had to get one to try later on:

It's a sort of crepe wrapped around a Chinese donut. I ate one of these in Beijing on the last day of my most recent trip there two years ago, and so I just had to re-experience that taste. I could see the lady preparing it, and she was doing it the same way I recall they did it in Beijing:

It's a shame we couldn't eat this on the spot, because it looked so amazing, but we were full. So we took it home. I just now took it out of the bag, and though it's gotten kind of soggy after a few hours and probably doesn't taste as good as it would just freshly cooked, an initial bite suggests that it's quite good nonetheless. It looks quite good:

The crispy deep-fried donut inside is wrapped by a soft crepe slathered in some kind of brown sauce. There's also an egg cracked into there, giving it a more substantial flavor. Would be great for a hearty breakfast or even lunch. I believe the green herb is cilantro.

Strangely, this was actually a fresh juice stall, not a food stall. The sign apparently only applies to this particular dish. Otherwise all they sell is juice drinks. Apparently Mr. Zhang is a restaurant located on Victoria Drive. I suppose this juice stall has worked out some arrangement with the restaurant. A cunning synergy, this,  offering just this particular dish at a bubble tea place, at the same time attracting customers to the juice as well as advertising the restaurant. Take-out menus for Mr. Zhang were laid out on the counter.

Usually a juice stand has fruits of various kinds to make their drinks with, right? But then I saw the following amid all the fruits:

Wait a minute. Bitter melon? You mean you offer freshly made bitter melon juice? I've never heard of this before. MUST TRY IMMEDIATELY.

Then we noticed this sign advertising the juice:

Bitter melon is, for some reason, alternately known as balsam pear. I would never have known what they were talking about if I hadn't recognized the Chinese characters 苦瓜 and made the connection with the melon on display.

If they make it, it can't be that bad, right? In fact, it's not that bad. I drank it all.

We got the apple + bitter melon combo. It's a very interesting taste. When you take a sip, the first thing you taste as the drink enters your mouth is the sweetness of the apple. Then, a moment later, as you swallow, you begin to taste the bitterness of the bitter melon. Then a moment later, it hits you full force: the pungent bitterness that is the hallmark of the bitter melon. The bitterness really lingers, too. Nevertheless, you get used to it after a while. I was really digging it by the end.