Egg Fu Old

 

In the 1950s a thousand Chinese restaurants bloomed… and for the next fifty years nothing happened.

Convoy Street’s Dumpling Inn is, on the outside, about like any other hole-in-the-strip-mall nondescript Chinese restaurant. Complete with iffy grammar (a surefire sign of authenticity and gustatory happiness), the menus list off dumpling after dumpling, noodle dish after noodle dish, each sounding like variations of each other. It’s a happy family of dishes, to be sure. After all, Dumpling Inn has been argued by many reputable food critics as the best Chinese restaurant in San Diego, as good when eaten at the worn dining tables as it is at home in front of a Jackie Chan marathon… perhaps a little drunk. Perhaps a lot drunk.

And so I find myself at the Dumpling Inn eating the best that the genre has to offer. And it’s good. The food is well balanced, nicely seasoned, and served at a face-melting three-billion degrees Fahrenheit… enough to turn sand into glass. And if that’s not enough to make you want to eat it, consider this; it’s only a couple of dollars more than the steam-table slop that the second-senior-year high school student with backne has been charging you for the corn syrup and meat amalgamation that they call “Beijing Beef and Orange Chicken Two Entrée Combo”. Can I get that with extra mediocrity?

The food at Dumpling Inn is good, very good, and the legions of eaters that crowd its dining room are a testament to that. But I still found myself somehow… unsatisfied. Like the guy in high school who just scored the head JV cheerleader as a prom date, I find myself saying… “Is that the best I can do?” And when you’re eating what you know to be the best that a genre has to offer and you begin to think of something else, it’s time to ask bigger questions. Let the inquisition of Chinese cuisine begin.

It’s good, but it can be bland. Really bland, to the point where shrimp and chicken are only mildly different. And what a shame! How is it that the sweetness of shrimp or the salty wonders of chicken can get lost in a cuisine that undoubtedly has one of the greatest varieties of spices and seasonings in all of cooking? How did this happen? To be sure, a great deal of it has to do with technique. With such an intense focus on only one cooking implement, the wok, a cuisine is bound to have its limitations. But even with this one instrument, one should be able to perform a great number of different tasks – braising, steaming, frying, and deep-frying can all be done with a wok. However, each of these techniques is a fast technique, and even more than this, none of them are ambient heat techniques.

Or perhaps it has something to do with cultural roots. The roots of Chinese cooking are the same as Chinese medicine, the Ben Caos and other various botanical and agricultural texts. Dedicated cookbooks, as opposed to cooking/medicine books, didn’t appear in China until the Song Dynasty. And let’s face it; aside from anomalies like the Gin and Tonic and Codeine for particularly rainy days, medicine has rarely produced good food.
The Zagats, yes, those Zagats, have a different theory. According to their New York Times article, it’s nearly impossible to get work visas for a competent Chinese kitchen staff in a post-9/11 world: but I have trouble with this idea. Mostly because here in San Diego, I could go to a dozen capable restaurants of varying cuisines, and almost every single one of my rainbow coalition of orders would be shouted into the kitchen en español.

Some could even blame it on communism. After all, arguably the biggest food trend in China during the 1990s was “retro-Maoist” cuisine, an ironically industrial revival of rice gruel and other basic cereals… and not much else. But does centralized governmental planning make for bad food? Try asking the Vietnamese, or even the French, assuming that they’re not on vacation or strike.

But of all the problems associated with the American take on Chinese food, perhaps the most troubling is stagnation. Hole-in-the-wall joints like Dumpling Inn have been serving the same food since the 1950s, when they were the only Asian kid on the block. But since then, waves of Thai, Japanese, Viet, and Indian restaurateurs have set up more exciting shops. Sure, mu shu pork was exciting back in the days of black and white… but so were the bowling alley, Howdy-Doody Time, and the pushbutton transmission on your grandma’s Edsel. If times really have changed, then Sichuan has a lot of ground to make up. And if Peking Man, who first set fire to Paleolithic Chinese deer some 500,000 years ago could see his successors now… there would be grunts of despair and sad faces on the cave paintings.

Chef Jordan Cherry
Staff Writer, thefeedfeed.com

Dumpling Inn
4619 Convoy St # F
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 268-9638