Back at Osmanthus Alley last weekend for lunch with fellow HOer, @Nathan_Jones.
Braised Peking spare-ribs - not one of those slow-cooked-till-meat-falls-off-off-the-bone rib dishes, but it has been cooked till the texture was at its optimum tenderness - yielding, but not mushy-soft. The sauce was the usual complex combination of soy sauce with its various counterparts (oyster sauce, fish sauce) but spiked with the deep, mellow flavours of fragrant Zhenjiang black vinegar.
Eggplant in garlic sauce - this is a simple, almost too common, Shanghainese stir-fry: eggplants, garlic, red chili, soy sauce and sugar. Each Shanghainese/Chinese cook will have a variant on it using the basic ingredients above, but with minor additions or variations. The one here has minced pork for added protein, then topped with fresh, chopped scallions.
Stir-fried tomato & egg - another pure comfort food (for the Northern & Eastern Chinese) - a simple combination of beaten eggs and chunks of freshly-cut tomatoes. I remembered a visiting Shanghainese professor (during my university days in Australia) who’d cook a soup version of this - simmered tomatoes, with eggs beaten into it, then seasoned with MSG - for her dinner every day! For the Southern Chinese, and the Chinese diaspora in South-east Asia, mainly Hokkiens/Fujianese, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochews and Hainanese - this dish don’t even exist for us!
Penang-born Chef Tang obviously learnt this dish from his days working for the Shanghainese-slanted Leong’s Legend in London Chinatown, and added it into his repertoire:
The restaurant was pretty busy, and was full the whole time we were there - a testament to its ability to appeal to Penang’s rather finicky dining crowd.
