Rice Pot Asian Cuisine made it onto my radar thanks to the ever-curious Steve Siegel, who emailed me last week with the intriguing news that there is a Chinese place in Annandale with dishes with intriguing names like, “Full Burst of Milk,” “Baked Cowboy Bones with Mushroom Sauce,” and “Scallion Pops.”
I was going to be in Annandale on Saturday to go to a coin show, so this made it easy to stop by and check out Rice Pot with my “coin buddy” Steve L, who fortunately is also a good eater.
The current menu is staggeringly long, starting with “001 - Roast Pork w/Mixed Vegetables” and ending with “288 - Husband and Wife Lung Tablets.” It was a little disappointing that there were no Baked Cowboy Bones, Full Burst of Milk, or Scalllion Pops dishes on the menu (maybe due to an intervening better translator?), but there was more than enough variety and exoticism to hold your interest.
With only two of us, we were basically just dipping our toe in and, to be honest, we didn’t do that great a job of ordering.
The best part of the meal was probably the three little free dishes that started off the meal.
These dishes included a tasty bowl of boiled peanuts. I’ve always thought it funny that boiled peanuts are basically found in the American Deep South and China (maybe they’re in other cuisines too, but I’ve never seen it). The Chinese version is honestly much better than the Southern version of boiled peanuts. The spices (not sure exactly what, but maybe anise and Sichuan peppercorns?) are more interesting in the Chinese version than the super-dose of salt in Southern boiled peanuts. And the Chinese “al dente” boiling is more appealing to me than the hours-long cooked-to-a-mush-in-the-shell traditional in the US South.
Also included among the free dishes were a nice bowl of steamed Asian radishes, with a light spice (maybe 5-spice?) and an interesting bowl of steamed chicken feet. The chicken feet were simple, but real good and they disappeared quickly. However, they lacked the savoriness of what I think of as traditional stewed Chinese chicken feet. Still, you couldn’t beat the price and this was a nice start.
For an appetizer, we started with #43, Pig Skin with Radish. This turned out to supply the savoriness that I had missed in the free chicken feet. Although Steve and I both found this dish delicious, this was a huge serving, so there were leftovers to take home for Toni (who liked them, making the positive verdict unanimous).
For our entrees, I chose #205, Conger with Vinasse Sauce. I had to google both conger and vinasse, and found that conger is just a big eel and vinasse is the industrial byproduct when sugar is made from beets or sugar cane. That sounded interesting, so I went with that.
Steve wanted something more traditional, so he chose #271 Chongqing Spicy Chicken off the short Sichuan portion of the long menu. This is the traditional fried chicken cubes covered in whole chilis and spiced with Sichuan peppercorns.
Thanks to the combination of our non-existent Chinese and our two servers’ fairly weak English skills, we weren’t able to get much clarification on the menu or how the dishes would be prepared.
It turned out that we accidentally ordered two fried dishes. The conger came out as huge chunks of fried fish. This was very well prepared, but with no noticeable spicing other than salt and pepper. The accompanying bowl of vinasse for dipping was less interesting than I’d hoped. It basically tested like a somewhat less assertive version of soy sauce. So, a perfectly good dish, but not a memorable one (and the eel had a ton of bones).
The Chongqing chicken was a disappointment, one of the weakest versions of this dish I’ve had. It was fried too long for the very finely diced chunks, so they were crunchy all the way through and way too salty. It says something bad about my eating habits that I nibbled my way through most of this, just on inertia. Steve prudently stopped eating the over-fried, over-salted dish much more quickly than me.
So, based on just one meal with two people, I don’t know whether Rice Pot is a find or not. With a menu this long and interesting, t’s certainly worth more exploration, but I also wonder whether the long menu in a small restaurant means that they rely heavily on frozen ingredients (and that the frozen ingredients might tend to linger in the freezer for a while).
Anyway, here are some of the other more exotic items on RIce Pot’s gargantuan menu:
- Sliced pork feet Foshan style
- Cold jellyfish
- Curry pigskin
- Deep fried pig’s intestine
- Pigskin with duck’s blood
- Marinated ducks’ tongues
- Spiced boneless ducks’ feet
- Cold jellyfish head
- Cold lamb tripe
- Marinated cuttlefish
- Cold jellyfish and baby octopus
- Crab meat with fish maw soup
- Braised pigeon
- Salt and pepper quail
- Beef with pumpkin (kabocha)
- Congee with sliced beef, squid, pig’s skin, and peanuts
- Congee with frog
- Golden frog with duck egg yolk sauce
- Osmanthus mussels with yellow chives
- Stir fried duck blood with chives
- Fried squid and shrimp skin with XO sauce
- Pork intestines with sour cabbage
- Stewed pork intestines with duck’s blood
- Spicy fresh conch
- Dried abalone
- Buddha Jump Over the Wall
- Fried sea cucumber
- Crispy shrimp with walnut in mayonnaise sauce
- Raw geoduck
- Griddled intestines
- Griddled bullfrog
- Fried goose intestines with pepper
- Boiled eel bone
- Thirteen fragrant crayfish
Thanks again to Steve S for his ever-sniffing nose.
