Fish sauce is unpleasant stuff, smelly and weird, but without it, you can’t really get the right flavor to your home made Thai or Vietnamese food. We bought one bottle of the stuff which we threw out immediately upon opening it – it was beyond weird and smelly, it was downright nasty and there was no way I was putting it in my food. The next bottle we got proved more palatable, if you can call fish sauce palatable on its own. It really is essential, though, it adds whatever that flavor is to your food that makes it taste like The Real Thing.

I’m still toying with Pad Thai recipes, I haven’t found one that works for me 100%. Some recipes call for ketchup, some for loads of Sri Racha (hot sauce), some for tamarind… Last night’s came from The Noodle Shop Cookbook, but it was amended slightly by me – my notes say to replace the ketchup with tamarind and to go crazy with the lime. I still ended up a little short on the sauce and I should have used the little ready cooked shrimp instead of the Gulf prawns, but they looked so appealing in the seafood case.

We have loads of Asian supermarkets here. I’m torn between two of them, the lush Uwajimaya that has vast quantities of beautifully stacked groceries or the ramshackle (and always freezing cold) Viet Wah where the items are a bit more mysterious, the market a bit more like being in Vietnam. At Viet Wah you can buy fresh rice noodles, at Uwajimaya you can get fresh spinach noodles, it’s not a six of one, half a dozen of the other situation. I could not find the ginger candies that I love at Uwajimaya but they don’t seem to have the ginger cookies that make me crazy at Viet Wah.

I’m a fan of supermarkets as adventure, I always love to go grocery shopping overseas and here in Seattle we’re lucky to have a nice variety of ethic grocery stores. Mystery produce is always fun, mystery meat has a slightly terrifying edge to this vegetarian inclined eater, and I get a ridiculous amount of glee from finding things in cans that I can not identify.

Eat your fish. It makes everything more interesting.

She’d noticed we were paying attention. It was hard not to. We were one of a few tables of white people at Ho Ho, a Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District. The place was packed with an enormous Chinese family – four generations filled the dining room, from Mr Chow at 94 to his highchair seated great grandchildren. Mr. Chow was making the rounds, standing behind seated family members for photographs, teasing the youngsters, beaming over the huge family that filled the restaurant in his honor.

Ruby Chow, his wife, died earlier this year. She was a Seattle legend, a matriarch, a grand American success story. “Don’t mention Ruby,” said our waitress “or he will be very sad and start crying.” Of course. They were married for more than 60 years. “The family has been coming here for over 20 years. We know them all. He calls me, I say ‘How many?’”

Ruby and Ping met in New York. Mr. Chow was quite the ladies man, apparently, but when he was hospitalized for a condition affecting his eyes and thought he was going blind, Ruby was the only one who came to visit. “This is the girl for me!” Mr. Chow was in the military at the time – he’d joined to get his US Citizenship – but his training was in classical Chinese opera. He’d worked his way to New York from Hawaii where he’d been left by his patron/employer when he’d fallen ill. Ruby and Ping went on to build one of Seattle’s grand families.

Mr. Chow’s daughter, Cheryl, told us these stories while we sat in at our corner table drinking Tsing Tao beer and letting the waitress tell us what to order. She passed our fond birthday wishes along to her father and he looked up from his place at the head of the crowd. That’s when he walked over and placed the bottle of wine on our table.

“You’re lucky!” said the waitress. “He is passing along this good fortune to you! You are very lucky!”

We all agreed.

Ho Ho Seafood Restaurant is at 653 Weller in Seattle’s International District.

The salt and pepper squid is a favorite, as are the green onion pancakes and the chow fun with prawns – dry, not with gravy. We skipped the duck this time – this was our second visit to Hing Loon – and subbed in some tofu dishes for our vegetarian friend. The hot pot was hot all right, but only okay for flavor, but the Szechuan tofu, in a spicy red sauce, was yummy. We also had an order of pea vines with garlic – always good – and it’s important to eat your greens. The people next to us had sizzling eggplant so we had to have it too – it arrived sputtering in pale bubbling sauce, so hot as to be dangerous. We had to wait for it to simmer down to taste it. I found it odd – eggplant is tricky – but the sauce did have a spicy bite that sneaked up on you when you weren’t looking.

Hing Loon brings your bill – 19 dollars a head for 7 dishes plus beer – with fortune cookies and sesame balls. It’s a good place to go with lots of friends – that way you can order some old standards and something new and still get plenty to eat.

Hing Loon Seafood Restaurant is at 628 Weller. Here are some pictures of Hing Loon taken by people I don’t know.
[tags]International District, Seattle, Chinese food[/tags]

The Wing Luke Asian Museum was free today and that was our first stop. The museum documents the history of our local Asian population and highlights the shameful period of the “relocation” camps in a heartbreaking exhibit complete with barbed wire. It wasn’t sad in the museum today – the place was packed with kids making little red lanterns.

After the museum, we squeezed our way in to the crowded Union Station hall to watch a few traditional dance groups. The sound in the hall was a nightmare (yo, festival sponsors, maybe you want to hook the I District community up with some decent audio next time?) but the dancers were gorgeous and the little girls too adorable for words. Overwhelmed by the crush and the unbearable noise of the sound system, we got the hell out of there and went for bubble tea at Ambrosia – Seattle’s first bubble tea shop. The young man behind the counter looked exactly like an Miyazake hero – shocking good looks, perfectly cut hair, flipped up collar and sharp smooth cheekbones. Mango bubble tea and anime fantasy, 3.25.

Then we wandered over to Higo to flip through fancy books, admire the ceramics, and generally adore what the new owners did with the store. Higo used to be a stuffed to the rafters variety store – I used to wander around in there for hours eyeing the plastic doo dads and house coats and chopsticks and well, they had all kinds of stuff there. The west wall of the store still has a the old display cases and odds and ends from Higo’s old inventory on display.

On the way home we passed an herbalist and tea shop, another housewares store featuring rice cookers and religious icons, a teeny tiny burrito counter, a handful of jewelry stores, a Mexican market, and the old Wonder Bread factory. I never get tired of this part of the city, it’s a wonderland.

–

Speaking of the I District, we did indeed eat on Jackson Street this last Friday night. The choice? Lemongrass, a little Vietnamese place that supposedly serves up “the best five spice chicken on the planet” – or some such glowing review. While the chicken was good, all right – perfectly cooked, crispy, not oily – I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it the best on the planet. On the other hand, the lemongrass ginger chicken? Delicious. Lemongrass is something of a subtle flavor, but this stuff must have stewed in it, so richly did it have that lemony grassy taste. Yummy. The only downside was that we’d ordered heavy on the meat and ended up asking the waiter to bring us a plate of garlic green beans to round out the meal. Good stuff, speedy service, and with four entrees on the table at 32 dollars, totally affordable. Good service, too. If you’re there on a cold night, sit away from the door, it’s a small place and gets kinda drafty.

Lemongrass is at 1207 South Jackson in the Ding Ho Plaza. Parking is available in the oddly signed garage underneath. Make a risky left turn off Jackson and go right down the ramp as you pull into the shopping center.
[tags]Seattle International District[/tags]