China’s Street Restaurants With No Menu But Legendary Food

Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit joins Lucas Sin at a traditional fly restaurant in Chengdu, China, to try huiguorou, or twice-cooked pork. Although this fly restaurant has no menu and only opens for lunch, locals love it, earning it a legendary reputation.

Transcript

00:00早餐好! Welcome to 醋桥菜市场 inside of Chengdu.

00:07豆腐脑花 is a typical Chengdu-style fly restaurant.

00:12We're here to see a dish called 回锅肉.

00:14Lunch rush is in full swing, so for us to get more food, you just gotta do what we gotta

00:18do.

00:19Here's the line.

00:20Let's cook pork.

00:21A little bit of oil, 郫县豆瓣 and the 豆豉, so fermented soybeans and the fermented

00:27soybean paste inside, bringing up the temperature of that wok.

00:30That oil is starting to extract all those flavors from those two fermented soybeans

00:33and the pork goes in.

00:34You see the pork in the beginning as it went in, the fat was opaque, and now it's starting

00:39to slowly turn translucent.

00:41That's the fat rendering and coming up to temperature.

00:43This curling up motion, they call this the lantern shape.

00:47The idea is that when it curls up in this slight U-shape, it can hold a little bit more

00:50flavor, it might hold some of the ingredients, and importantly, it'll hold a little bit of

00:54that oil, that sauce.

00:55In goes the green chili peppers.

00:57The chili peppers here are spicy, certainly, but they're a bright, fresh, green pepper

01:01type of spicy.

01:02The pork is slowly continuing to render.

01:05That pork is lending its pork fat flavor to the chili peppers as much as that chili pepper

01:09is lending its green herbaceousness to the pork itself.

01:12All the while, because of the copious amounts of oil, the fermented soybean and the fermented

01:16soybean paste are continuing to flavor the entire seasoning.

01:20The last little bit of seasoning is 甜面酱, 甜面酱 being a fermented soybean paste

01:24that has a little bit of wheat inside of it.

01:26Sometimes we'll see it in dishes like Peking Duck, but here in Sichuan, this is what they've

01:29chosen as the finishing flavor for the twice-cooked pork.

01:35An even smattering of pork and chili peppers straight onto the plate, steaming hot still.

01:43That in a matter of a minute or so is two portions of twice-cooked pork.

01:48It's a very traditional, home-style dish made of pork that's first blanched, and then sliced,

01:54and then stir-fried with a bunch of aromatics, and a little bit of chili.

01:58One of our favorite things to get here at 豆腐脑黄.

02:01Okay, so here is the 回锅肉, twice-cooked pork.

02:06First of all, look at it.

02:07Oil.

02:08Two purposes.

02:09Number one, that's the flavor.

02:11Number two, it's going to cover and protect the temperature of this dish.

02:15That's why so many Sichuan dishes have that amount of oil as a carrier of both flavor

02:19and temperature.

02:20Now let's look at the spices.

02:22Here you can see the chili from the 郫县豆瓣.

02:27There's no added red chili, dry chili here.

02:29But there's also the fermented black beans, the fermented soybeans, a little bit of that

02:33fond, which is the bottom of that wok that's picked up as it's being stir-fried and things

02:37caramelized.

02:38There's a huge amount of maillard reaction here, and the chilies themselves.

02:42These long green Chinese chilies, it's going to be deeply savory, really, really, really

02:46tasty.

02:47It's getting a little crazy, but before we eat this, I need to have some rice.

02:51This is the perfect rice dish, 下饭菜.

02:55Rice here is 2 yuan per person, but you have to go get it yourself.

02:58Bowl, and chopsticks.

03:08Don't be shy about the rice because that's what this food is here for.

03:51真的是辣味带一点点的甜,甜里带一点点的咸,真的好好吃。

04:03This type of restaurant is called a 苍蝇馆子, a fly restaurant.

04:07Originally, 苍蝇馆子 is to describe the flies inside the restaurant, to give people

04:13a sense that it's maybe a little bit dirty, it's a little bit old, it's been here for

04:16a while.

04:17This term fly restaurant has, I think, been transformed a little bit.

04:21People have started to look at this word 苍蝇馆子 as something with a little bit of admiration

04:25and love.

04:26And I think the important thing about fly restaurants isn't the fact that people have

04:30labeled it as what once was like a cheap, dirty, high-volume restaurant, but that these

04:36restaurants are so good because they're so close to the ground, it's because they take

04:40the details seriously, it's because they have technique.

04:43From the technique to the flavor to the people to the community, once the place starts to

04:46get busy, you'll really get a sense.

04:49They are cooking for the people around here, they're cooking for locals, they're cooking

04:53for people in this market.

04:54Why this is particularly delicious is the wok technique, the knife technique, the balance

05:00of the flavor, and the fact that they're cooking it at this temperature for this volume of

05:05people.

05:06It's always fresh, everything is cut the day of.

05:08If this restaurant weren't busy, this wouldn't be as good.

05:10If the people hadn't worked here for this long, it wouldn't be that good.

05:15The peppers are nowhere near as spicy as they look.

05:18They are hot.

05:19They're not nearly as spicy.

05:22It's fatty, the oils in the rice, all the flavor is being carried.

05:29Like, one of these things that us chefs are so excited about is this idea of depth of

05:37flavor, which is that when you eat something, that flavor kind of stays with you, and it

05:41feels like it sinks and then envelops your body.

05:44That's what the fermented beans do.

05:46Number one is the fermented fava bean, spicy, but it's a warming, large amount of savoriness,

05:55and then slightly spicier are these little fermented black beans that we're very familiar

06:01with in Cantonese cooking, but also is really important in Pueblo.

06:04I should say the obvious, that twice-cooked pork means that the pork is cooked twice.

06:09The first cook is this.

06:10The pork needs to be simmered, it needs to be blanched so that the fat begins to render,

06:14the skin can tighten, and the flesh is actually cooked enough so when we bring it into the

06:18stir-fry, it doesn't have to cook for so long, and it'll just absorb all those flavors of

06:22the other aromatic that it's being cooked with.

06:24Here comes the belly, the first cut and the second cut.

06:27Cook for a significant amount of time until it's tender.

06:31It's been simmering relatively at a low temperature in the seasoned broth.

06:36The flesh has constricted a little bit, the fat has begun to render, and the skin has

06:41begun to tighten.

06:42This kind of pork you don't often see in too much Western cooking because it's known as

06:46a relatively low-quality cut that's a little bit too lean, the ham, but when it's treated

06:51like this, it can be delicious.

06:54Look, so this is the first cut, this is the first cut, this is the second cut, right?

07:00So after you cook, you can see the difference.

07:02This is the first cut, you see how much fat there is?

07:04All that needs to do is begin to render out during this process.

07:08Here's the diar dal, a little bit less fat, and then you have a little bit more marbling,

07:12I suppose, and a little bit more of the sinew and the tendons for texture.

07:18And third is this middle piece here, that's the pork belly.

07:21You can see the five layers of flesh, fat, flesh, fat.

07:24Three different textures combined together makes a cohesive dish.

07:28Ayi here is slicing the pork for the twice-cooked pork.

07:33As this stir-fries, if it's thin enough, it's going to curl up to create a delicate

07:37little texture for the final product.

07:39This cut here is the tou dao, the first cut.

07:42Sichuan chefs like to describe that it's a good balance of lean and fat, because as

07:47you can see, it really is basically 50-50.

07:50That's what makes twice-cooked pork so delicious.

07:52Look at the precision, and more importantly, the volume of everything from the scallions

07:58to the ginger, to look at the ginger of the minced, the sliced, I am in awe of how much

08:05knife work there is here, and how precise it is.

08:08Interesting.

08:09So, come look at the setup for the kitchen from the back here.

08:11There are two woks, two wok stations, both of them are on gas.

08:15Each of them, just like a traditional Chinese kitchen, it has a specialty for certain types

08:20of dishes.

08:21On the left is doufu na hua, the tofu with the brain, as well as the stir-fried vegetables

08:27and things like that, and the pork that we're going to see.

08:29On the right-hand side is more of the awful dishes, so the kidney and the liver, and the

08:33intestines.

08:34All of the mise en prep is done, everything is portioned out, and when they decide on

08:38cooking something, they just go on rotation, they grab things and start stir-frying.

08:42Once she's done cooking, that finished dish gets split into bowls here, and people just

08:45come up and they are handed whatever has been cooked.

08:49When it gets busy, there's no way to order here.

08:52It's just whatever they make.

08:58You can't come to Chengdu without coming to a proper fly restaurant.

09:01And despite the connotations around that name, what we've seen today is high technique, really

09:06precise cooking, good people cooking good food for the people around them, ingredients

09:11treated well, and overall, just a delightful, genuine, authentic, I'm going to say, eating

09:17experience.

09:19On to the next.

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