Yulin Harbor Restaurant

At the recommendation of someone at the hotel, I went out in seek of spicy food at the Yulin Harbor Restaurant. Don’t ask me where the restaurant is, because I have no idea. I just know that through a lot of side streets and traffic an hour after I departed the hotel in a taxi, I arrived at the restaurant. Fortunately, the ride home was much faster…not sure if it was just later, or that this driver knew something the first didn’t know because I came back via a different route, with almost no traffic (at least by Shanghai standards).

The restaurant was clean and could pass for any western restaurant as far as how it was decorated and such. Definitely not a “hole-in-the-wall” kind of place.

Best part was that this menu had pictures, but the writing was entirely in Chinese or the pinyan version of the Chinese which didn’t do much for my understanding of what I was ordering. Again, I ordered way too much food, but I wanted to try a variety of foods. I ordered 5 dishes which in the end was about 150 RMB for dinner. That’s $22USD. If I could live here in China, and earn an American salary, I’d eat like a king!

The waitress pointed me at some of the restaurant’s specials which included a fish dish, another that she couldn’t describe initially, and a cabbage dish. I recognized Ma Po tofu, and I ordered that, and then added soup. The soup turned out to be a sweet egg drop-like soup with what tasted like glutinous rice flour balls. It made for a nice contracts to the hot stuff.

The Ma Po tofu was about what I expected, although the source of heat is a combination of red chili peppers like you usually see as well as whole peppercorns. I think they were more of the sichuan pepper corns then the traditional black ones. They added a quick bit of heat when you bit down on one, then a lingering tingling to your tongue. Eventually, I opted to stop eating them as my tongue was getting oddly numbed by them.

The cabbage was simple, but tasted good, and it allowed me to think I was being healthy by including a vegetable in my meal I actually ate pretty much the whole plate. The other two house specialities presented a little more challenge. The fish dish was exactly that, but with a slight twist that I couldn’t tell by the pictures. The menu showed two pieces, one covered in red and the other in green. I assumed it was the two fillets, one side covered in red chili then other in a green. I got the red and green part right, but I got the fillet part wrong. Instead, I got two large (like 4-5 inches across and 6 inches long) fish heads. Just as Grandma always showed us, the cheeks contained some good meat, and at the base of the head where it was cut from the body, there was a fair amount of meat. I’m not sure if others would have consumed more of the head, but I decided I didn’t need to go that far…I had enough adventure remaining to tackle the other dish.

The last house specialty was not described initially. It was just supposed to be a specialty that I must have. It contained chunks of white meat with some bones that had a delicate flavor…it didn’t taste like chicken. And the bones were not fish bones…or chicken bones…but it tasted good. The dish also had a lot of lotus root and what I think were taro root chips. Eventually I got an explanation that I understood…the meat was frog meat. So, I can now add that to my list of things I’ve eaten. Good thing the cooked frog didn’t resemble a live frog at all…or I might not have eaten it at!

Tags: frog, Shanghai, spicy food