Dong Ting Spring, the restaurant that has replaced the terrific-and sorely missed-Malaysian restaurant Banana Leaf, on Schiff Drive behind Chinatown, has a name that refers to a famous lake in Hunan, a province in central China. That’s mostly relevant because this is our first bona fide Hunan restaurant, even if many signature dishes are in unreadable Chinese characters on a blackboard by the kitchen.
Hunan (the home province of Mao Tse Tung) is known for its incendiary cooking, the result of many dishes smothered in mouth-numbing fagara peppers. But it’s also the home of amazing smoked pork, made by using tea and camphor leaves, and a wonderful cuisine that rivals that of any region in China. Its debut in Vegas has been long overdue.
At this writing, the sign outside still reads Banana Leaf, but this restaurant couldn’t be more different. The décor hasn’t changed, still mini-mall blando, but the presence of two or three potted red plants indicate the new ownership, as they signify luck and prosperity.
I ate here with GQ food critic and noted curmudgeon Alan Richman, who the next day warned a group of journalists at a luncheon about dining out with me. “Never eat with Max,” he told them. “He’ll tell you to have anything you want, and then order the dishes all by himself without letting you get in a word edgewise.”
I plead guilty as charged, but with an explanation: Around 20 years ago, I read An Eater’s Guide To Chinese Characters by a linguistics professor named James MacCawley. Ever since then, I’ve been ordering Chinese off the blackboard.
The good news is that in this restaurant, it’s not really necessary. There are dozens of authentic dishes listed on the English menu, so you can have a field day without bringing a Chinese friend. Alan, I’ll make it up to you.
But he did rave about our lunch, proclaiming it the best Chinese restaurant in Vegas. It might just be. I couldn’t talk him into the fish-head casserole, but we started smart with smoked ham with bamboo shoot, chunks of stir fried smoked beef and sautéed ong choy, the hollow, reedy water spinach that is slowly catching on with the Western palate.
Hunan restaurants aren’t big on appetizers, but there are several spicy small plates that are ideal for sharing, and terrific with a cold beer. Dishes on this menu that are spicy—and that would be around half of them—are marked with a small chili pepper symbol. They do adjust the spiciness on request, but rest assured, the marked dishes are hot!
For the novice Hunan diner, I recommend salt-and-pepper shrimp, crackling in their shells with a mild bite, Tong Ting duck, braised in beer, and glutinous spare ribs, served inside a bamboo steamer with pieces of sticky rice coating the meat like a batter. This is the dish that P.F. Chang’s made popular, but this version is ever so much better.
Ah, but then there are the dishes for the adventurous, which are legion here. Pig skins with leek and hot pepper are like the world’s greatest pork rinds, and fried pork kidneys are deliciously spicy-hot and wonderfully crunchy. One of the glories of Hunan cuisine is the dish called whole fish with hot bean sauce—unfortunately a frozen fish here, but still a hard-to-beat platter, thanks to a rich sauce made from fermented soy beans and chili.
Hunan cuisine is big on eggs, something you rarely see on Chinese menus. There’s a steamed dish called steamed five-colors egg that I recommend, and also a hot and spicy egg dish called sunny side up egg with hot pepper.
Various pig and fish parts are also put to good use. Stir-fried smoked fish is powerfully smoky, and a similar flavor permeates stir-fried smoked pig tongue, stir-fried smoked pig ear and smoked ham with dried turnips, the meat mostly differentiated by texture.
One of my favorite vegetable dishes is pickled long bean with ground pork. Long beans can be found at any Asian market. They look and taste rather like string beans, but can be up to a foot and a half long. Here, they are pickled in rice-wine vinegar, delicious on rice. But if you don’t like the sour flavor of rice vinegar, maybe you’d better give it a pass.
There are more conventional dishes if you’d rather tread a more familiar path. Family-style braised tofu is excellent, and so are any of the pan-fried noodle dishes. Most of the fried rice dishes are available as well, although for a treat, try the one served with an egg sunny side up on top. It’s Chinese peasant comfort food personified.
If you see me, though, I’ll probably chow down on stuff like chicken gizzard in hot pepper, the house-made sausage and the steamed fish-head casserole. Richman vetoed that one, and I deferred to him. Don’t let it be said that I am not a reasonable man.