Many of us have our own ideas about Chinese food, but in reality it is a 900-pound gorilla of a cuisine, defined by an endless universe of dishes, varying from province to province, country to country.
Taiwan is a Chinese-speaking country, for instance, but it’s also an island with an indigenous population and a cuisine shaped in large part by Japanese influence, since Imperial Japan ruled the island until the end of the Second World War.
The ’80s and ’90s brought a huge influx of Taiwanese immigration to this country. So today, restaurants serving the foods of that country are commonplace in a number of West Coast cities. Ay Chung Café, a youthful place that specializes in the snacks, drinks and plate lunches you get everywhere in Taiwan, is one of our first real Taiwanese-inspired restaurants.
It’s best described as bright, brassy and casual, a cafeteria-like space in the Asia Pacific Mall, a few blocks west of Chinatown. It’s not uncommon to spot purple spiked hair or a pierced tongue glorifying this youthful customer base, and the lingua franca is Mandarin, not English. Some of the food may be familiar to you. Other dishes will certainly not be.
Take oyster pancake, also known as oh-ah-jen in the Chinese dialect known as Fu-kien, the island’s unofficial language. (The official language is Mandarin, the same one spoken all over in Taiwan’s bitter rival, the People’s Republic of China.) If you’re imagining something made from Bisquick, get a grip. What we have here is a gelatinous, black-around-the-edges disc made from glutinous rice flour, topped with what could pass for a one-egg omelet laced with fresh oysters. On the side, there is a sticky red sauce best described as sweet, spicy and sour. If you’re squeamish about texture, you will not enjoy this dish. Personally, I love it, but I like it even better with the tiny river oysters that Taiwanese restaurants in the LA suburbs bring in from goodness knows where.
Then there is the Taiwanese meatball, another misleading descriptor. It’s ball-shaped, I guess, but the “ball” is made from diaphanous rice flour. The Chinese name is ba wan, or literally, “beef ball.” The dish is served in a bowl; an invention again sauced in red before being stuffed with chopped beef, mushrooms and finely minced bamboo shoots. I brought three kids here, by the way, and they all loved it, except for the garnish of cilantro.
The appetizer section of the menu, where these dishes reside, is actually a larder of weirdness: pig’s ear, the notorious stinky tofu (which the Chinese insist is no stranger to us than a ripe French cheese is to them) and even crispy fried chitterlings. You can order stuff you’ll get on various rice plates here, one by one, from an a la carte list. That means fried squid, fried chicken, crispy pork chops and bits of sweet, medicinal sausage. The list goes on and on.
Rice plates, actually one-plate lunches complete with vegetables, salad, meat and rice, are a bargain here, all under $5 a pop. This is one area where the Japanese have influenced the cooking. In Taiwan, tray lunches known as bien dung are sold everywhere, eaten in parks, on trains and in offices. (Japanese restaurant fans may know this as bento, the quintessential Japanese box lunch.) Ay Çhung Café doesn’t serve them in the tray, but what you get on the plate is essentially the same thing.
Crispy pork-chop rice, for instance, is a pork chop on the bone cut into thin slices the way it would be in a Japanese bento box, presented on a mound of steamed rice with a quirky corn salad, hot steamed cabbage and various pickles. Minced pork rice is rather sweet, a stir-fry you mix up with the rice. All in all, there are nine different rice plates.
Noodles are big on this menu, as well, mostly in steamy bowls of hot broth. Thin noodle, the only stir-fry option on the noodle menu, comes with chitterlings, for some unknown reason. From the approximately two dozen soup noodle choices, two of my favorites are satay squid stew rice noodle soup, which has flat white rice noodles and Indonesian spices, and meat stew noodle soup, a hearty dish perfect for cold Vegas days.
There are also a few sizzling steak dishes, sliced beef with onions on steel trays, and an entire page of eccentric drinks—slushes, boba drinks and fruit milks, to name a few. Boba means tapioca in Mandarin, maddening, starchy little balls that some people, not me, like to put in their milk teas and fruit milks.
For dessert, there is shaved ice, from a create-it-yourself menu that spans fare such as red bean, lychee fruit, taro root, grass jelly, peanuts and tofu, among other goodies.
Ay Chung Café
5115 W. Spring Mountain Rd. 458-6868.
Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-2 a.m.
Suggested dishes: oyster pancake, $5.25; Taiwanese meat ball, $3.95; crispy pork chop rice, $6.95; house special steak, $8.95.