Cantonese comfort food

Posted by Max Hauser
a resident of another community
on Feb 8, 2015 at 12:22 am

A good overall write-up on the Mountain View Cooking Papa (I've had half a dozen meals there).

The subtitle threw me off a little though: "Cooking Papa in Mountain View hits some dim sum, but not all" could be read to imply it's fundamentally a dim-sum restaurant, or even that Cantonese food consists just of dim sum -- neither of which is true, certainly (dim sum is a submenu offered part of the week, which the review does make clear).

One thing the review didn't bring out is that much of the Cooking Papa restaurants' local novelty and interest is precisely that they _depart_ from the sort of limited or Americanized Cantonese restaurants many Americans "grew up going to," toward the much wider range of dishes found in the southern China province itself or Hong Kong. In that connection I might wish that the review had dwelt less on Peking duck (acknowledged as non-Cantonese) -- whatever its merits -- and more on things like the lo-mein and rice-noodle-roll dishes (which are briefly mentioned). A novelty at CP (I think it's more novel than tasty but still, everyone should try it) is a (soft, savory) rice-noodle roll enclosing "flour crisp" -- fried cruller slices! Vegan yes; lo-carb, no.

Also, the usual Cantonese word for rice porridge (which CP's English menu just calls "porridge") -- almost a shibboleth for true Cantonese restaurants around here -- is not congee but jook. "Congee" is associated with US Chinese restaurants having non-Cantonese owners, or in parts of the US much farther than us from San Francisco and its 150 years of Canton connections.