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Posted by TW Lim

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-105-the-inverse-of-chinatown

As we left the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, D and I stopped for a cone of soft serve at one of the supplicant food carts arrayed around the hem of the dowager’s skirts. An increasing proportion of those carts have tape on their signboards, as though nicked by their own prices. Our ice cream truck was one such: its prices were a mystery, and our swirl of chocolate and vanilla turned out to cost $9. The vanilla wasn’t synthetic so much as aspirational, the chocolate was trompe l’oeil. It may have worked if the lights were off. It wasn’t even particularly sweet, because sugar costs money. A treat for a time of hyperinflation.

Nonetheless we nibbled happily most of the way across Central Park, the weather was too perfect to begrudge. The soft serve was cold and dense and well-behaved, the air sparkled just enough to slow its ambitions of being soup. D grew up eating ice cream without vanilla, and the plainness on our tastebuds, accompanying us across the lawns and the trees, was a momentary, infinitely elastic pleasure.

This cost $9 too – the best thing I ate when I was in San Francisco the week before, on Stockton Street in Chinatown. Cheung fun with egg, scallions, and cilantro, rice stretched to transparency. Cheung fun should feel speculative, a texture of fantasy or science fiction, not at any rate of this reality. The natural comparison is silk, but cheung fun are reputedly a food of starvation. You start by grinding rice into a slurry that runs like whipping cream. A cheung fun specialist will have a stone mill, two lumps of granite the size of tires. In some places you can watch it filling the red plastic bucket – it’s always a red plastic bucket – at a decidedly non-industrial pace. It’s even slower if you turn the mill by hand, though I’ve never actually seen this done. As though you’re eking out the rice with time and labor – in Guangdong those never used to be in short supply.

The bucket of slurry goes on the floor next to the cook, who stands in front of a steamer the shape of a flat file. The flat file has two trays for drawers, and a balcony on the front. You yank a hot tray from the steamer onto the balcony, ducking the grunt of steam. Grease it with a paintbrush. Then take a ladle of slurry and stretches it across a surface the size of a coffee table. This doesn’t look like sleight of hand, this looks like moving a table, and you’re doing it at high speed. Throw the tray back in the steamer and grab its twin from the steamer. This sheet has set, thin enough that it’s a mere suggestion across the tray. A fistful of garnish or a slaughtered egg, then a momentary vanish, into the steamer and out again. Now take two plastic scrapers, wide as laptops, and roll the sheet like a yoga mat, then chop it with the scrapers and deposit on a plate. Start again.

The process takes less than a minute. A good cook can work six crepe pans, but no one can keep up with more than two cheung fun at a time. Even by the standards of line cooking, this is hyperkinetic, a non-stop breakdance. There’s nothing gentle or subtle about the motions. Every part of you is moving, all the time, and everything is wet, what isn’t covered in water is covered in steam. The cooks wear galoshes, dancing in a sauna.

Factories sluice the slurry onto a conveyor that runs through a steamer. Adding tapioca starch to the batter makes them easier to handle in heaps. Sometimes they’re still rolled by hand, but other places ship squiggles instead of spirals, “cheung fun” piled like rubble. You can get a river of wide rice noodles, ho fun, those vehicles for wok hei, off the same conveyor. Those get an extra meeting with a knife. The first fresh cheung fun I had came from a hawker who poured the batter on muslin napkins stretched over a steamer grate the size of tabloid paper. Each order took two napkins. Those are flannel instead of silk, heavier to hand, tighter. The fabric leaves their surface with the slightest nap, almost like static electricity.

The cheung fun place in SF was still working on its patina. You could tell it wasn’t old, but it felt like it would be. A dozen old folks were trying to help, polishing the tables with their elbows while collecting themselves for the next quarter mile of their walk. Some had shopping carts, to help with the dings the place still needed. The younger customers rolled through, wearing down the floor on their way to jobs and places not-like-this. They, and I, ate standing.

This felt like one of the last plates of real food in San Francisco, among the gardens in the sky, the tent cities, the viral everything and the wreckage of the Michelin stars. Amidst the ankles of the skyscrapers and their immaculate lobbies, Chinatown is still a real place.

On my first trip, San Francisco tasted like sunshine and a good place to grow things. We were still cooks, so this was pilgrimage, guided by the still new testament of the Omnivore’s Dilemma. We walked the Ferry Plaza market like grannies in Chinatown, over hours, with breaks, at museum pace. Painted nectarines, sculpted lettuce, installations of melons, fresh ginger, berry galleries. We didn’t visit the old shrines at Chez Panisse and Zuni, but the names of farms were everywhere, and so was the produce. Was that cuisine du terroir? In the before times it was easier to think it mattered.

Locality has slipped through our fingers. Some of it’s sublimated, deposited on signs so omnipresent, so obviously commercial, that they’re impossible to notice. Some of it’s seeped into menus like dye, it lingers there assumed and unremarked, a backdrop for more photogenic whizbang on the menu. Or maybe cities never actually taste of the land around them, which I suppose is why the idea was remarkable in the first place. Cosmopolitanism is the opposite of a sense of place, the internet explodes place altogether. Locality was always tendentious, but maybe it was a necessary lie.

I don’t know what San Francisco would taste like today. Seven miles by seven seems a small enough area that it should have a flavor. You can cross it in a day and still have time to climb Mount Davidson, from which you’ll see most of the city. At one point, most people could stand somewhere and actually see where most of their food was grown – that was one way to taste a place.

You can’t see rice paddies from Stockton Street, nor from anywhere in downtown Hong Kong. And yet cheung fun tastes of place. It tastes like Chinatown, like cramped walkups, benevolent associations, laundries, jade. A splinter of something hard, lodged deep in San Francisco.

In some ways soft serve tastes like the inverse place, the San Franciso/Manhattan/London around the Chinatown. Milk and sugar feel too universal to place. The first soft serve I remember came from the McDonald’s in Changi airport. McDonald’s and I arrived in Singapore 3 weeks apart, and in those days flights were occasions, requiring extended families, entourages. To some part of me soft serve is to-dos and hullabaloos, childhood bribery, split-flap displays and flight. I didn’t even know what progress was, but the soft serve was a thrill – the colloidal weight, the cold, the malleability – the taste of an only somewhat welcome future.

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-105-the-inverse-of-chinatown