Propaganda by Proletariateats

One meal.  That’s all this layover in San Francisco will afford me:  time enough to savor the gustatory essence of what many believe to be America’s greatest food city, summated in a single dish (if I’m lucky), and devoured in a single sitting.  For that meal I choose Chinatown, a neighborhood of such auditory and olfactory exotica that even the simple act of walking its streets feels dream-like, almost hallucinatory, for the intensity of their wonder.  To experience San Francisco’s Chinatown is to suddenly find oneself in Nanjing or Chengdu, transported on the music of spoken Mandarin, and on the stink of ammoniated fish.  Chinatown is where I want to eat, and for my meal, my one meal this trip to the city by the bay, I choose Chong Qing Xiao Mian.  

Chong Qing sits on Chinatown’s Kearny Street, between Wayne’s Liquor and House of Nanking.  It’s an unassuming little place, painted in orange, and adorned with wall-sized illustrations of the restaurant’s geographical namesake, the erstwhile Sichuan city (long story) of Chongqing.  These illustrations imagine a cloister of thatched-roof Quonset huts, nestled between sub-tropical palm trees, and set on the kind of Yangtze River beaches that China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism uses to bait travelers like me into spending American greenbacks in the worker’s paradise that is today’s China–ahem.

I sit at a two-top, at the rear of the restaurant, near the open kitchen, the only westerner in a space crowded with mellifluous Chinese dialects and redolent of Szechuan pepper corns sizzling in sesame oil.  The restaurant’s lone server, a middle-aged Chinese woman whose proficiencies in pantomime ameliorate deficiencies in her English, hands me a laminated, two-sided picture menu that’s tacky to the touch and frayed at the edges, but which offers a breathtaking array of Szechuan classics:  braised pork-intestine noodle soup; chicken feet with pickled pepper; spicy-numbing beef tendon; pickled mustard-green fish-filet noodle soup; any of which would make happy.  But today I’m craving something more elemental, even substratal, to the Vulcan-fires burning at the molten core of Szechuan gastronomy. 

I order Dan Dan noodles.

As with all great dishes in gastronomy, there’s a creation story behind its genesis, and for Dan Dan noodles, that story is this:  in 1841, Sichuan street-hawker, Chen Baobao, sells portions of the dish he carries in two clay pots affixed to the ends of a dan, or pole, to Chinese eaters ravenous for the stuff.  They can’t get enough.  Eventually, the perennial popularity of Chen Baobao inspires imitators, and the ubiquity of the dish eventually enshrines Dan Dan as stalwart and staple of Szechuan cuisine.  It’s the one Szechuan dish I seek everywhere I go.

Today’s bowl of Dan Dan at Chong Qing is composed of wheat noodles, topped with ground pig, all lovingly dunked in a lake of unctuous pork broth that tastes like lava, and burns inside my chest with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.  Never elsewhere in gastronomy do I encounter this kind of heat, not in the Japanese wasabi paste that routinely calls tears from my eyes, nor in the Chiltepen peppers that explode like Mexican firecrackers inside my mouth.  No, this kind of heat is special, people.

It’s also the entire point of the exercise.

Because Szechuan cooking offers strata of umami so manifold and complex that one fails to realize the incendiary nature of the dish until it’s too late, until the burning inside feels less like fire, and more like alien possession.  That’s when you understand the heat of the Dan Dan is inside you, radiating outward from your core like some magmatic volcano set to blow.  No high priest can help you now, friend-o.  Your only salvation is a ride on the thunderbucket back at the hotel, an expedition more spiritual than scatological, and one that will hurt oh, so good, leaving you lighter and enlightened, begging for more.

To say my bowl of Dan Dan noodles at Chong Qing was merely delicious would be an understatement for the ages.  Instead, let’s call it what it was:  an affirmation of Szechuan cooking’s scintillating greatness; the apotheosis of a perfect dish; the deliverance of one, perfect meal in one of America’s greatest food towns.

Go, then, to Chong Qing the next time you’re in San Francisco.  Sit by the kitchen.  Inhale the pepper-spray coming off the line, and wipe away the tears.  Order the pig intestines, the chicken feet, the Dan Dan noodles.  Be brave, my friends, and tickle that dragon’s tail.  In the end, you’ll be glad you did.

contact: christopher@proletariateats.com