Looking for foods to try and share a bit of my own culture. My family is cantonese viet and I grew up eating in a lot of traditional banquet hall restaurants. Usually these are dim sum menu for lunch and traditional shared foods for dinner. Most people have tried the common ones like siu mai (pork wrapper dumpling) and haw gow (shrimp rice dumpling) but my favorites are the uncommon ones like ngau zaap (beef offal) and baak wan fung zaau (pickled chicken feet).
Ngau zaap is basically braised brown sauce using off cuts, usually stomach and whatnot, with chinese radish. Its very savory, kinda like if you made an asian gravy.
Baak wan fung zaau is just chicken feet pickled in white vinegar. If you had pickled radish it’s essentially the same pickling and the chicken feet is gelatinous and a bit crunchy. You can also get them sometimes boneless since eating around the bones is kinda a pain. I really like pickled foods so this is one of my faves
Fish and chips. And despite all the jokes about British food, you really do owe it to yourself to learn just how good this meal can be when cooked well.
Samin Nosrat argues, in her book of the same name, that all cooking comes down to salt, fat, acid, and heat. Fish and chips is the perfect synthesis of this theory. It is cooking stripped down to this core idea. Done right, it is an absolute delight; beautifully flaky fish cooked to delicate perfection within a crunchy shell of light, crispy batter. Malt vinegar brings acidity to cut through the fat and salt. Everything works in harmony. There are contrasts in texture to enhance the melding of flavors.
Fish and chips, done well, is culinary perfection. But it is very hard to do well. There is nothing to hide behind. It is cooking stripped to the essentials, which means that those essentials have to be perfect. Most people outside of the British Isles have probably never had a good fish and chips in their lives, and even in the UK there are plenty of bad examples.
Anyway, those pickled chicken feet sound incredible. I had paper wrapped duck feet once and those were absolutely delicious.
I like fish and chips but in the US it’s so expensive, it’s about 17 USD for a 3 piece
I’d like to visit the UK once since I heard the old school edm scene is still pretty alive there