Panda Gourmet Noodle With Hot Chili and Beef
The $20 Diner: Panda Gourmet dazzles with genuine Sichuan and Shaanxi cooking at a Days Inn
A rouga mo Chinese burger at Panda Gourmet in Washington. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post)
Tim Carman
The fountain outside the Days Inn on New York Avenue NE pumps out limp, concentric circles of water, a decidedly united nations-Bellagio display that seems to underscore the bleak physical griminess of this commercial strip. It doesn't help that the motel exudes a Tom Waits, "Jockey Total of Bourbon" vibe or that the h2o in the fountain looks like the surf around Galveston after an oil spill.
The first time I pulled into this Days Inn — after I had traveled a mile or two past the motel, clearly missing my 1 and only chance to make a left turn anywhere virtually the identify — I was confronted by a gentleman who insisted I fork over $xx. Apparently there was an event at a nearby strip gild, and the joint had contracted out the Days Inn parking lot. I refused to pony upwardly. I informed the bellboy I wasn't going to blow my entire budget only for a parking spot. Likewise, I told him, I was headed to Panda Gourmet, not to the Stadium Gild.
To the more choosy eaters among the states, the proper noun Panda Gourmet alone might conjure up images as as seedy equally those generated in a gentlemen's club. The name tin can inspire an almost Pavlovian response of revulsion, a genu-jerk reaction based on years of uniformed food-court hawks passing out greasy nuggets of breaded meat-cartilage, each a little flop of soy, carbohydrate, salt and oil. This place is not that kind of Panda Gourmet.
This Panda Gourmet, located on the basis flooring of the Days Inn just steps from the rushing traffic along New York Artery, is an urban hideaway devoted to Sichuan and Shaanxi cuisines. Co-owner Joseph Huang has hired two chefs who specialize in the spicy-numbing ma la cooking from Sichuan province and another who exclusively pulls the noodles and bakes the breads for the Shaanxi dishes. Every bit you might imagine, Chinese expats and defended chowhounds have already programmed Panda Gourmet into their GPS systems since the place opened in Feb.
Among critics and those four-wheeled foragers who love to "discover" restaurants, there is an awkward and sometimes self-serving trend to overpraise the new, at the expense of the old and established. I will try to avoid this while trumpeting the genuine delights of Panda Gourmet.
Let'south offset with chili-infused oil that serves equally the foundation of Sichuan cooking: Panda Gourmet produces a chili oil of exquisite complication, its flavors almost equally vibrant as its color, a fire-engine ruddy that's not nigh as molten as the hue would advise. When I ladled my mapo tofu over rice, I admired how the chili oil enrobed each ingredient, wrapping its fragrance, oestrus and flavor around everything from the silken, custardlike tofu to the tiny grains of rice, which glowed like neon. If only the kitchen had dialed up the dish's ma la qualities — the local anesthesia of Sichuan peppercorns and the heat of chili peppers were both muted — I'd exist shouting similar a Telemundo soccer journalist over the mapo tofu here.
This fire suppression was a mutual occurrence at Panda Gourmet, even when I'd pointedly reject the Chinese-American bill of fare handed to me, request the Chinese menu and inform the await staff that I relish the numbing, nuclear interactions of Sichuan cooking. A waiter later on confided that the eating place itself has been burned — by too many Americans returning dishes accounted hotter than Sean Penn'due south neckband during a public tantrum.
The spiciest dish I tried at Panda Gourmet was non fifty-fifty Sichuan. It was the cumin-beefiness burger, a steer-based variation of the more common pork sandwich known as rou jia mo in Shaanxi (or "rouga mo" in Panda Gourmet). Slices of the spice-rubbed beef were tucked into a house-made bun — a saltless creation that'southward part pita, part cracker — with plenty pieces of hot, heart-pounding pepper to bring the dead back to life. (By contrast, the rou jia mo was more than savory than superheated, as if a sloppy Joe had morphed into something far more complex and delicious.)
Fifty-fifty without the spectacular ma la fireworks, Panda Gourmet repeatedly ignited my palate. The slender flounder fillets that floated in my volcano/bowl of semi-hot chili sauce were but as silken as the tofu that bobbed in the same container, their delicate textures playing off the garnish of chewy soybeans.
For sheer delicacy, though, cypher topped the hand-pulled Shaanxi biang biang noodles, these wide downy ribbons dusted liberally with toasted spices and scallions; they were so ethereal they were more like a suggestion of noodles, equally if their class was divers as much past the dry spices they ferried. Compare the biang biang noodles to the Shaanxi cold-steamed noodles, a dish that revels in its layering of textures — spongy tofu, velvety strands and crunchy mung-edible bean sprouts.
The mother of all noodles, however, goes past the name of Dan Dan. My dish of the stuff was almost besides pretty to eat: ivory-white strands curled on a plate and topped with crumbled pork and scallion ringlets, the whole lounging in a liquid approximately the colour of red-vino sauce. The noodles provided all the resistance of overripe bananas, while simultaneously releasing their starchiness, which combined with the chili oil to perform a kind of Chinese massage of the mouth. I am not joking.
In some ways, Panda Gourmet'south pocket-sized approach to spice allows you lot to revel in the complexity of Sichuan and Shaanxi cooking, nuances that could easily go lost in the radiations burn of peppers. You might discover, for example, that the melt-in-your-oral cavity flounder in the Sichuan "peppery pot" deserves only as much attention as the chili oil that tries to drown it.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-20-diner-panda-gourmet-dazzles-with-genuine-sichuan-and-shaanxi-cooking-at-a-days-inn/2013/08/28/cef3a876-0b9c-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html
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