It's been a while since I've posted here. Over the winter break, I had the opportunity to go home and spend time with friends and family. It was a much needed break from the college grind and overall stress of Paris protests. While I was able to spend the holidays home with my family, I wasn't able to spend the Lunar New Year with them, which is an extremely important holiday in my Chinese culture.
It was weird not being home, and part of me felt like I had been missing out. I decided that I couldn't just sit around and pretend this was a normal day in Paris, so I decided to take my friends out to a traditional Chinese dinner.
Before we went out to dinner we took a stroll along the beautiful canals. Paris is not a city known for canals, but rather its heavily polluted, yet central river Seine. The beautiful bridges and surrounding architecture make up for the rather murky water, but the canals stretching across the 10th arrondissement are a hidden treasure in the less touristy part of Paris. At the peak golden hour, my friends and I took a casual stroll across the looping bridges while taking aesthetic pictures, exclusively for the gram.
While I have usually acted as the one who is supposed to find the best restaurants in the states, my friend Yubin took the job from me here in Paris. She was able to find the perfect little traditional Chinese restaurant tucked away in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Located on a tiny street called Rue Royer-Collard, this restaurant called Ton Hon Chinois Restaurant is a hidden gem just outside the famous Luxembourg Garden.
Chinese food in Paris tends to consist of restaurants similar to Panda Express where people can choose a rice or a noodle and pair it with various "Chinese" dishes. It was my friend Sidney's first time having Chinese food that didn't come from Panda Express so I wanted to make sure that we got some of the most authentic dishes that weren't too crazy or outside her comfort zone.
The main dish I made sure to order was the famous Yang Chow Fried rice. The name varies depending on the region of China this comes from, but my family has always called it Yang Chow. This rice dish contains char siu (Chinese roasted pork), peas, carrots, green onions and in this case, shrimp. The rice is stir fried together with various spices and is served on a dish on its own. This is often regarded as one of the most popular dishes among American Chinese cuisine.
While it is often said that there should always be either a noodle or a rice dish at a traditional Chinese meal, I wanted to give my friend the full experience so we made sure to also order some old school Lo Mein. Often times in American Chinese food, Lo Mein is often mistaken for Chow Mein. Lo Mein is a noodle dish consisting of thin egg noodles that is stirred with a soy based broth and mixed with various vegetables and beef. This is one of those dishes that has been widely popularized by American Chinese cuisine but has been significantly changed to feature much thicker noodles with overpowering flavors based with oyster sauce.
To pair with our noodle and rice dishes, we decided to order black bean beef. Black beans often known as "douchi" are fermented black beans with a sharp, distinct flavor. The beef dish is stir fried with the black beans to create an umami like effect.
The final dish we ordered was a Chinese eggplant dish often known as di san xian. In Mandarin di san xian translates to the "three treasures from the Earth." The name comes from the three major ingredients in the dish: eggplant, zucchini and bell peppers. The ingredients are stir fried in a salty, viscous sauce, and is well paired with any rice dish.
The meal was absolutely delightful and it all came out to be under 30 euros (quite the deal for any sit down restaurant in Paris). It felt nice to be able to have a nice sit down meal with some of my closest friends, despite not being able to be home with family. If there is one thing that Chinese culture is about, it's that food has a way of bringing people together even if they aren't there. For lack of a better word, it sucked not to be home, but little meals like this make me realize that a food can close that 5600 mile gap that divides us.
Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Lunar New Year - Karisa
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