First impressions mean a lot. This is something my mother taught me growing up in the lace-curtain suburbs of Rochester, New York, until I developed something of a complex about it.
Peter Mumford
The Lams fulfilled their American dream 13 years ago in "a shotgun shack of a space."
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Mandarin Chef 5022 University Way, 528-7596, mandarinchef.com. Open daily 11 a.m.–10 p.m., closed Sunday.
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For my first communion, I looked like a midget doorman, short only the top hat. First day of college, I was dolled up like some kind of punk-rock pirate—all nose rings and bandannas, torn jeans, combat boots, and flannel shirts. First day of work at a tiny little pizza place just down the street from my high school, I arrived dressed in pointy-toed black dress shoes, slacks, and a cadaverous blue button-down dress shirt with a butterfly collar. I'd been hired as a second-string dishwasher and tray-scraper and I showed up looking like the lead singer of Foreigner, or worse.
That first communion, though, must've set me right by Jesus, because since then I've walked deliberately into my fair share of hells and come out clean on the other side. On my first day of work—despite the fact that I broke the dish machine, flooded the kitchen, and hadn't the slightest clue what I was supposed to be doing—I wasn't fired, and ended up falling totally, completely, head-over-heels in love with the bash and clamor of working kitchens. And on my first day of college I met the woman who would many, many years later become my wife—and who never fails to remind me what an utter tool I looked like, wandering dumbfounded across campus dressed like a low-rent John Bender from The Breakfast Club and trying to come off cool.
The trick is to know when first impressions matter—specifically, when they ought to be ignored for the possibility of good times, good food, or serious fun. With restaurants, it's all about knowing what doors are worth walking through.
My first time walking through the door of Mandarin Chef in the University District rendered the following impressions:
My goodness, this place is small: 10 tables, maybe, all crammed into a space no bigger than a storefront T-shirt shop, pushed in close against the walls and against each other, with a short counter at the back of the room and a door leading back to a kitchen that must've been the size of a closet. The left-hand wall was all mirrors. The lighting was bright and harsh, and left the place burning like a kung pao supernova.
My goodness, this place is dirty. Every table not occupied was still covered in the detritus of meals gone before: glass-topped tables smeared with sauce and stacked with plates, the mirrored wall smudged with fingerprints, the floor a wreck of dropped silver, wadded napkins, and chairs all askew. It looked like a party, 20-strong and ravenous, had just exited out the back, leaving so quickly that their plates were still warm.
And then I thought: What is that delightful smell?
Inside, the three of us chose the least befouled and sticky table we could, and settled in while one tiny woman with a big smile puttered around the dining room, acting as hostess, waitress, busboy, guide, captain, and cashier. When she saw that our table was dirty, she apologized and attacked it with a damp cloth. She brought us a pot of tea and small glasses, cold bottles of Tsingtao, and menus—then vanished into the back and left us alone to stare, goggle-eyed, at the bounty available from the kitchen.
Mandarin Chef has been around for 13 years in this shotgun shack of a space, serving Sichuan chicken wings, dumplings, and noodles to generations of college students and starving grubniks questing after that sweet hit of Chinese authenticity. It exists where it does because owners Sang and Lang Lam came here from Sichuan province 35 years ago, following a daughter who'd come to UW to learn to be a dentist and staying because a good cook (which Sang is) can work anywhere. They'd always wanted to open a restaurant—a small place where Sang could do the work he'd trained for as a cook in China, owning and running restaurants. They wanted to do it here so their children could get good educations, and so they could protect the food traditions they'd grown up with and introduce them to a whole new crowd.
It took time. Sang worked for years behind the swinging doors at Maple Leaf's Snappy Dragon before he and Lang could get a place of their own, before they could cook the food they wanted to and assemble the menu they'd dreamed of together. With Mandarin Chef, they got it. And the menu here is big. Seriously big. It reads in places like a high-speed collision between the "authenticity" that some foodies yearn for when sampling and dismissing American Chinese restaurants, and the actual, true Chinese-immigrant cuisine as practiced thousands of miles from the alleys, districts, and cities that birthed it.
Sang cooks sizzling rice soup with chicken, shrimp, and colorful vegetables alongside seafood soup where everything (scallop, crab meat, egg white, vegetables) is white—like a Chinese blanquette de veau, a deliberate blankness of the gastronomic color wheel. He does clay-pot tofu—an open-fire throwback to Sichuan peasant dishes that have been cooked for centuries in rural China—and kung pao chicken deeply spiced with chile peppers and tossed with a handful of peanuts. It's a dish invented in Sichuan, part of its long, noble culinary tradition—yet there's nothing more American than kung pao these days, nothing more identified with the American-Chinese immigrant canon.
