Ignorance is bliss, especiallywhen you don’t know you’re eating jellyfish, pork hock, and fish lips. Six of us are gathered around a large round banquet table at Top Gun, the latest Cantonese restaurant-of-the-moment in the International District. Wildly popular for its fine dim sum, Top Gun is also a must-try dinner destination.
Top Gun
668 S King, 623-6606 open daily major credit cards, no checks
Ours is the only table with gwailo (white folks); everyone else is ordering in Cantonese. Decision-impaired after one look at the 200-plus item menu, we choose a combination dinner that promises to serve six to eight people for $78.
The first course is the vague “appetizer platter.” A mound of jellyfish arrives, surrounded by slices of wine beef and pork hock.
“What’s this?” asks a friend who is shoveling in a healthy portion of the beige, noodle-like squiggles. “Must be a vegetable.”
When he learns it’s jellyfish, he and two others push their half-eaten plates away. Gwailo do not know that the ultimate accomplishment of Chinese dining is to be able to eat anything, with gusto.
The self-explanatory wine beef—paper thin slices in a fragrant marinade—is very popular. As is the pork hock, which is tactfully described as “a glorified cross between pork terrine and aspic” by those of us who know better. Quite frankly, it’s the ultimate in thrifty cooking: Hocks are cooked until the cartilage, fat, and meat slip off the bones. The results are strained and then rolled together, to be chilled, sliced, and dipped in vinegar or red-pepper paste before eating. Pork hock is an excellent example of the various gelatinous textures that are prized in Northeast Asian cuisine.
The seafood-and-fish-maw soup that arrives next is clear and very thick; strands of egg white and small pieces of shrimp and whitefish are suspended throughout. It’s delicate and absolutely delicious, as are two other soups. The house special “wanton” (sic) soup brims with sensuous round dumplings stuffed with chopped shrimp ($6.95). “Three Kinds of Seafood Sizzling Rice” soup, so named because of the rice cakes that hiss when the server drops them in, is chicken broth with tender pieces of scallop, shrimp, and octopus. Flavors, in all these soups, are clear, focused, and light.
There’s a brief pause—service here is quick and efficient, despite the fact that only one of our myriad attendants seems to understand English—and then, in quick succession, comes the rest of dinner: prawns and squid sautéed with bok choy; sweet-and-sour spareribs; rock cod steamed with ginger and scallions; crab sautéed with ginger and scallions; fried chicken; fish lips, black mushrooms, and vegetables in a clear sauce; diced beef with pepper; steamed Chinese broccoli. Everything, save for one dish, is very good.
Foods that require chopstick finesse have been helpfully hacked into pieces; this means that a sharp bone fragment occasionally pops out of the spareribs and chicken. Treated this way, a single crab can be shared by an entire family. The only weak dish, the spareribs, is cloying, but the chicken is a revelation: moist meat with crackling, melt-in-your-mouth skin, aromatic with Chinese five-spice. The crab hushes the table into concentrated silence.
Probably stir-fried in a wok, the claws have a formerly crispy, tempura-like coating that has dissolved into a finger-lickin’, gingery goo. There is no choice but to use the hands; I suck loudly for another strand of the moist, buttery meat. Eating with gusto means your pleasure is audible. Lips are smacking all over this small, packed, very tidy restaurant.
The food is so good that on the final visit I propose we succumb completely to chance: Why not point to random items in the Chinese part of the menu and see what happens? But the argument across the table is passionate: What if we end up with something like “supreme soy sauce duck tongue” or sea cucumber?
The compromise: Order one dish in that fashion. The finger lands on a dish I can only describe as the $9.95 dish, because it’s the only option on the Chinese part of the menu with that price. It turns out to be an assortment of fried tofu, shrimp, some kind of fish, and diced asparagus, in a clear, mild sauce. It’s very good—soothing and pleasant, and makes for an excellent counterpart to the spicier dishes we’ve ordered: pan-fried scallops with “X.O.” sauce (couldn’t get a translation on that one; $9.95) and pan-fried shrimp with black beans and chile ($9.50).
The crowning glory of that last meal there, however, is the hot pot with cod fillet ($7.95). A small ceramic crock is lined with lettuce leaves. Pieces of deep-fried cod fillets, duck skin, mushrooms, and various vegetables are then added, along with a thick ginger-spiked sauce. Everything in the crock complements the others in all sorts of unexpected ways. But don’t take my word for it: You won’t understand how good the snap of a snow pea pod can taste until after you’ve chewed contemplatively on some expertly seasoned duck fat—or was that a mushroom?
