China’s Street Restaurants With No Menu But Legendary Food

[wok sizzling]

[foreign word] Welcome to Chu Qiao Xia Shi Chang

inside of Cheungdu.

Tu fanu hoa is a typical Cheungu style fly restaurant.

We're here to see a dish called Bwe Boro.

Lunch rush is in full swing, so for us to get more food,

you just gotta do what we gotta do.

Here's the line.

Spice cooked pork, little bit of oil [foreign word]

and the do shu, so fermented soybeans

and the fermented fava bean paste inside.

Bringing up the temperature of that wok.

That oil is starting to extract all those flavors

from those two fermented soybeans and the pork goes in.

You see the pork in the beginning as it went in,

the fat was opaque and now it's starting

to slowly turn translucent.

That's that fat rendering and coming up the temperature.

This curling up motion, they call this the lantern shape.

The idea is that when it curls up in this slight U shape,

it can hold a little bit more flavor.

It might hold some of the ingredients.

Importantly, it'll hold a little bit of that oil

in that sauce.

In goes the green chili peppers.

The chili peppers here are spicy certainly,

but there are bright, fresh green pepper, pepper spicy.

The pork is slowly continuing to render.

That pork is lending its pork fat flavor

to the chili peppers as much as that chili pepper

is lending its green herbaciousness to the pork itself.

All the while, because of the copious amounts of oil,

the fermented soybean and the fermented faba bean paste

are continuing to flavor the entire seasoning.

The last little bit of seasoning is Jiang Jiang

being a fermented soybean paste

that has a little bit of wheat inside of it.

Sometimes we'll see it in dishes like Peking duck,

but here in Sichuan, this is what they've chosen

as the finishing flavor for the twice cooked pork.

An even smattering of pork and chili peppers

straight onto the plate, steaming hot still.

That, in a matter of a minute or so,

is two portions of twice cooked pork.

It's a very traditional home style dish

made of pork that's first blanched and then sliced,

and then stir fried with a bunch of aromatics

and a little bit of chili.

One of our favorite things to get here at [foreign word].

Okay, so here is a [foreign word] twice cooked pork.

First of all, look at it.

Oil, two purposes.

Number one, that's the flavor.

Number two, it's gonna cover and protect

the temperature of this dish.

That's why so many Sichuan dishes have that amount

of the oil is to carry of both flavor and temperature.

Now let's look at the spices.

Here you can see the chili from the [foreign word].

There's no added red chili dried chili here,

but there's also the fermented black beans,

the fermented soybeans.

A little bit of that fond, which is the bottom of that wok

that's picked up as it's being

stir fried and things caramelize.

There's a huge amount of mired reaction here.

And the chilies themselves,

these like long green Chinese chilies,

it's gonna be deeply savory.

Really, really, really tasty.

It's getting a little crazy, but before we eat this,

I need to have some rice.

This is the perfect rice dish. [foreign word]

Rice here is two bi per person,

but you have to go get it yourself.

Bowl, chopsticks.

Don't be shy about the rice because that's what this food

is here for.

[speaking in foreign language]

[Lucas chuckles]

[speaking in foreign language]

This type of restaurant is called a [foreign word].

A fly restaurant.

Originally, [foreign word] is to describe the flies

inside of the restaurant to give people a sense

that it's maybe a little bit dirty, it's a little bit old,

it's been here for a while.

This term fly restaurant has, I think, been

transformed a little bit.

People have started to look at this word [foreign word]

as something with a little bit of like admiration and love.

And I think the important thing about fly restaurants

isn't the fact that people have labeled it as

what was like a cheap, dirty, high volume restaurant.

But that these restaurants are so good

because they're so close to the ground.

It's because they take the details seriously.

It's because they have technique from the technique

to the flavor, to the people, to the community.

Once the place starts to get busy,

you'll really get a sense.

There are cooking for the people around here.

They're cooking for locals,

they're cooking for people in this market.

Why this is particularly delicious is the wok technique,

the knife technique, the balance of the flavor

and the fact that they're cooking it at this temperature

for this volume of people.

It's always fresh. Everything's cut the day of.

If this restaurant weren't busy, this wouldn't be as good.

If the people hadn't worked here for this long,

it wouldn't be that good.

The peppers are nowhere near as spicy as they look.

They are hot, they're not nearly as spicy. It's fatty.

The oils and the rice, all the flavors being carried.

One of these things that us chefs are so excited about

is this idea of depth of flavor,

which is that when you eat something,

that flavor kind of stays with you

and it feels like it sinks and then it envelopes your body.

That's what the fermented beans do.

Number one is a fermented fava, bean spicy,

but that it's a warming large amount of savoriness

and then slightly spicier of these little

fermented black beans that we're very familiar with

in Cantonese cooking, but is really important in

[foreign word]

I should state the obvious, that twice cooked pork,

means that the pork is cooked twice.

The first cook is this.

The pork needs to be simmered and needs to be blanched

so that the fat begins to surrender.

The skin can tighten and the flesh

is actually cooked enough.

So when we bring it into the stir fry,

it doesn't have to cook for so long

and it'll just absorb all those flavors

of the other aromatic that it's being cooked with.

Here comes the belly, the first cut

and the second cut, cooked for a significant amount of time

until it's tender.

It's been simmering, relatively at a low temperature,

in the seasoned broth,

the flesh has constricted a little bit.

The fat has began to render

and the skin has begun to tighten.

This kind of pork you don't often see

in too much western cooking because it's known

as a relatively low quality cut

that's a little bit too lean, the ham.

But when it's treated like this, it can be delicious.

Look, so this is the [foreign word].

[speaking in foreign language]

So after you cook, you can see the difference.

This is the first cut. You see how much fat there is?

All of that needs to be begin to render out

during this process.

Here's the [foreign word].

A little bit less fat

and then you have a little bit more marbling, I suppose,

and a little bit more of the [foreign word],

the tendons for texture.

And third is this middle piece here, that's a pork belly.

You can see the five layers of flesh, fat, flesh, fat.

Three different textures combined together

makes a cohesive dish.

Aye here is slicing the pork for the twice cooked pork.

As this stir fries,

if it's thin enough, it's going to curl up

to create a delicate little texture for the final product.

This cut here is a [foreign word] the first cut.

[foreign word] Chefs like to describe

that it's a good balance of lean and fat,

because, as you can see, it really is basically 50/50.

That's what makes twice cooked pork so delicious.

Look at the precision and more importantly,

the volume of everything from the scallions to the ginger

to, look at the ginger of this, the minced, the sliced.

I am in awe of how much knife pork there is here

and how precise it is.

Interesting.

So come look at the setup for the kitchen

from the back here.

There are two woks, two wok stations.

Both of them are on gas.

Each of them, just like a traditional Chinese kitchen.

It has a specialty for certain types of dishes.

On the left is [foreign word] the tofu with the brain,

as well as the certified vegetables and things like that.

And the [foreign word] that we're going to see,

on the right hand side is more of the awful dishes.

So the kidney and the liver and the intestines.

All of the [foreign word] prep is done.

Everything's portioned out.

And when they decide on cooking something,

they just go on rotation, they grab things,

they start stir frying.

Once she's done cooking,

that finished dish gets split into bowls here

and people just come up and they are handed

whatever has been cooked.

When it gets busy, there's no way to order here.

It's just whatever they make.

You can't come to Chengdu

without coming to a proper fly restaurant.

And despite the connotations around that name,

what we've seen today is high technique,

really precise cooking, good people, cooking good food

for the people around them.

Ingredients treated well.

And overall, just a delightful, genuine, authentic,

I'm gonna say, eating experience.

Onto the next.