LAST November I was crestfallen. I had been talking up -- and most effusively, I must add -- this incredible Shanxi restaurant to a colleague, and the time had come to lead her there. As we turned right from Shennan Thoroughfare into Bading Road, my eyes began to scan the area for the restaurant's sign. To my utter disappointment, the restaurant seemed to have completely vanished. Ah well, we'll just have to eat somewhere else, said my colleague, but I was dejected. Was my relationship with Shanxi Hanji suddenly over? And without even a goodbye?
It was a relationship that dated back to the sticky summer of 2006. I had been invited to participate in an English corner in Litchee Park, an otherwise unmemorable event which I can still recollect because of one odd fact: The three foreigners at the corner were two Germans and me, i.e., none of us would qualify for the "native English speaker" type that the corner might have been attempting to attract. Anyway, English corner over, we headed to a restaurant heavily recommended by a chap called Francis. It was my first encounter with Shanxi Hanji.
It was also my first encounter with the famous Shanxi roujiamo, which has since then become one of my three things in China. A roujiamo, for those who have yet to taste one of the culinary god's finest creations, is griddle-steamed bread with lamb or pork filling. The meat is first boiled with wine, salt, rock candies, fresh ginger and shallot stems, and then more than twenty flavorings such as cardamom, clove, cinnamon and aniseed is added to it. After being cooked for 3 to 4 hours, the meat is then put intotwo pieces of freshly made (and never ready-made) griddle-steamed bread. The end-product resembles a sandwich -- I jokingly call it a "lamburger" -- but the taste is vastly different. The steamed bread is tender and crisp, and the chopped meat is spicy and savory, creating a deadly combination that keeps you coming back for more.
Repeated visited to Shanxi Hanji confirmed one thing: no eatery can make can make roujiamo quite like it. Other places try and fail -- either the bread's too thick or the meat's too tasteless -- but Hanji roujiamo, at only 7 yuan (US$1) is just about perfect. And other dish that's made better in Shanxi Hanji than in most other restaurants in town in the zhajiangmian (8 yuan). With a name that literally means "fried sauce noodles," zhajiangmian is a northern Chinese dish consisting of thick wheat noodles topped with a mixture of ground pork stir-fried with fermented soybean paste. Most other restaurants serve it in a meat-flavored soup, but Hanji serves it like it should be: The delicate soybean paste makes it just moist enough and extremely tasty to boot.
To continue with the story: After the November setback, I had no choice but to shrug my shoulders, cross the restaurant of my rotation list, and move on. But one question kept nagging me. How could a restaurant that was packed with diners noon and night suddenly close? In the end, I decided another trip was necessary. Rounding up a group of friends, I again ventured into the area, with the fall-back option being that if the restaurant had not reopened, we would go to the Xinjiang restaurant nearby on Dongyuan Road.
To my absolute delight, I found that the restaurant was open, and had merely closed for renovation a few months earlier. Gone were the rickety wooden stools and the long benches; in their place were proper tables, fancier decor and even air-conditioning. Suddenly Shanxi Hanji had become a place to take your parents, or perhaps even a date to. I cheered, for quality roujiamo was back in my life.
The moral of this story? All's well that end's well, I guess. And also, never lose faith in a good roujiamo.
