Off the menu

>> The search for special Chinese dishes leads
to Fu Kam Wah in Ville St-Laurent

by A.J. KINIK

Back in the ’70s, Calvin Trillin, the famed journalist and food writer, wrote repeatedly, even obsessively, about his attempts to demystify the Chinese restaurant once and for all and find a foolproof solution to the “problem” of those tantalizing, frustratingly untranslated “specials” signs that you see in your more authentic Chinese restaurants. His proposed solutions included everything from the mundane—convincing his wife, Alice, to invite some of her Chinese exchange students out for dinner in Chinatown so that they could “practise their English”—to the fantastical: suddenly, magically getting assigned the task of escorting Chairman Mao himself on an eating tour of New York City (the fact that Mao had already passed away did nothing to derail Trillin’s fantasy), one that included stop-offs in Chinatown and the use of the Chairman’s personal interpreter.

Times have changed since then. China is now a capitalist tiger, and I don’t meet too many people who have food fantasies that include Chairman Mao (or Premier Wen Jiabao, for that matter), but for many of us here in North America, the language barrier that keeps us from those exotic, delicious-smelling specials that get whisked past us to other tables when we go out to Chinese restaurants is still all too present.

Now this matter is of a special urgency here in Montreal because, as our cousins to the West are wont to remind us, Montreal’s Chinese cuisine doesn’t hold a joss stick to that of Toronto or Vancouver. We need all the good Chinese we can get. I tended to believe that tired old line until I heard an intriguing theory: Montreal’s Chinese food is just as good as Toronto’s and Vancouver’s, you just have to get to those off-menu specials. Certainly plausible, right? Hmm…

We decided to test out the Theory of Off-menu Specials at Fu Kam Wah, an unassuming but immensely popular Ville St-Laurent restaurant that we’d heard was among the best Chinese restaurants in Montreal if you manage to convince the management that you’re adventurous enough for their specials. How you get to that point is another matter. We went to Fu Kam Wah with a couple of regulars who were already insiders, so maybe we got a false impression, but our waiter and the owner seemed quite amenable to discussing “special dishes.”

Things got started with a large bowl of delicate crab and fish maw soup and it set the tone for the evening—it was exotic, it was delicious and it was nowhere to be found on the menu. Our next couple of courses were seafood dishes, and the best of them were these roasted razor clams (so hard to find in Montreal) dressed with chives, ginger, garlic and accompanied by a tangy sauce, but the roasted oysters with pork came a close second. We also had some spicy “Thai-style” littleneck clams later in the evening, but they were a bit starchy and our favourites among the seafood dishes remained those lovely razor clams.

Then it was on to the principal dishes, the most exotic being a variation on their beef sauté with black bean sauce ($8.95) that came with bitter melon instead of the green peppers you typically find. Celebrated for its cleansing properties, the bitter melon on its own was, well, very bitter, but together with the beef, the flavours balanced nicely. Most of the remaining dishes were either slight variations from the regular menu or menu staples. The excellent steamed salty chicken ($9) came with pickled jellyfish, Fu Kam Wah’s house “coleslaw” and a wonderfully garlicky dipping sauce, the clay pot duck we’d been hoping for got replaced with a very satisfying marinated duck “Chui Chau” ($10.95), and our eggplant dish was none other than the pork with eggplant sauté “Yu Hsin” style ($8.95).

All in all, I was impressed. Was Fu Kam Wah just as good as anything I’d found in Toronto or Vancouver? Not exactly, but it was some of the very best I’ve had in Montreal, and there’s no question those off-menu specials had something to do with it. Does the Theory of Off-menu Specials hold merit? You be the judge.