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Sungari
Restaurant
735
SW 1st Ave., 224-0800
Lunch
and dinner Monday-Friday, dinner only Saturday. Moderate
to expensive.
Picks:
Stuffed bean curd with shrimp, abalone and black
mushrooms, Peking duck, sautéed spinach, scallops
in spicy tangy sauce.
Nice
touch: Calm, cool interior spaces,
with subdued tones of gray and terra cotta.
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The decline of Chinese restaurants is one of the minor
scandals in the Portland food scene. Granted, there are
several worthy places, including the Cantonese emporia Seven
Stars, Golden Horse and Fong Chong as well as the outstanding
Hong Kong establishment Legin, with the most interesting
selection of fresh tank fish around. But since the glory
days of Uncle Chen and his offshoots Chen's Dynasty and
Chen's Chinese Clipper, we have witnessed scant evidence
of Chinese master chefs dedicated to heightened levels of
creativity or to introducing provocative new dishes to Portland.
Sadly, for a cuisine long regarded as the second-greatest
after French, in recent years it has not shone brightly
in these parts. When you compare Portland to Seattle in
this respect, we come in second, let alone trying to hold
our own against San Francisco.
I know many people who, when they crave Asian food, instinctively
gravitate to Thai restaurants--understandable because there
are so many good ones here. With the coming of Portland's
new Chinese Garden, perhaps local Chinese cooking will return
to what its devotees call zhen wer, "the true taste,"
a classical principle of careful preparation ignored by
too many American Chinese restaurants. There is hope--though
it opened some months ago when the garden's mature plants
were but seedlings, Sungari Restaurant may serve as a beacon
to a more enlightened future. The decor recalls the original
Uncle Chen's, with an elegantly beautiful space worth contemplating
in its own right. There are virtually no Chinese tchotchkes,
only a beautiful metal disk backlit to show the Chinese
characters, and a few artful statuettes. Chef Zhi Wei worked
for Uncle Chen, and he has clearly absorbed the lessons
of the Master.
A thoughtfully ordered dinner at Sungari is a joy. While
not everything on the menu is glorious, many dishes do have
a transcendental quality. The restaurant's name comes from
a river in the northeast, but the cuisine is essentially
Szechuan or southwestern, which means hot and spicy flavors
with an abundance of peppercorns, hot bean paste, garlic,
ginger, chilies, peanuts, soybean paste and preserved or
pickled foods.
Of the several superb blazing dishes, I'd suggest sea scallops
in spicy tangy sauce. Sungari applies a light batter and
quickly sautées the large crustaceans in a fiery
sauce that's cooled down by a medley of tender vegetables
and strips of seaweed. Another regional dish eminently worth
having features diced chicken slathered with paper-thin
sheets of fresh ginger that liven your mouth. These two
dishes are interestingly complementary, allowing you to
experience "heat" in different forms.
Not all the dishes are incendiary, however. Though it's
an expensive item, I would urge you to order abalone and
black mushrooms in oyster sauce. The thinly sliced mollusk,
glistening with alabaster freshness, is placed on top of
the succulent giant fungi in a rich and savory sauce with
jade Chinese greens scattered throughout. The serving is
huge, and though five of us couldn't stop talking excitedly
about the dish--giving new meaning to "five-happiness spice"--we
surrendered a good part of it to the next day's lunch.
Vegetables are outstanding at Sungari: a simple preparation
of spinach sautéed with garlic is bracing and refreshing
at once, more like wild field greens than American spinach,
with a distinctive smoky taste. Fried eggplant with Gon-Bon
sauce seems a welcome change from the ubiquitous Lovers'
Eggplant--here the vegetable is mashed and then fried like
a dumpling, lending a crunchy outside to a lusciously creamy
interior. I am not normally a lover of tofu, but I will
reconsider now that I've had bean curd stuffed with shrimp.
Minced balls of the crustacean sit atop lightly fried tofu
in a mahogany-dark pungent sauce, the layers of sweet and
earthy tastes and the succulent textures making for a stunning
dish. Spicy sesame beef roused memories of Uncle Chen's,
though Sungari's thinly sliced, crispy and glazed beef showered
with toasted sesame seeds lacked the orange zest and orange
sauce that marked its avatar. As a drier dish than the more
heavily sauced ones, this beef represents a welcome addition
to the menu. I found only one item disappointing: Prawns
with honeyed walnuts suffered from battered shellfish syndrome,
and the walnuts were almost burned. There are other problems
that need mention: too many mundane items on the menu (egg
rolls with mustard) and items that are greasy (scallion
pancakes that seem like poorly concocted fry bread).
Sungari is one of the few places in town to serve Peking
duck (you must reserve it a day in advance). In a Peking
duck restaurant the cook makes use of the whole bird; here
you must be content without the feet or the tongue, and
the only bill you get comes at the end of the meal. Nor
do you receive the traditional duck, cabbage and winter
melon soup made from the carcass and served toward the end
of the proceedings. Nonetheless, the experience is wonderful.
Your waiter carves several ducks at tableside, then fills
crepe-like pancakes with scallions, a sweet, plummy Hoisin
sauce, and the rich dark meat with crackling red lacquered
skin. The legs become a second course. A complex cooking
method that boils the meat from the inside as it roasts
from the outside gives the duck its famed crisp dry skin
and tender meat.
No other dish will make you feel so much a part of a regal
Chinese banquet--maybe even, in a moment of fantasy, a beneficiary
of the imperial kitchens of the Ming Dynasty, where Peking
duck was a special favorite. Peking is nowhere near Szechuan
province, but Sungari displays a generous eclecticism, and
in the process has moved to the upper echelons of Portland's
Asian culinary world. Given the disappointing nature of
that world, however, I'm afraid it's not saying a very great
deal.
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