"The American people were horrified when they heard about this," she said. "And so was Nixon, to see it. But the Chinese were very proud. This was something very special they had done."
And probably something you won't be seeing on the menu at P.F. Chang's anytime soon.
Mark A. Manger
The claws that refreshes: Simon Tran displays one of Ocean City's specialties.
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1098 South Federal Boulevard, 303-936-1000
Hours: 11 a.m. - midnight daily
Fried dumplings: $5.95
Melon soup with meat: $8.95
Seafood porridge: $9.95
Abalone in oyster sauce: $9.95
Deep-fried chicken (after 9 p.m.): $4.95
Prawns with walnut (after 9 p.m.): 5.95
Lobster salad: market price
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We eased into a simple dish of long-grain rice studded with tiny cubes of mushroom, potato and smoky Chinese sausage, then moved on to sweet crabs pulled fresh from the tank and killed to order; we cracked the shells with our hands, using skillful chopstick work to prize meat from the long, spidery legs. Then, finally, came dessert: a chilled soup of black beans, sugar water and ginger that tastes syrupy-sweet and bizarre to an American palate accustomed to pastries, chocolates and ice cream as a final course, but settles the stomach like oil poured on choppy seas.
Dinner had started around seven. It didn't finish until after midnight, and I don't think any of us shut up the whole time -- except while we were chewing.
I returned to Ocean City twice in the days that followed -- no translator, no special orders. There weren't any pigs' ears available either time, but that was because the ears had been a special dish prepared for the full-moon festival; as a substitute, I was shown plenty of other pork dishes -- including some featuring fried pigs' intestine and others using pigs' blood. Instead, I retried some of the things I'd had at that first dinner, and while the abalone was slightly smaller in portion, it had been prepared with the same care. The melon soup with meat -- popular as a starter for large tables, served in a big tureen and ladled out as needed -- consisted of a handful of melon cubes soaking in a simple chicken broth with some pork, a little seafood, some duck and what-have-you thrown in for flavor. It wasn't complicated, but I liked its rustic preparation -- even if I didn't understand the melon, which added nothing to the soup.
An order of fried dumplings was the only real disappointment. Filled with a bland pork paste and limp vegetables, the dumplings were overcooked and hard. But they came with a sharp, spicy rice-vinegar sauce that proved perfect for dunking the shrimp puffs that were included with the smoky, deep-fried chicken I ordered off the late-night menu. Available after 9 p.m., this menu features smaller plates for about half the price of dinner portions, to encourage grazing. Still, the fried chicken was enough to fill me. The bird had been hacked into crisp-skinned little morsels with no apparent concern for what part of the chicken was being used, which makes it slightly scary when you bite into a big chunk of bone and gristle but a good meal if you keep your eyes open.
Making my way through the large and varied menu, I stumbled upon a seafood porridge that had me fishing around like a piranha with my chopsticks, gobbling down the little bits of shrimp, fish and lobster that sank to the bottom of the thin lemongrass- and ginger-flavored mush. It was incredibly filling, but not at all heavy. And sitting alone by the windows that look out onto the dark storefronts of one of Federal Boulevard's rougher Asian neighborhoods, in a narrow room surrounded by people whose language I don't understand, I finally felt transported.
"This is the way the Chinese eat," I remembered my friend telling me on our way out the door after that marathon meal. It had been one of the most foreign, most educational, most singularly enjoyable dinners I'd ever eaten. And while no meal eaten alone at Ocean City will probably ever measure up, the food there is still miles above what you get in most strip-mall joints. The kitchen is kept honest and authentic, because it's cooking every night of the week for people who'd know the difference if it weren't. And even if you stick with the English version of the menu, it's an adventure -- as with any great travel book, where mystery, oddity, the peculiar and the sublime are all hidden within its pages.
Ocean City had everything I'd hoped to find at Ng's when I was too young to really knew what I was looking for. Although it may have taken a couple more decades than I planned, I finally got that special meal.
And I didn't even have to wait until my birthday.
