Restaurant: Kings Co Imperial, Brooklyn
Full confession: I’m a snob about Sichuan fried string beans, that authentic, delicious Sichuan icon, Gan Bian Si Ji Do.
This is a popular dish that many American Chinese restaurants claim to offer but I’ve been through far too many disappointments. So imagine my delight when I found it cooked perfectly at the Kings Co Imperial on Skillman Avenue, in Brooklyn. I could have ordered three plates of the thing. Finally the right, authentic string bean.
Sorry, my photo above does it injustice. It was dark and I was in a hurry to sink my teeth into in. Believe me, it tasted a-may-zing.
What’s with fried string beans? How can one go wrong with fried beans? Plenty. This is no ordinary fried beans.
The reason Kings Co Imperial’s is done perfectly is because the string beans are first deep fried. Si ji do is simply the humble string bean. Gan bian is the way the bean is cooked– it is deep fried and drained. The oil is drained from the pan and the beans tossed back in to dry it out.
Pressing the bean down gives it that dark singed bits; it helps dry out any grease. This process is the gan bian. The deep fried beans are then quickly stir fried with a dollop of ground pork, and little morsels of suan cai (pickled vegetables) and chili.
So, if you skip this process and take the short cut (i.e. be lazy about it) then it’s not gan bian, is it? It’s just stir fried beans, or chao si ji do. Boring.
Deep frying makes all the difference. The bean becomes shriveled and ugly to look at but is tender, with only a hint of a crunch. It tastes completely different from plump, quickly fried beans. (BTW, let’s not talk about which is more healthful. If you want healthful eat the bean raw, okay?)
And when I first ate this as a child, no one in my family even knew it was string beans. Mum told us it was a special bean they used. Well, she was wrong, for once. Some people use long beans, which to me, just doesn’t cut it.
She introduced us to this Sichuan dish in my early teens in one of the few Sichuan restaurants in Singapore. Mum took us often to the Omei Restaurant, on Coleman Street. Most restaurants in Singapore are Hokkien, Teochew or Cantonese establishments, but not this one.
Omei seemed to cater to a different clientele. I think it was fancy by the standards of those days in the 1960s. It was air-conditioned, and they had tablecloths. Our standards were so different then.
But they had delicious Camphor Smoked Duck. I sampled the best Sichuan Chicken–Gung Bao Chicken–even sucking on the dried chili, coated with its delicious sauce after all the chicken pieces were gone. That’s the same as our ubiquitous Kungpao Chicken. (Well, not exactly the same. The American version is cooked with mass produced sauce.)
And Omei served some dish garnished with a deep fried leaf. I can only guess today it was either deep fried spinach or deep fried potato leaves. I can’t remember if that entree was pork or chicken, we just loved the garnish.
Alas, this restaurant is long gone. They moved to a new location, and then I don’t know what happened. But when I moved to Taiwan, I discovered that all the Sichuan and Hunan restaurants offered these dishes and done with the utter reverence of how it was meant to taste.
Then I studied cooking with the Taipei cook/teacher extraordinaire, Fu Pei Mei. And she taught us how to make Gan Bian Si Ji Do and that’s when I found out how the string bean was transformed. I went home to Singapore and told Mum that Gan Bian Si Ji Do is not a mysterious bean, not long beans, but the humble string bean. And that I could easily duplicate this fabulous dish easily. (Next week’s post.)
Go to Brooklyn and try it at Kings Co Imperial. It’s run by Tracy Young, who lived in Sichuan for more than a year where she learned all about its cuisine. Her restaurant offers such varied delights, some of which she created on her own with strong Sichuan influence. Here’s Tracy with Russ, my son, and Ali Smith, his girlfriend who took us there and ordered all the best dishes–like eight or 10 for four people! My kind of meal.
Try this cute dish called Mock Eel. Don’t panic, it’s not eel at all, mock in Chinese cuisine is vegetarian. According to Ali who used to work at the restaurant, this long strand of mushroom is clipped painstaking by cutting around a huge mushroom. It’s steamed and them fried in KCI soy. KCI for Kings Co Imperial. Next to it is Ants Climbing A Tree, another Sichuan dish authentically cooked. (Again, not ants.)
We started dinner with the Pao Cai pickled vegetables, and ended with dumplings.
Their dishes have interesting and imaginative names as well. Fried rice dishes named Angry Pig (hanging pork , smoked tofu, snap pea, egg and ginger) and Hot Head Cow (same as the first dish but with beef); Chop Your Head Off (a soup with dumpling and Napa cabbage) and Weeping Tiger Salad.
Don’t let the names scare you. Tiger is too expensive, and illegal.
Kings Co Imperial is located at 20 Skillman Ave., Brooklyn, NY11211. Click here for their website.
