What does it say that two restaurants specializing in the relatively obscure food of the far reaches of northeastern China have opened within a month—within blocks of each other, no less? This hasn’t even happened in Chinatown, but in neighboring Bridgeport, where there’s been quite a bit of demographic spillover but hardly the wall-to-wall restaurant density of the Chinatown Square mall. And Tony Hu has nothing to do with it.
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It is certainly interesting that Northern City chef Cheng Hai Wang was a three-year veteran of Ed’s. Nancy Wu, owner of Homestyle Taste says her chef (and uncle) Aiken Zhou also cooked in restaurants in Chicago, but, mysteriously, she declines to say where.
Neither Northern City (which you can read more about on our blog, the Bleader) nor Homestyle Taste is even Chicago’s first Dongbei restaurant (the late, short-lived Dragon King was ahead of its time). So beyond the novelty, what’s particularly special about their food? Well, being that Dongbei—the once geopolitically contested region you might have known as Manchuria—is flat, windswept, and exceptionally cold in the winter, its hearty, heavy food is exceptionally suited to relieving the primal anxiety that you might freeze to death. And that’s also why it’s exceptionally suited to our own oncoming deep freeze. Good timing.
The Chinese are a people unafraid of eating their way around bones—that’s where flavor concentrates—and a certain degree of dental and digital dexterity is required to extricate them in a number of important dishes, such as chunks of bone-in lamb in a rich brown sauce with sweet, soft blocks of daikon radish (that’s a special listed on the wall in pinyin). But the flesh slips easily from the skeletal frame of a whole tilapia smothered in brown sauce, tarted up with lightest touch of vinegar, and surrounded by cubes of jiggly pork belly, fat rehydrated mushrooms, and whole cloves of softened garlic (C88). Brown is dominant in this culinary spectrum, and though dishes often appear as if they might be a viscid, cornstarch-fortified mess, they usually turn out to be incredibly satisfying and rich, none more so than one of the region’s best-known offerings, di san xian, a simple stir-fry of green peppers, eggplant, and hard-fried potatoes that hold their own against this sauceslaught (on the wall again).
3205 S. Halsted 312-949-9328homestylechinese.com
