There’s been a lot of noise lately about an alleged restaurant renaissance in Little Italy, but as long as we’re flogging historical cliches, why no talk of the sleeping tiger that is Chinatown? Just count off the hipster Hong Kong cafes, the Richland Center’s subterranean food court, the baijiu-focused China Place Liquor City, Tony Hu’s trippy lounge Lao You Ju, and the forthcoming Lure Izakaya from former Mulan chef Kee Chan—to say nothing of the dedicated noodle puller stoically stretching dough in the window of Hing Kee—and you’ll be as surprised as I am that more food pooh-bahs (foobah to you, fouchebag) haven’t noticed the once semidesolate Chinatown Square booming with lots of new and interesting places to eat.
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Maybe that’s because the restaurateurs of Chinatown generally don’t swim in the same tepid, yellowed social-media pools that writers, chefs, and publicists wade in, rubbing each other’s backs with wrinkled fingertips. Liu Ling—owner of Chi Cafe and the stalwart part-time dim-sum house Shui Wah—doesn’t. Neither does her chef, Wu Ming, who commands the kitchen at MingHin Cuisine, a double-decker Hong Kong-style restaurant where the first thing you notice when you walk though the door is the glistening brown barbecued birds and pork bellies hanging behind glass in the kitchen. That Macau-style roast pork belly has indeed been slicked with a measurable share of food writers’ saliva—and deservedly so. It’s served in neatly sliced cubes of tender, fatty layers of flesh capped by a crispy skin fragile as crystal and served with a small bowl of lily-gilding processed sugar (you’re meant to sprinkle it atop).
It’s this sort of engagement that will pay off when exploring MingHin’s other key offerings, particularly its live and otherwise fresh seafood, prepared to the diner’s choice, perhaps steamed or salted and peppered in a black-bean sauce, or served in a casserole or sashimi style, as practiced on live scallops dissected into thin medallions on an ice bowl ringed with vivid red grapefruit half-moons, followed by a second course of chewier musculature steamed on the half shell with bean sprouts and yellow chives. One night my table failed to do its homework and devoured a gorgeous whole red grouper steamed to optimum silkiness with garlic, ginger, and scallions. This lovely overfished creature exists with other related species in karmic imbalance with less endangered ones such as the invasive “Bighead” (aka Asian carp), oysters, or freshwater eel (weekends seem to be when most of the live sea creatures are available).
