Vegetarian Mary Chung's

[maillard]

I was at Mary Chung's with a vegetarian friend last week and we had a confusing conversation with the waitress about which dishes were completely vegetarian (no fish sauce, no meat stock, etc.). Does anyone know which are for sure? She said that the dun dun noodles had fish sauce, which surprised me, but I'm not totally sure we were understanding each other correctly. Here are the dishes I'm wondering about and if anyone knows one way or another that would be great:

dun dun noodles, dun dun tofu
yu hsiang eggplant, yu hsiang broccoli, yu hsiang tofu
spicy eggplant
spicy bean curd with beef, chicken, and shrimp
spicy green beans

Thanks!

[nfo]

So just to summarize... A very strict vegetarian or a vegan is probably going to go hungry dining somewhere like Mary Chung's. Even the crispy wonton noodles have egg in the dough, and are probably fried in the same oil as everything else.

Someone with more flexible standards, who doesn't mind risking the possibility of inadvertently consuming fish sauce, oyster sauce, lard, or some other non-obvious animal products, just has to watch out for the aforementioned bits of pork (like with collard greens). Yeah, even the green beans.

[Dr.Jimbob]

That would be accurate and correct. I remember from a year spent in the mainland that my vegetarian buddies had the hardest time if they were straight-up vegetarians. Outside of Buddhist restaurants where the management is reasonably scrupulous, it's pretty close to impossible not to get stealth pork or other creative interpretations of "no meat" (the Chinese "rou" which is usually used to translate "meat" actually only implies mammalian muscle i.e. beef, pork, lamb and the like; "rou" is not used to describe poultry or seafood, so you'll often see "vegetarian" dishes in the Old Country with shrimp and chicken in it).

My understanding of yu xiang was also a flavor used to get the fishiness out of fish, hence the reliance on heavy duty aromatics, garlic, soy sauce and cooking wine. Fish sauce to deliberately introduce fishy flavor into a yu xiang is new to me (though like kung pao, this is not typically a flavor that I opt for given its somewhat vague and easily inauthentic nature).

[kobuta]

Hard to say without really knowing how they prepare it - whether taking a traditional approach or not. Chinese cooking also tends to have a lot of oyster sauce which does tend to have a tiny bit of oyster flavoring in it.

Anything yu hsiang should really be non-vegetarian, considering the the name means "fish flavored". This is typically made with a sauce that contains a cured, salted fish. This flavor can be strong for a Western palette, so I don't know how many in the US prepare it that way.

[MC Slim JB]

I was once told (by a Guongzhou native whose wife is from Sichuan) that "yu shiang" literally means "fish flavor", but that its sense is "for flavoring fish", meaning a sauce used primarily on fish (but also on other meats and vegetables), as opposed to meaning that the sauce contains fishy ingredients. Was that a myth (or maybe a misunderstanding on my part)?

[kobuta]

I'm not a chef by any means, but the good yu hsiang I have most definitely tastes of the cured fish in it. My parents happen to love it that way, and insist this is the more 'accurate' taste of the food. They're not Sichuan though they grew up in China. There's one place in Chinatown that makes a yu hsiang eggplant where you can really taste the cured fish. I guess a better translation of the "hsiang/xiang" (which means fragrant or frangrance) is closer to fish essence - the idea is it should smell and have the flavor of fish (in a non-nasty way of course).

[noforkplease]

I would go with this explanation of "fish flavor" == "used to flavor fish" - if nothing else based on Fuschia Dunlop's explanation & that fact that I've never seen a yu shiang recipe with any kind of fish ingredient.

[kobuta]

Racking my brain the other day and I finally remembered that the one place locally that makes yu xiang eggplant where you can taste the fish is the Hong Kong Cafe in Quincy. They actually have visible little chunks of the cured and salted fish in the sauce, and you can taste it.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I looked this up on Google, and found several recipes yu xiang on the web (didn't link b/c they're in Chinese). One page confirms what MC Slim JB said, while other recipes call for the cured fish I've tasted. Seems like both versions are acceptable.

[MC Slim JB]

Pardon if you know this already, but "fish sauce" in this context means a salty condiment similar to soy sauce that contains fermented anchovies. It is used in a lot of Asian cuisines as a seasoning, much the way Western cooks use salt, especially in Southeast Asia (Thai and Vietnamese cooks use a lot of it). It's not strictly vegan, but it's not a sauce of chunks of fish, either.

I think that many of these dishes, especially the yu hsiang ones, are likely to contain small amounts of pork, often ground and easy to overlook. I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that many of Mary Chung's sauces are based on chicken stock.

[maillard]

I am sort of familiar with fish sauce, but mostly in Vietnamese & Thai food. I associate it with the strong flavors that come from using it heavily, so I guess that's why it seemed weird that it'd be in the dun dun sauce. But it makes sense that a smaller amount would just blend in.

Hrm, I hadn't even thought of Stealth Pork. We ended up with yu hsiang tofu because the waitress seemed to be saying it was meat-free, and there didn't seem to be tiny bits of meat in it, but who knows. I agree about the likelihood of chicken stock.

I think I just need to find myself some tofu-loving meat eaters to accompany me on future Mary Chung visits...

[foodieB]

I have been going to Mary Chungs since 1983 and I am not sure about any of those dishes but if you ask Mary or the host (I think it is Mary's son) or hostess (not the waitress) you are more apt to get and answer you can understand that is infact true. Most of the waitresses have no clue what goes on in the kitchen.