Not long after paying a visit to the hot pots at Element, I went to essentially the opposite sort of hot pot at Lu Gi. Now when I say opposite, I don’t mean in terms of the food itself, but the general setting. Here, the stoves weren’t built into the tables, but were portable and brought out to each table after ordering. It felt like eating hot pot in someone’s home, except for the whole paying of money and whatnot.

Per usual, I went spicy and my companions went mild. When I went to make my sauce, it was once again evidence that this was more like home-style hot pot because instead of nicely organized sauces there was just a tub filled with various bottles of sauces to mix together. Fortunately, this meant there was a variety and I made myself quite the mixture.

I got my usual mix of meats and potato-like vegetables and was very happy with the results. The spice level was solid and I can’t emphasize enough how good it felt to dip that meat into a concoction like that. It may not be luxurious or any degree of fancy, but it sure tasted good.

It’s a good thing most people in LA don’t realize that the word “mian” simply means “noodle(s)” in Mandarin, or else they might just write off the restaurant Mian in San Gabriel as some sort of Noodle World or Noodle and Company knockoff. Fortunately, Mian is anything but. Like Chengdu Taste before it, Mian represents the Sichuan (or Szechuan or Szechwan) region of Chinese cuisine.

Unlike Chengdu Taste, the menu is sparse, making it much easier to decide what to order. Plus, while the interior is pretty nicely designed for San Gabriel, the prices don’t reflect any sort of pretentiousness or fanciness, with literally every dish coming in below the $9.99 price point.

I ended up ordering the Chengdu ZaJiang Noodles. This is essentially a noodle bowl (but not soup) dish filled with thin handmade noodles, a fried egg, minced pork and, for some inexplicable reason, bok choy. Each noodle dish also came with a corresponding mug with the word “soup” in both English and Chinese on it, which did have an explicable reason. The waiter explained that it was water used to boil the noodles and that some people liked to sip on it on the side while eating such noodles. It was cold, and tasted like water with a few sprinkles of sugar and starch. Not exactly my thing, but the noodles certainly were.

The ZaJiang noodles managed to surpass any expectations I may have had before getting my food. Not only was there a perfect balance of meat, egg and noodles – the spices used in my noodle bowl were impressively tart and spicy at the same time. And when I say spicy, I don’t just mean traditional heat, I also mean Sichuan numbing pepper heat, which can often be overwhelming, but was utilized perfectly in these noodles.

As far as flavors go, Mian is pretty unbeatable. As for the noodles themselves, I am generally more partial to thick noodles when they don’t reside inside of a soup, but Mian figure out how to make these work. Perhaps that is the greatest testament to how good Mian actually is. Just go, and you don’t even have to thank me later.

There is a saying attributed to Jonathan Gold that goes something like “‘A’ is for ‘American’ Chinese food, ‘B’ is for ‘Better’ Chinese food and ‘C’ is for ‘Chinese’ Chinese food.” The letters, of course, are in reference to the health code and if you’ve ever been to China, you would know this to be true. Thus, when I heard great things about the dumplings at Emperor Noodles in San Gabriel and then found out it had a “B” rating, I got pretty excited to try it out.

Due to my familiarity with many things Chinese, I was put mostly in charge of the ordering and even used a bit of Mandarin to impress my waiter. It’s amazing how bad white Americans are with languages that even the correct pronunciation of Kung Pao Chicken (gong bao jidin) blows real Mandarin speakers away. So, I ordered two sets of shengjianbao (pan-fried soup dumpling) because I knew one per person would not be enough. It turned out I was right, as these were by far the biggest hit of the meal, beginning with the perfect dough, moving on to the delicious pork and finishing with the delightfully crispy sesame seed-laden bottom.

We probably could have just ordered a few more sets of those and been happy, but instead we added on some Salt and Pepper Shrimp, Kung Pao Chicken, Stir-Fried Rice Cakes and Duck Noodle Soup. It was quite the range of food and every bite was delicious. The in-laws weren’t exactly excited about peeling their own shrimp, but were pretty happy with the taste they found inside. Oh, and pepper in this case didn’t mean the seasoning, it meant the vegetable in case you’re wondering.

The kung pao chicken was the perfect throwback to my time in China, where I ate this stuff pretty often. It was just the right amount of oily, peanutty and spicy. And if you wanted it to be extra spicy all you had to do was take down a few of the peppers littered around the plate. They weren’t hard to find.

As for the rice cakes, they were probably my least favorite dish of the meal and also some of the lesser rice cakes I’ve eaten. The cakes themselves were fine, but the sauce was definitely lacking in flavor and there was very little meat to be found. In fact, nearly every time I thought I found a juicy morsel, it turned out to be cabbage with enough sauce on it to make it look like meat.

The duck soup was a nice way to finish out the meal (never mind that the rice cakes came out last, I saved the soup to finish things off). I say it was a good way to finish because it had great, yet subtle flavor, allowing me to wash everything else down while still enjoying some taste. It didn’t hurt that the noodles were also very enjoyable and the duck and bamboo shoots were pretty snazzy.

So, yeah, it was a solid outing. Not every dish was tops, but the overall experience felt ripped right out of my time living in Shanghai and frankly even real Shanghai would have trouble competing with this shengjianbao.

Although LA has a pretty cool Chinatown, it’s not really the center of Chinese culture in the area. To got the real experience, you have to take a long ride northeast of the city to the San Gabriel Valley. For some reason, Chinese chose this land to create much more than just a little Chinatown. Driving into it, it almost feels like you teleported to China, as all the signs are written in Chinese and the people almost seem to have made no effort to learn English.

Since I had spent a year living in Shanghai and always missed real Chinese food, one night my friend’s family (they are Chinese) took me out to San Gabriel. We went to a Shanghainese restaurant called Wang Jia (yes, there is more than one kind of Chinese restaurant). The place was packed with Chinese people, which is always a good sign. If the waiter spoke any English, he made no note of it.

Then, my friend’s mom began to order, all in Chinese. Afterward, I waited nervously, hoping that she had ordered as few vegetables as possible. Soon, there came a seemingly endless swarm of dishes. (Pictures below)

Although there were so many dishes, a few of them stood out a lot more than others. Pictured above is xiao long bao, one of my favorite dishes when I lived in Shanghai. These are dumplings filled with pork, but also sealed off to hold soup. When you bite into them, you have to be extra careful or else you’ll spill the soup or end up with a mouthful of soup.

The spicy chicken was also really good. It’s actually not a Shanghainese dish, but more indigenous to Sichuan. It is an almost overwhelming amount of hot peppers with chicken bits.

Of interest was the fish head soup, which is a massive bowl of soup containing an entire fish head. And this isn’t like the little head of a trout, it is the head of some giant fish that I couldn’t hope to name.

There was also so good battered and fried fish, a couple pork dishes, shrimp and a spicy beef soup. Everything tasted just as I was living in Shanghai again. If only I knew how to get back to the restaurant (and speak fluent Shanghainese), I would be sure to pay Wang Jia another visit.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Shout out to Fiona and the Chens for taking me to this wonderful place.