STRICTLY CHINATOWN STYLE

I went to a certain restaurant in Chinatown the other night, after hiding out at the office all day. It's a small place that caters mostly to people from the neighborhood, although it does a fair amount of lunch business because of its proximity to the Financial District.
Their menu is not particularly exciting – mostly typical offerings, veering from the classics that white people love to a couple of dishes that many white people won’t like - and they do not offer rice plate specials.

Rice plate specials, really, are what all bachelors need.
A mixture of animal protein and vegetables on top of a heap of rice.
It's a balanced meal. Single servings are seldom balanced.

What I wanted was steamed meat patty with salt fish: 鹹魚肉餅.
Haahm yu yiuk beng.
Unbalance epitomized.

The waitress took my order, then came back to regretfully inform me that unfortunately they had sold out of the salt fish - did I want something else?

I had the 鹹蛋肉餅 (steamed meat patty with salt egg) instead.
With rice, of course.

What you need to know is that steaming yields tender juicy meat, especially if the fat content is high enough.
At home I occasionally squeeze out the forcemeat in an Italian sausage and moosh it flat, then steam it with some salt vegetables (鹹菜).
Very simple, very heaven.

[LINGUISTIC EXCURSUS: 鹹 ('salty') is nowadays almost always rendered as 咸 ('all together'). The reason is that with twenty strokes, 鹹 looks nearly illegible and is harder to form properly when writing, compared to 咸 with only nine strokes. Either word sounds the same, both in Cantonese (haahm) and Mandarin (xian). And note that 咸 is the phonetic element in 鹹.
In a food context, it is easy enough to see that 咸 should be read as 'salty', instead of 'all together'. Likewise, the expletive 咸家鏟 (haahm ka chaan) does NOT mean "salty practitioners with shovels", but more or less "bury the entire family". You may have heard it in gangster films.
In some contexts, 咸 is replaced with 冚, for instance in 冚塴唥 (haambalang: all, every one of something). All three of these characters are Cantonese colloquiagraphs. Ham (冚) means lid, so if it were used in the curse above instead of 咸, the implication would be coffin lids for the entire clan.
Paang (塴) is used as a phonetic transcriber, and lang (唥) is a melodious sound, something round, a bundle, or a dude.]



鹹蛋肉餅 HAAHM DAAN YIUK BENG

I would've added some shredded ginger on top, and mooshed it a bit thinner.
Evenso. Quite tasty lah, and precisely what was needed for breakfast at nine in the evening.

I shan't tell you the name of the restaurant, for reasons which will become apparent.
While the food is not exceptional, it is carefully made and attentively served.
The people who work there are good folks, and run a clean honest business.
And I like the ambience - it's purely Chinatown, nothing frou frou.
Decent honest cooking and a pleasant neighborhood atmosphere.

What added warmth to my meal was the waitress.
I cannot tell what age she is, she could be anything between barely in her twenties to mid-forties.
Melodious voice, girlish laughter, and bright eyes.
Shorter than me, trim, ageless.
A small woman of youthful proportion, with an intelligent face that reflects a likable character.

And she has very pretty hands.
You do NOT need to know about those hands.
I have no wish that you should become familiar with them.
Really, you could not possibly appreciate her hands properly anyhow.

I was the last customer, the staff sat down to their own dinner one table over while I was eating.
I can't figure out if she is the daughter of the family, or the wife of the boss.
She addressed the other cook as Kau-fu (舅父), which doesn't say much.
But I need to know. For some reason, I am fascinated.
Did I already mention those hands?


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