muffin
I tried going to a place that seemed to be a sophisticated Sichuan cuisine restaurant even though it's a serious Chinese restaurant. The restaurant is located in a building in Ueno where many serious Chinese restaurants are crowded. It's the same building where the famous mushroom hot pot restaurant "Ho Sheng" is located. Suiyun, the restaurant I visited, is known for dishes like boiled fish and boiled beef, but since it's a bit too much for just one person, I ordered a highball, twice-cooked pork, and boiled dumplings. The twice-cooked pork had the phrase "Lao Chengdu" in front of it, so I assumed it was a "serious Chengdu-style" dish, and it turned out to be exactly that. To be precise, I've never been to Chengdu, so it was like "seriously that kind of thing," haha. But, man, this looks really delicious! It's seasoned with doubanjiang, chili oil, and fermented black beans, without the sweet bean sauce that's essential in Japanese twice-cooked pork. The main ingredient is thinly sliced boiled pork stir-fried with plenty of vegetables. The dish includes garlic leaves, bell peppers, green chili peppers, and celery, and it's amazingly delicious! Of course, it's spicy, but it's very refreshing and full of flavor. And, there's a lot of it. It's just right for sharing between two people. As you eat, you'll find some black soybeans in the dish. These are fragments of black soybeans commonly found in the seriously aged Pixian doubanjiang used in Sichuan cuisine. No wonder it's so delicious. When you taste these soybeans on their own, they're salty, flavorful, and really tasty. I thought about trying the mapo tofu since they use the Pixian doubanjiang as the base seasoning, and it was incredibly delicious, but the portion was too much! It was too spicy. I also ordered the famous cucumber pickles that have been selling for 30 years, and they were also incredibly delicious. The way they prepared it was amazing. The cucumbers were thinly peeled like daikon, cut into random pieces, and quickly dipped in chili oil flavored with Sichuan peppercorns. This was seriously delicious! This kind of cooking technique and creativity would be well received by the Japanese, so they should definitely promote it more! Next, I tried the dan dan noodles, which were quite challenging due to the double punch of green beans and minced meat that I also ordered. However, both were incredibly delicious. The green beans were almost as expected, but the spicy flavor was intense. It might be the spiciest Sichuan-style green bean dish I've ever had. Surprisingly, the dan dan noodles had soup, and the spicy flavor was extremely strong. The hot oil and Sichuan peppercorn oil, heated to the limit of flavor in the pot, covered the surface of the bowl, and when you lift the noodles, you're enveloped in this intense flavor. But when you slurp the soup with a spoon, you can feel a faint sourness and the sweetness of the soup behind this intense spicy flavor, and it's exquisitely delicious! The alternating between the richness of the soup and the kick of the noodles became addictive, haha. By the way, the sesame seeds were just roasted sesame seeds sprinkled on top, there was no sesame paste flavor.