This past week was a pretty busy one for both of us at work. During the month of April I have between 8-10 classes per day, which means there is barely time to breathe as I usher the previous student out of the classroom and welcome the next one in. Kuniko’s schedule was also pretty packed with special events at her school, so we were both looking forward to meeting up after work on Friday and getting some Chinese food.
I think that I’ve talked about my growing addiction to Chinese food on this blog before. The key is to find food that hasn’t been Japan-ized and tastes authentic.
Our target on Friday night was Shin-Shin (ææ) in the Motomachi area of Kobe. It is hidden on backstreets and we have often passed it on the way to Anonym, our current favorite Kobe restaurant. We’ve tried to walk into Shin-Shin a couple of time, but each time they were booked up and we were turned away. We decided this time to go ahead and set up a reservation. Outside the restaurant a flag is flying the name of the restaurant with a big red star, and the bottom portion of the flag must be near a fan blowing out aromas from the kitchen. The good news is that the street in front of the restaurant smells great, but the bad news is the bottom of the flag is stained with the oil that is carried out the ventilation duct. Still, this could be a good sign – we’ve eaten at restaurants with dicey sanitary conditions before and have left satisfied.
Upon sliding open the front door you can see a very narrow kitchen with a few counter seats facing the cooks. I thought that it was the entirety of the restaurant, but the owner led us around behind the kitchen to a quiet room that might actually have been someone’s living room at one time. The furniture of the room seemed more homey than what you’d find in a restaurant, and the quiet room in back had no excitement of frying food and cooks in action. We ordered up some beers and reviewed the menu.
The menu was a bit limited, especially in the dim sum arena, but we ended up ordering a few dishes to get an idea of what they could do here. We started with shu-mai, sui-gyoza, sweet/sour pork, and onion ginger noodles. They started us off with the shu-mai which had quite a bit of shiitake mushroom chopped up and mixed in with the pork filling. I liked the texture of the mushroom in there, although I think Kuniko didn’t appreciate it very much. The shiitake didn’t add a lot of flavor however, and overall I thought that it was a little lifeless for shu-mai. The sui-gyoza were a little better on flavor, but the wrappers were quite thin, and I prefer thick dumpling style wrapped gyoza.
The su-buta (sweet/sour pork) was the big disappointment of the night for me. I couldn’t really taste much su (vinegar), the pork was a bit overfried, and there wasn’t that perfect balance of salty and sour that makes the dish shine. Disappointed!
The last dish that arrived was the onion ginger noodles, served without soup. These were really good. The noodles were flat wheat noodles and the sharp onion flavor went nicely with the cold beer we were drinking. The ginger wasn’t over the top but definitely present, and it made for a really nice dish. I could have eaten several more plates of those noodles.
We decided to leave on a high note and we skipped dessert. It was good to finally try Shin-Shin but those noodles are about the only thing that will get me back there. Kobe is filled with more Chinese restaurants for us to try first.
To change things up a bit we stopped at a bar called Porto Bar, and we had a small platter of cheese. Kuniko had a cava and I asked for the Port list, but it turns out that the Porto Bar had only one port. It was not bad, though – a young tawny port with a lot of fruit – and it was nice break for our palates.
Still slightly disappointed by our experience at Shin-Shin we walked a few blocks to another area with some Chinese restaurants, and we went to a gyoza place to have a few kinds of gyoza – shiso gyoza, extra garlic gyoza, and their regular every-day gyoza. The service there was a bit slow, and the atmosphere a little like warehouse more than a restaurant, but I couldn’t complain about their gyoza. They served them as tiny bite-sized squares, fried crispy on the bottom.
After the gyoza we wrapped things up and decided to head home, but not ten steps out of the gyoza restaurant we found a tiny Chinese place specializing in shorompo (Chinese soup dumplings). We waltzed in there just before they closed and managed to eat three baskets of dumplings. The Chinese husband and wife that ran the place were nice enough to let us in and cook us our last meal of the night. Delicious!
So that was our Friday night – a very high calorie food marathon, and that was just the beginning of the weekend. Saturday night it was grilled cheese Cuban sandwiches, and then Sunday night we made Thai and Korean mini-pizzas for dinner.
I think I need a few days of salads to balance things out…
