Feel like Chinese? Yougot to try this place

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

Chef Hongbin Yu, left,with Yougot owners Zhong Ren and Xiao Lu Xiao.

I couldn't believe it was happening. Again. I had done the right thing and checked the opening time the day before, but there I was, friends in tow, on Yougot's little porch at the said-to-be opening hour of 11:30 a.m., only to be confronted by a door that wouldn't open, and no sign of life within. The most astonishing part of it was that I'd had the identical experience on that very spot two years ago. Different restaurant. Same address.

After almost an hour we finally left for another restaurant, and I never did find out what had happened. I might have given up altogether, never to return (we certainly have no shortage of Chinese restaurants) but fortunately a friend phoned to tell me that her friend Pamela, who had lived in China, loved Yougot, and she thought it might be a good idea if we went there with Pamela as guide. I thought it was a good idea too, but I also thought it would be only proper for me to try it on my own first, without someone who had met the owner who -- it turned out in a wild coincidence -- had lived a few blocks from her in Shenyang, in the far northeast corner of China.

Yougot is a tidy, wee place (a mere 24 seats) with a simple but pretty motif of white chrysanthemums on the black fabric on the chairs and on the black lacquered tables. The exhaustive menu is the kind that gives me a headache -- I want it all, and I know it would take me more visits than I could ever manage to make a dent in it. Prices range from $8.99 to $13.90 for copious portions, and although the first few pages list very familiar fare, most of the other dishes are North Chinese, many of them unusual.

Fortunately the entire menu is in English as well as Chinese, with appetite-whetting colour photographs illustrating each dish, and big blow-ups of some of them on the walls. Which is helpful since communication was nearly nil on that first visit, and not much easier on the second, even with Pamela's presence. But more about that second visit later.

On my first visit there was just one nearly unilingual waiter who was nevertheless friendly and tried to steer us to the dishes he thought we'd like. To, as it happened, the only total failure of either night, kung pao shrimp -- limp, tasteless shrimp in a watery and utterly tame rendition of a normally spicy dish. I suspect it was no coincidence that it turned up on the bill separated from the other items, under the words "English menu." For the most fun in any Chinese restaurant be bold -- try to convince your server that you want authentic Chinese food, and then take a chance on some dishes you may never have heard of.

We started with a cold appetizer of chewy, vermicelli-like jelly fish and seaweed in a sesame-seasoned dressing with an underlying bite -- a first for my finicky friends, who tasted it gingerly, then devoured it. They needed no urging to try the superb asparagus, done to a perfect state of resilience, simply splashed with soy sauce and strewn with red pepper strips and slices of garlic, or the fabulously flavourful stir-fried lamb, aromatic with a whiff of cumin and topped by slices of green onions.

We had a deep fried basa fish, the skin crisp under a scarlet sweet and sour sauce that might have had some ketchup in it but wasn't in the least cloying or banal. Another dish the waiter steered me to was one I might not have ordered had I seen it first -- they looked like simple chicken fingers, but turned out to be tasty, becoming even tastier when dipped into the little mounds of tingly, fragrant Szechuan pepper.

The owner was there on my second visit, but I can't say the food that night was better than the food of my first visit -- it was delicious both times.

The difference lay in Pamela's familiarity with certain dishes, which led me to some I might never have known about on my own, like the cold, tangy toss of slithery, hand-made rice noodles with slivers of cucumber and carrots in an innocent-looking but incendiary dressing.

Szechuan pepper might have been the mystery ingredient that added a subtle, almost floral tone to a few of the dishes, and to one in particular, a savoury dark brown stew of cumin-spiced beef brisket with potatoes. Probably the most surprising dish was one I'd never seen on any other menu. Described simply as "fried spare ribs wrapped in paper," they turned out to be marinated salty-sweet little riblets, each thickly wrapped in foil and deep-fried. Opening the packages was tricky and messy, but the succulent meat within was worth the effort.

The deep-fried oblongs of "fish-scented" eggplant is actually a vegetarian dish. The name refers only to the method of preparation, which gave it a salty-sweet surface crunch at first, and which softened eventually but remained delicious. We also liked a homey stir-fry of sliced pork and scrambled eggs, with a chewy contrast in the heaps of whole black wood ear fungi. Ma po tofu is something I've often had elsewhere, a invariably successful dish of diced pork and tofu with a potent belt of chili, and it's good here too, albeit soupier than some, and glistening with a sizable slick of oil -- authentic, probably, but possibly too much so for some tastes.

Dinner is served daily from 5 p.m., lunch Thursday to Sunday, from 11:30 a.m. Given what happened on my first try, and the restaurant's tiny size, it's probably a good idea to make a reservation instead of just dropping in.

The food is worth the extra planning, with or without an experienced guide.

marion.warhaft@freepress.mb.ca

Yougot Chinese Restaurant

1521 Pembina Highway, 284-6618

Licensed

No wheelchair access

Four stars out of 5

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 28, 2010 d3