For northern Chinese food, this is truly a wondrous find: On the two occasions that I had dinner…read morehere, I can tell that the chef is the real deal. In Oxford, no less! Incidentally, the Chinese ideograms for the restaurant's name actually mean "Flaming/Burning Wine," which might not be the only thing on fire, if you get my drift...
My dining companion and I tried a total of five dishes over the two occasions we came here for dinner. Some were dishes that were a little off the beaten path, what with the current mania in society for "healthy foods" and all, but sometimes, you've got to live a little and relish that incomparable taste of fat that makes a dish so iconic otherwise you won't ever know what you're missing! And of all of them, I wasn't disappointed in any, which is testimony to the chef's skill. It also doesn't hurt that the owners, Shuman and Teresa are very genial hosts and bring extra warmth to the already cozy atmosphere of dark colours in a very classic Chinese setting.
In the appetizer category was the Mouth Watering Chicken which was a poached chicken that was covered in a sauce of fiery chili peppers with peanuts sprinkled over it. It certainly lived up to its name. This is definitely not a dish for those with wimpy tastebuds because they're likely to have them seared off as with a blowtorch. However, for those who can handle it, it'll provide a nice "glow" in both your faces and stomachs to start the meal off.
The initial foray into the forbidden began with the Shanghai Sweet Soy Braised Belly Pork dish which we had with plain white rice (in the old and traditional days, only animals were fed brown rice or unthreshed rice). With its generous cuts of fat-laced pork belly covered in a thick sweet soy sauce and with the white rice to "cut" its artery-clogging richness somewhat, I was in Seventh Heaven. This was food from my childhood when the "fat is bad" mantra just didn't exist. It was oh-so-good and brought back memories of times past and of home in Singapore.
We ordered the Mapo Tofu with its classic chili and meat sauce as a sort of counterbalance. It was another dish that didn't disappoint. The ground pork swimming in that beautiful spicy sauce mixed in with the usual bowl of rice just hit the right spots where it counted. The spiciness wasn't as intense as I've had at some other restaurants and this is a good thing because it's so hard to taste something when your tongue feels like it's been run over by a lidocaine steamroller! Not to mention that drooling because your lips don't work any more is so unbecoming...
On another visit, we decided to just "go gangbusters" and ordered the Shanghai Sweet Soy Pork Hock which just made my day. It was one entire pork hock that had been stewed in the traditional sweet thick soy sauce which infused the entire hock rather than just its surface. Now, the tree-hugging health nuts will probably be turning up their noses in disgust but, as I said, you haven't had true Chinese food until you've tried the richer dishes at least once (and risk your doctor going apoplectic on your next visit)! Okay, it's not something to have daily or even weekly but once in a while, to quote Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street": "Greed is good!" And amen to that.
Now we come to Tofu in Crabmeat Sauce: The silky tofu cooked with the divine crabmeat made for an incomparable taste sensation that also sent shivers up my spine. Singaporeans can summarize this feeling in one word, "Shiok!" In other restaurants that I've had this dish, they skimped on the crabmeat and/or even used low-quality crabmeat, which detracted from the overall taste. But not here. At Sojo, they use a well picked-through, high quality backfin crabmeat (this is one dish where jumbo lump crabmeat would not have worked) so that you don't end up with crab shell or cartilage in your teeth nor is there a fishy flavor. Despite its reddish colouring, it has no chilli of any sort in it whatsoever, so rejoice all ye who have wimpy tastebuds or sensitive gastrointestinal systems!
This is a restaurant that I am dying to return to so that I can wander through its menu searching for another "hit" of nirvanic bliss on each visit. Since I happen to live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I'm sure that Sir Richard Branson will be more than happy to have me add to his already bulging coffers and perhaps Virgin Galactic. Assuming his pilots park their cars on time for a change and we don't miss our departure slot again: Nothing is quite so ludicrous as hearing your flight is delayed because your pilot is looking for a parking spot for his car...it was like being stuck in an episode of Mr. Bean!
