Soup as Tao in Hong Kong, and Other Oddments

We must take utmost care," Yut Wei cautioned, "to choose soups according to our physiques. You, for example, are, in my estimation, not a yang. Therefore you are a yin. But we must press on beyond this basic and discuss your physique before we order your soup."

"Well, some people have suggested that I am a bit on the chubby side" I began, thinking I might help.

"We know that. We are not talking about that. We must discuss your interior; consider the construction of your yin. Are you yin weak or yin strong? Is your yin one that is wet-cold-weak or dry-hot-weak, wet-hot-strong or dry-cold-strong?"

Oh. "If you are wet-cold-weak you must drink a soup of heat and reinforcement. If you are dry-hot-weak your body will welcome a soup that is humid but cool. A wet-hot-strong physique needs to have its blood and other pressures lowered, of course, and if you are dry-cold-strong you must drink a soup that will protect you from strange and sudden sickness. Analysis is very important before the soup. Don't you see?" Yut Wei asked.

I knew he was right. After all, hadn't he confided to me that infusions of correct soups at correct times had kept him out of the clutches of Western doctors for twenty years? Surely a record to envy. I resolved therefore to yield to his analysis of me. Before my soup.

We had made our way, Yut Wei and I, one recent evening to a soup restaurant called Ah Yee Leng Tong, in the Causeway Bay section of Hong Kong. A place of spare, unadorned tables and chairs, Ah Yee Leng Tong has been a refuge of solace and sustenance for Yut Wei, who is a food critic for Ming Pao Weekly, one of Hong Kong's major magazines. Its only decorations are wall signs proclaiming the efficacy of herbal soups made with the likes of water convolvulus, stewed algae, couch grass root, and cordyceps. Delicious prescriptions all, according to Yut Wei.

Soup by dosage, as medicine, is not a custom unique to China, a fact to which those of us who have had persistent grandmothers can attest, but the soups at Ah Yee Leng Tong, I was to discover, extend beyond the concept of chicken soup as a cure for the common cold.

The restaurant's name translates literally as "Beautiful Soup from Number Two" and arises from a bit of male Cantonese lore that suggests that mistresses, "number twos," generally make better soups than do wives, "number ones." Yut Wei explained. "Some Chinese men say that if you have a wife who cooks soup at home you should go home to her. Others say that if you have a wife at home it is better not to go home. I am not one of those, I hasten to add. Some men, lacking mistresses, I expect, come here to Ah Yhee Leng Tong for Beautiful Soup from Number Two, and perhaps they dream as they eat their soup. What do you think of this?"

"I think I would rather discuss my personal yin," I replied quickly, for the subject seemed the sort of social minefield through which I did not care to tiptoe.

"Done," said Yut Wei. "Now, because I see your yin as wet-cold-weak, I suggest some rice-field chicken soup."

"It's good?"

"Rice-field chicken is frog," he continued. "A nice frog soup, tin gai tong, removes wetness, strengthens the spleen, removes congestion, and clears the stomach. It is a perfect wet-cold-weak soup.

"Are you sure it's not toad?" I asked. "Because I'm not sure whether I'd like toad."

"Perhaps a snakehead soup." Yut Wei proposed, declining to answer my question.

"Cobra?"

"Snakehead is a fish," he said quietly, "and you make a soup of it with mulberry tree fungus, barley, and red dates."

"And it's good for?"

"Rheumatism and stiff joints — both wet-cold-weak afflictions — and it will also prevent gout, among other conditions."

"Aha! Let's have some of that," I said.

We sipped snakehead soup and had some sin yan sum wu guat gai tong as well, a soup of ginseng root, gingerroot, and black chicken that Yut Wei assured me would invigorate my blood and strengthen my metabolism. I expect it did, for, well metabolized, I suggested to Yut Wei that we go out into the night and find some lions to slay.

"Not before dessert," he replied.

Yut Wei led me a few blocks away into a narrow alley in the district of Wanchai, to a tiny bamboo-paneled shop that is called Vassar Health Dessert Specialist. It makes sweet medicinal desserts, Yut Wei said.

"Vassar?" I asked.

"It is part of the name of our Buddhist Vassar Chinese Medical College," said Simond Chan, the restaurant's proprietor and a former student at the college. "Medicinal reinforcement of bodily health through eating is taught there."

"I believe in that," I said.

"He does," Yut Wei informed Mr. Chan, and asked to sample a couple of the sweet, medicinal soups the shop prepares. He pointed at me. "My friend is yin, wet-cold-weak yin."

Mr. Chan nodded. "He must then drink some fig dendrobium. It removes the heat from the lungs and strengthens the stomach." He brought out a bowl of thin soup, dull gold in color, that was sweet but tart, and very good. Mr. Chan brought more soups, insisting I try tastes of his prescriptions. He noted that small tastes of many soups would not create within me an imbalance, lest I feared that.

"I don't," I assured him.

First I drank a liquid he called "ramulus loranth" tea with lotus seeds. A large bowl of this, Mr. Chan said, would strengthen my lumbar region, which I agreed was a good thing. Next I ate some cream of peanut soup with "moriuda root," then some cream of apricot soup with fritillary bulb — both of which would guarantee unblemished skin. I drank some puréed black sesame soup, which Mr. Chan said would, in time, if I consumed enough, turn the gray streaks in my hair back to brown, dark brown.

I had some yam pudding with wolfberry; then Mr. Chan brought out two bowls together. In one was a thick pink porridge, which he said was cream of taro with coconut milk. In the other was a consommé of honey, ginseng, and chrysanthemum blossoms. Though different, he said both soups would help my "middle burner" immensely.

"My what?"

"Your middle burner," Yut Wei said.

"These two soups are designed to reinforce the operation of your middle burner. A worthy purpose."

"Where," I asked discreetly, "is my middle burner?"

"It's here," Yut Weis said, touching an area just below my rib cage.

"Oh. There?" I said.

Nevertheless I drank all of my medicines that night, and the next morning I telephoned Yut Wei to thank him for his prescriptions and to report that my middle burner seemed to be humming along smoothly.

"Of course it is," said Yut Wei.

The China Syndrome.

Asia's economy may be ailing, but its tastes for fine wine is as healthy as ever.

Mr. Chui looked thoughtful, more so than usual.

"I am informed that people are drinking wine with their food now. Is that so?" he asked.

"Yes," I agreed, knowing that I was on somewhat irrefutable ground and prepared as well to have one of my periodic, occasionally elliptical, chats with Mr. Chui. Chui Wai Kuan that is, Number Seven Big Brother and proprietor of Fook Lam Moon in Hong Kong, surely the finest seafood restaurant on the planet.

"And any restaurant of certain high repute should have a house wine, a good house red wine. Is it not so?" asked this fellow whose restaurant is considered Hong Kong's culinary academy, one that has over the years provided executive Chinese chefs of virtually every major hotel in Hong Kong; one that has one employee, "the Emperor of the Fish," whose sole duty is inspecting, accepting, or rejecting individually the live fish brought to him each morning.

"Is it not so?" he persisted.

"Most do," I replied, nodding.

"Then we must have my house wine," Mr. Chui said with a sly grin, beckoning over his right shoulder with a forefinger as if to say, come.

At once a bottle appeared at his right elbow, a bottle of 1982 Château Lynch Bages, a fifth-growth Bordeaux which, if not great, is certainly grand. It is surely the best wine that has ever been suggested to me as a house wine, particularly as an accompaniment to shrimp-filled dumplings, yellow-oil crab and a steamed fat green wrasse.

Once this mischievous playlet would have been unique. No more. Or an aberration. No longer. These days, all of Asia is bobbing on a swelling tide of wines. Western wines, specifically, are the wines it demands, collects and drinks without pause: the most glittery bottles of Bordeau and Burgundy, the biggest of the big Barolos and Barbarescos, any wine from Australia as long as it says "Penfolds" on the label, everything that Robert Mondavi can ship west to east — actually anything red, made from grapes, in bottles.

Cases of wines, no, not cases, but rather whole ship containers, arrive in Asia stacked with red wines that are spoken for before they even reach port. They become possessions, or futures to hold for eventual profit, adornments that confer even more status than the ubiquitous gold Rolex that circles the wrist of Asia's tycoon du jour. These wines are, it must be said, also drunk.

Any red from Fat Guo, or the "Expanded Country," as France is known in China, is snapped up sight unseen, usually on the basis of printed vintage charts. The same goes for wines from Mei Guo, the "Beautiful Country," America; or Oh Jau, the "City" of Australia; or Ee Dai Lei, the charming phonetic for Italy. Christie's auction house sells wines to Asians in New York, while Sotheby's sells to Asians in Hong Kong. Both regularly set records. Other auction houses from Singapore to Japan find that all they need do is announce a wine sale and jack up the reserve limits, and the money rolls in. And in Hong Kong, the Island Shangri-La Hotel, an outpost of luxury consumption, has little trouble selling out $4,000-per-person wine dinners, or an occasional $17,000 bottle of 1906 Pétrus (the hotel stocks 44 vintages). Those are, by Mr. Chui, never far from any culinary cusp, has a wine list which, though small, would surely engender a lot of respect from the keep of Taillevent's Parisian cellars. In recent years, over meals with him, he has produced for us several '82 Margaux, a parade of '85 Mouton Rothschild, as well as a parade of Haut-Brions and Cheval Blancs of impeccable pedigree.

"Good?" he always asks, despite knowing the answer.

"Oh yes."

"Come at Christmas and I will open some 1982's you haven't seen yet." I've made my airline booking.

The Airline Syndrome.

Never, it appears, despite our pleas, will we be rid of culinary pretension, particularly as regards airplane food. Our appeals for the simple in-flight sandwich go unheeded still. Instead, at thirty-five-thousand feet we find ourselves prisoners, subjected to cornstarch-thickened pseudo-French sauces; warmed-over, Italian-sounding pastas; stateless dishes of Spanish intention; and airborne ersatz sushi. Most of us, however, are relentless optimists, and we keep flying, tasting, hoping.

Recently, aboard a jet over the Pacific, we were presented with a menu that proposed to treat us to some of the tastes of that newest food fads, "East meets West." This sampling was the work of a practitioner of the genre, we were informed by the menu and in a brief pre-meal film, a fellow who for our ultimate pleasure had cooked more than eight hundred dishes in three days to come up with this carte. We were to be fed shrimp salad dressed with a "Southeast Asian Pesto" (which by the way became, on the return-flight menu, "Asian Pesto"), a "Chinese Ratatouille," "Hong Kong Style Fried Rice," and "Pasta in Black Bean Sauce with Triple Tomatoes."

It is sufficient to report that not one of the above even approximated its given name.

Perhaps, I wondered idly, we were being served rejects from that eight-hundred-dish exercise? I asked our flight attendant at one point what "Triple Tomatoes" were. She replied, "I don't know. Would you like to try some?"

I suppose so.

What was delivered to my flip-up table was a small oblong bowl of warmed linguine dotted with a few black beans and fewer bits of chopped tomato.

"Are these the triple tomatoes?" I asked.

The flight attendant bent over the bowl and peered at the pasta. "Maybe they're double?" she suggested.

"Or single?" I volleyed.

"Maybe. But they are tomatoes, aren't they?"

I guessed yes.