More and more people are getting Asian cuisine at home, and more and more people are realizing that polar buffets do not sell Chinese food as local Chinese eat themselves. There are actually many places in Budapest where you can eat authentic food, although they are still a minority. However, most of them have to travel further afield, with Pest Center surprisingly behind other large western cities in this regard. It is especially incomprehensible why Chinese buns do not get a similar score to pizza and gyros, as they are amazingly diverse, tasty, quick to eat and lactating. Their big drawback is that really good dumplings are made exclusively by hand, so it is difficult to make a large amount of them. Zhu & Co is trying to fill this place, as handmade dumplings are becoming more and more popular, but they also have a business that they don’t know much about, and even more exciting: Chinese dinner every month. Their example shows not only how much less it is, that a real, quality and exciting gastronomic experience would not require a truffle with lobster or a sixty-page menu, but also how good it would be if Budapest one day became London, where every other nationality in every Angle – with love and care I can taste home cooked food.
Mushrooms, cucumbers and sesame seeds – Photo: Ács Bori / Telex
Zhu’s story is very nice, even if we draw from the products themselves: Masha of Russian origin and Chinese Ji met in Hungary. Masha studied Hungarian at Moscow University, works as a hairdresser for J, made an acquaintance on television as the host of the ethnic news program. Eating defined their relationship from the start, with the boy arriving on his first date with a heavy dose of marine scavengers, he even made them. Since then they have been cooking and eating together, because, as they say, he connects their culture with Russia and also China: as soon as they are cooked, they also invite guests, because it is not worth a few people.
The restaurant was cooked not by them, but by my J. parents, who came here from Wenzhou in the mid-90s (it’s an hour east of Shanghai, roughly on the beach), and it was entrusted to her grandmother, and only then, as a teenager. Masha and Ji wanted to open a tea shop first, and then as soon as they visited my parents, who made dumplings for them as usual, they remembered how nice it would be to show this to others as well. “In China, it works by going to an absolutely unmarked garage where there is absolutely no menu, and the locals simply know to make a package. We wanted something like this: one thing, but to do well.” There are a lot of dumplings, and each group has different types of noodles, a variety of fillings and shapes, as well as regional variations, they also carry the individual signature of their makers. “Like our dumplings, only my mom can make them, and she doesn’t know the exact recipe, she just does.” Ji also talked about how necessary it is to explain the true meaning of the craft to the guests. The fact that her mother is standing in the window and folding her packages is not just a sight but a vivid explanation, without which many people do not understand why a bowl of handmade dumplings costs more than fast food menus.
We recommend places where you can eat well
In our new series every month, we pick restaurants that have been tested by several members of our editorial staff many times over a long period of time, but have never disappointed, and are unique in some way, be it location, technology, style or whatever. another thing. When evaluating the experience, we examine not only the dishes themselves, the techniques for their preparation and their uniqueness, but also the service, the atmosphere and the atmosphere. In the first part, we served DP BBQ at a South American barbecue.
Nothing makes more sense than foreigners who live here to bring their culture into our lives, sit at their tables, try the food they cook for their holidays and thus gain new culinary experiences without having to travel thousands of miles for them. This opportunity is very rare even at home, so a Zhu dinner is a great idea. Once a month, the feast is held in a closed circle: in this case, the simple food that they cook at home when the family gathers is laid out at the table. It is simple, but it is not: snails, mussels, crabs and many other foods that are new to us are introduced.
Steamed fish – Photo: Ács Bori / Telex
And the point is not that, but to explain the dishes that come before us, this real Chinese cuisine, and a small corner of it. Zhu’s idea works because the cuisine of such a distant culture would not be apparent to us in any obvious way. It’s not clear why veggies are risotto, why we dip the meat in the sauce, and why the pasta is so vibrant. Words have tremendous power: talking is better than eating, but if you hear stories and explanations about the foods you taste, the picture is complete.
Fresh texture but clean and simple flavors
Dinner starts a little silly way at four on a Sunday afternoon, at first it’s weird, then it’s also good, because we already feel like something else is going to be here at the start of the action. At the table, we find cold appetizers on the table for the first time, although in fact it accompanies the feast. The silken skein, which is soft and dense between cream cheese and cottage cheese, is mostly distinguished by its texture and freshness, and the sauce underneath. There is also sugar peas (peeled green peas), which are also very simple in garlic sauce, with their own taste and crunchy texture reigning, but for some reason they can not be turned off quite like a salty and crunchy snack. However, my favorite was the mushroom salad with cucumber, sesame seeds and sesame oil. The key to this was also that the mushroom itself had an amazingly good texture, and was roughly “al dente” if there is no confusion in the application of this adjective here. Asparagus salad was based on the same principle, which was actually made not from the asparagus we know, but from a special vegetable very similar to asparagus and cucumbers, whose English name is Celts.
Nothing strange was ahead yet, and then came the wild stuff: black mussels, steamed fish, and glass noodle crab. What was great about these dishes was that the focus was on the ingredients themselves, adding flavors that complemented and accentuated their core, and textures played an important role in these too. Chinese cuisine loves and uses a lot of things because of its unusual rubbery or cartilaginous texture. Fish crumble, little chewy crab, mussels.
Lucky pasta salad – Photo by Ács Bori / Telex
One of my favorites, because of its name, is the lucky pasta salad they eat on New Year’s Eve: sticky pasta with a texture very similar to noodles but made with rice flour, and topped with crunchy vegetables in a lukewarm and similarly simple sauce.
Another memorable dish is broth, which does not contain water – Jie’s grandmother’s recipe, and the interesting thing is that only Chinese spirits enter it. In China you can only have a whole chicken, they don’t buy chicken breast like us. This soup also contains all the animal elements, plus shiitake mushrooms and wood ear, which makes its taste amazingly intense. These dishes form a bridge between the Hungarian and Asian systems: we also eat broth and chicken broth, which (originally) contain all the elements of the animal, and here the experience is in fact close to a mixture of our two famous dishes, from alcohol to soy sauce. Another ingredient that we obviously don’t know because Umm Ji’s doesn’t betray, however is a whole new experience of taste and texture.
Masha and Ji – Photo: Carpenter Puri / Telex
Ji and Masa were surprisingly excited about starting a home business, and – unlike many Hungarian restaurants – they didn’t lose their enthusiasm because of the difficulties they encountered during the trip. The virus arrived in vain, and they felt the audience was directly happy with them and the new experiences they provided, but of course sometimes they also have to recalculate everything because they didn’t come out. The basic concept that Gee’s mother sets limits on almost everything is also the amount and growth, especially not giving the prescription out of her hands, in fact, she says she doesn’t know that either, because it’s in her hands. However, the primary goal is for the quality to remain that way. It is said that at home it is easier for them to thrive as a performing immigrant than the locals, who are constantly working and learning the language, so it is very important for them to go through several jobs at the same time and practice a lot of Magyars. The locals will approach much sooner if we tell them in Hungarian about things they are not known for.
