So it is that my quest for food-borne salvation brings me to A & J Restaurant in Annandale, Virginia, on this balmy early-November midday. Lucky for me, I know salvation almost always lurks in the strangest of places. This place, this A & J Restaurant, is no exception. For while Annandale, Virginia, might be one of the great culinary Asian hotspots in the Eastern United States, containing a mind-boggling number of first class Korean, Thai, and Chinese food joints, it is, as far as suburban towns go, a total shit hole. It's suburban sprawl has suburban sprawl. You would never, ever bring a date here. No one you'd ever want to impress. Annandale is downright nasty. And so is the strip mall that houses A & J Restaurant. It is, as suburban strip malls go, among the most homely and downtrodden I've ever seen. It's a vintage 1971 model, and sits adjacent to a number of abandoned and bombed-out single family homes. The neighborhood smells of ruin. Of decay. But it also smells of incredibly good Chinese food. Freshly-cut scallions are in the air. As is the unmistakable redolence of melted duck fat. And fried pork. Heaven smells of Chinese food. Salvation clearly awaits here at the A & J Restaurant. So I hurry in.
And this is where I ask you, dear reader, to imagine the sound of a record needle being dragged across twelve inches of vintage black vinyl. Because my young family and I are the only white people here. Because when we enter, everything stops, goes silent. Talking. Eating. Moving. Everything ceases. And everyone looks at us. Every person here is Chinese. And they are, as a group, clearly thinking the same thing: the white people are health inspectors, immigration police, or tourists who have taken a very wrong turn. The hostess asks us in passable English is we need directions back towards Washington. We need a table, we say with a smile. So we share a table with another family, two elderly adults and their adult child, who, as it turns out, is visiting from Oakland, California, and is nearly the only one here who speaks English. He kindly offers to help us navigate the menu.
"Circle the food you want," he says, pointing to the pencil on the table. So we do. We circle two bowls of noodle soup and six plates of dim sum. It's a lot of food for the four of us, a blowout in fact, so the waitress considers our order and asks us, finally, if we'd like our noodles skinny or fat. Both is what we tell her, and in no more than thirty seconds later we are rewarded with two steaming bowls of fried pork and fried chicken soup with house-made noodles, both skinny and fat, both incredibly fresh and delicious.
We slurp our soup loudly, as Chinese manners allow, and watch as the plates of dim sum starts to roll in. First comes the Pao Cai, the pickled cabbage, which is simply a slaw of cabbage, red chili pepper, and whole pepper corns in rice wine vinegar. The summation of flavors is hot, tart, bitter, and delicious. Thai-like and nothing I've ever tasted of Chinese cooking. Next comes the Ma La Er Si, or slicked pork ears, which my six-year-old daughter and I set upon with particular ferocity. Sure, they are a bit springy and tough, but they're also sublime, earthy, somehow tart, altogether a rare treat. The Chinese family at our table stares with open-mouthed incredulity. The elderly mother speaks to her son in quiet Chinese. The son nods his head, then speaks to us.
"My mother wants to know if you know what you're eating."
I tell him yes, that we are eating pig's ears, and that we're eating them with a pleasure that is truly keen.
The mother nods and speaks to her son in Chinese.
"My mother wants to know if you've told your daughter what she's eating."
I ask my daughter to describe the food presently in her mouth.
"Pig's ear," she says.
"We honor the animal by eating all its parts," I explain.
The son translates what I've said and his two elderly Chinese parents smile, then break into applause. Whatever I've just said, whatever its translation, has just won them over. They smile at us and pour us hot tea in our cups and nod their heads at us and pat our backs the way dog owners approvingly stroke their own pets. White people we are no more. We are something else. Something sympathetic. Knowable. And that's when the rest of the dim sum starts to roll in. When we've been deemed worthy by this Chinese family, part of the extended Asian tribe. Scallion pancake, Pan Fried Pork Pot Stickers, Chinese Sesame Biscuit with Sliced Pork, Thousand Layer Pancake, and some of the best fried chicken (outside Old Town's fabled Blue and White) that I've ever eaten. Plate after plate after plate of the best Chinese food I've ever put in my mouth. This from a guy who hates (or so I thought) Chinese food. Cantonese and Szechuan cooking styles, with their endless parade of sauces thickened with corn starch and buttressed with the empty pop of MSG, have always left me, post-meal, feeling angry, cheap, dirty, ripped off, and somehow, in a purely culinary sense, fucked with.
Not at A & J. Not here, brother and sister. Every flavor is deeply honest, if not outright vibrant. Every flavor is surely and unmistakably north-Chinese and starch-heavy, for sure, but it all manages to pull off the difficult trick (for Chinese food, at least) of appearing naked and fresh and vital and vulnerable to easy corruption. Sauces laden with corn starch and MSG need not apply at A & J. Here each protein, each vegetable starch, stands by its own merits and fails by its own shortcomings; food is allowed to succeed or fail nakedly, as it so goes in most Thai, Japanese and Korean cooking.
So is found my own Sunday salvation at A & J in Annandale, Virginia. On this bright, balmy Sunday. Here is Chinese cooking at its most humble and yet, most elevated. Here is a restaurant full of Chinese nationals willing to share their most guarded culinary secrets with a white-American family of four in the naked light of Sunday.
And this is when the old Chinese man at our table leans over toward me and asks me, in perfectly passable English, where I'm from and if I've enjoyed my meal here today.
I'm from Missouri, I tell him, and I've never tasted anything like this.
He nods and smiles and tells me that he too has lived in Missouri, in Springfield, to be exact, and he informs me that Springfield is the home of the American movie star Brad Pitt. This I know. I ask him if he found Missouri, my home state, the state I so deeply love, to his liking. He frowns and considers the question.
"It was slow there," he says. "And the Chinese food wasn't so good."
No doubt. Absent from professional palates was the cuisine of A & J Restaurant. Go there if you can. Venture into Annandale. Sure. You will find it sprawling. You will find it ugly. But you will find some of the best Asian food that this country has to offer. Korean. Thai. And Chinese. Especially Northern Chinese. A & J Restaurant. And share a table. You never know who you'll meet or where they're from. They just might be from China. Or Missouri.
