A Cantonese Lunch at Yongxiang Restaurant1

★★★☆☆ (for the Cantonese Dishes)

★★☆☆☆ (for everything else)

Dinxi Lu – just southwest of Zhongshan Park – offers some great eats (so many in fact, CNNGo.com published a tour of the area.  Check it out here).  Of the street’s many eateries, there are a fair amount of joints offering Cantonese food.  Hankering some chā shāo – honey glazed roasted BBQ pork – Ling and I recently ventured over to the Dingxi to grab a Canton-inspired lunch.

As required of any diner here, we opted for a plate of their deliciously tender and succulent roast pork.  The thick slices were juicy and doused with a liberal amount of their house maltose-based glaze.  This is serious zhūròu – the restaurant constantly has a line outside where hungry people can order this pork and their honey roasted duck to bring back home.

Their dry-fried green beans with chilies were standard and expectedly tasty.  I’ve had this Shanghai staple now at several places and I have yet to really find different variations of this classic vegetable.  It seems the adage “if it’s not broken…” applies to this dish.

We then became a little trigger happy with the menu.  We ordered a fried silken tofu with braised eggplant dish, mápó dòufu, and beef shuǐjiǎo.

The fried crust of the tofu delicately – and deliciously – enveloped its oozing silky and soft interior.  Although difficult to grasp with kuàizi, the effort was absolutely worth the trouble.  The accompanying thick slices of eggplant were equally delightful and were scattered with scallions and sesame seeds.

Even though it is neither Cantonese nor Shanghainese, when I see mápó dòufu on menus, I have a hard time resisting it.  I find the dish addictively, if not punishingly spicy, though Yongxiang’s Cantonese adaptation danced along the mediocrity.  Nevertheless, I didn’t have a hard time shoveling down an entire bowl of the stuff.

There was something about their beef shuǐjiǎo that was both unfamiliar and confused.  Perhaps it was the quality of the meat or the spices used, but these were some of the least palatable ones I’ve had in this city.

The Cantonese food here is great, and I highly recommend their BBQ meats (pork, duck, goose).  The fare from other regions – perhaps appropriately – is not as well executed.  But on your next stop to the Dingxi, be sure to check this place out.

• ¥¥
• Yongxiang Restaurant
• 1271 Dingxi Lu near Wuyi Lu
• 电话: +86 6226 1987