Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Save the Butterfly Shrimp!


"I can't wait until we go to Golden Gate," I told Janice. "I'm dying to have butterfly shrimp again. It's an endangered species."

"It is? Then I'm not eating it!" she said, adamantly. My conservationist friend had obviously taken my words literally and assumed that the butterfly shrimp was an exotic sea creature facing imminent extinction.

"It's the name of a dish," I assured her.

Butterfly shrimp is one of those classic Cantonese-American dishes of my youth. You hardly see it on Chinese restaurant menus any more, but about five years ago I developed a craving for the dish, a craving that went unsatisfied until December 7, 2008. Along with my butterfly shrimp craving I had developed a general, nostalgic craving for old-style Chinese-American food, a remembrance of things past sending me in search of time lost.

There are only a few places left in New York that serve the dishes that defined Chinese food in America up until the 1970s. The two most often mentioned when the subject arises are King Yum, a venerable Chinese-Polynesian tiki bar in Queens, and Golden Gate in Riverdale.

My chance to try Golden Gate finally arose when I went to Riverdale to see my friends Howard and Pat perform a Christmas program with the Riverdale Choral Society. Howard and Pat have been ordering takeout from Golden Gate for some years, but they'd never actually eaten in the restaurant. There was some bad news, Howard had warned me in advance. They had recently redesigned the place, so it no longer looked like a relic from the 'fifties. They added a sushi bar and broadened their menu to become pan-Asian. Fortunately, however, they retained a number of their old-school staples.

After the concert five of us went over to Golden Gate. I assiduously avoided all of the Asian-fusion and pseudo-Szechuan dishes and ordered a meal of mostly retro classics. For appetizers we had barbecued spare ribs and shrimp toast. I'd read that Golden Gate was one of the best places in the city for Chinese spare ribs, a favorite dish of my youth. Spare ribs were surely the most popular Chinese restaurant item among New York Jews for generations. Somehow the ribs must have been given a secret amnesty from kosher law, because countless Jews who kept kosher at home ate spare ribs at Chinese restaurants on Sundays and on Christmas Eve. Golden Gate's spare ribs were indeed great, and brought back memories of Joy Fong, the spare rib standard-bearer of my childhood. They were moist, meaty, lightly charred and slightly sweet. I don't know how many hundreds of Chinese spare ribs I consumed in my youth, but I don't think I ever even knew about Memphis, K.C. or St. Louis-style ribs until I was at least in my twenties. When you were Jewish in New York in the 'fifties and 'sixties spare ribs meant only one thing.




Shrimp toast is something I never really liked as a kid, but you never know when you're going to find it again and all of a sudden it seemed worth ordering. Surely this is a purely American invention. A paste of chopped shrimp, water chestnuts and egg is slathered onto slices of white bread, and the thing is deep fried.


Then came the main courses, of which, for me, butterfly shrimp was the centerpiece. As I remember it from my childhood, it consisted of large shrimps split lengthwise ("butterflied"), and the split side was coated with egg and bacon; it was served with a light sweet and sour sauce (not the really sticky kind) and onions. The version at Golden Gate was served more like an omelet: a mess of shrimp in a pancake of egg and bacon. It was so good! After all, what's not to like about shrimp and egg and bacon? Everybody at the table agreed it was wonderful. What a relief. You go around for years with a Jones for a dish based on a distant memory and odds are as good as not you're going to be disappointed. I wasn't disappointed.

I was hoping to order wor shew opp, pressed duck which is breaded and fried then braised with shredded vegetables, but it wasn't on the menu. Instead we had hong shu duck, which is almost the same thing. In fact, you could have given me the dish, told me it was wor shew opp, and I'd have been perfectly satisfied. It was heavy but good.


I don't think I saw moo goo gai pan, which in the old days was an "exotic" dish compared to chow mein and chop suey, on the menu. They do have shrimp with lobster sauce and egg foo yung, but I said no thanks to both. When I was a kid I didn't understand why they called it lobster sauce, because it had no lobster in it. Then I learned that it was the same sauce that was used for lobster Cantonese.

I broke with the nostalgia theme and ordered two things I never ate as a child. One of them is a dish that is apparently a Golden Gate specialty, lobster with burnt pork, which every review of the restaurant seems to have mentioned, and which is definitely worth mentioning again. It's a bit of a misnomer, as the minced pork is not burnt at all.



As Eric Asimov wrote in The Times:

Finally, the lobster with burnt pork ($22) arrived, looking and smelling as impressive as I had hoped. The lobster was cut into pieces, with mounds of ground pork heaped around, giving off an unmistakable burned waft. Yet the pork didn't taste burned at all. In fact, it was highly flavored, seared quickly in a wok to seal in the juiciness of the meat and well seasoned with a touch of sweetness. And the lobster was superb, moist and tender -- fried quickly and then, what, braised with the pork?

I asked the waiter, but the most he would reveal was that it was an old Cantonese recipe, which, he said, was available nowhere else.



I felt that we needed a green vegetable (a feeling I never had as a child), and I ordered the baby bok choy with Napa cabbage. This was the least satisfying item of the meal. The vegetables were limp and served in a sauce that was superfluous. Lightly sauteed with a little bit of garlic is the way to go with baby bok choy.

I had gone to Golden Gate on a nostalgia trip and really wasn't expecting much. But I was pleasantly surprised. The food was much better than I had expected. Back in the '70s I wouldn't have given this food the time of day. It was the old, inauthentic Chinese food that was being relegated to the dustbin of history by Szechuan and Hunan cuisine (or Americanized approximations thereof). Now that this food is nearly extinct, and now that the miserable childhood that accompanied this food has become little more than fodder for amusing anecdotes, I can enjoy it again. Sure it isn't "authentic" Chinese food, but now it can be celebrated as heritage American foodways!

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry to tell you, but whatever you call that dish in the first photo IS NOT butterfly shrimp. Butterfly shrimp always were fried and sold in paper boxes- some plain or the more exotic variety- wrapped with bacon!

Rupert Young
Toronto, Canada

3:06 AM  
Blogger Peter Cherches said...

Butterfly shrimp were never fried in NY. You may be thinking of fantail shrimp.

12:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

CHYRELH. SAID...
The first picture looks to be Shrimp Egg Foo Young.

10:48 PM  
Blogger sheldonu said...

First of all, thanks for the post.
Second, Peter's memory is faulty. Always deep fried, with a brown sauce, and loads of sliced onions.
Finally, I hope you have tried King Yum, in the interim.
My family took me there and they make the classic American-Cantonese dish of our youth.
Worth a trip.

3:31 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I having been trying to find a recipe for the butterfly shrimp with bacon.
My local take out has it on the menu here in NJ, however I wish to make this dish at home. I am so surprised that I can not find it at all on the web.

I have an idea on how it is done after studying my last order.
Slice bacon into 2-3 inch pieces. Mix egg, some flour in a bowl. Butterfly the shrimp. Dip the bacon into the egg mixture, place in hot skillet or Wok and place shrimp on top of bacon. Do the same with about 6 more shrimp. Line them up side by side and pour remaining egg mixture over and flip to cook shrimp on other side. Remove and add sliced onions and stir fry. Now some places serve with a red sauce, others a brown sauce. I always ask for garlic sauce.

The above is just my idea on how its made, I could be totally wrong, but would love to find even just "one" recipe for this dish.

For those that think butterfly shrimp is deep fried, you are thinking of "Fantail Shrimp." Growing up in NYC, I would order this all the time, it would come with duck sauce for dipping.

Butterfly shrimp with bacon and onions has no coating other than egg, and of course the sauce the onions are cooked in.

Now I am hungry. LOL

9:25 PM  
Blogger Arleena DeBlogger said...

In small town Northern Ontario with a large Cantonese Chinese community, there wasn't a shortage of specialty restaurants. One In particularly, run by a family of brothers all who came from the northern region of Canton China. They made the most delicious mouth watering 'Butterflied Shrimp'. In one order you would receive (in total) 6 large 'crumb battered' shrimp wrapped in thick fried bacon entwined in green onion. Pan fried to golden brown. The drippings made into a golden brown sauce made with just a small amount of corn starch provided just the right amount of sauce to be served over hot steamed white rice. If one was to be brave enough to request 'more sauce', Danny the owner would go ballistic 'what more sauce, no extra sauce, only makes this amount, what you think!?!' Lol I can still taste this most delicious treat. And since growing up and moving away, I've yet to ever find this delicacy anywhere else. They were the real deal Cantonese Butterflied Shrimp!

1:59 AM  
Blogger Winthrop Smith said...

Butterfly shrimp, as served in Mamaroneck, NY, Tung Hoy, was, as per Peter and others, shrimp butterflied, wrapped in bacon, cooked with eggs, in a red sauce. It has resurfaced here in Maine as 'fried shrimp,' the current model, more batter than shrimp, or fantail shrimp, mixed with vegetables. No bacon. No egg. No red sauce.

1:50 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thank you for the article! Growing up in NJ I agree with everything you described down to the shrimp toast. Butterfly shrimp was my absolute favorite dish. Don't forget about the Poo Poo platter on a lazy susan!

7:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I remember a dish called "Woo Dip Har" butterflied shrimp whetted to bacon. Wok fried with a sweet pale pink sauce. I only know of 2 restaurants in Michigan that serve this. Golden Moon in Flint and Ten Yen in Westland. I have only found one recipe on pinterest but it lacks the sweet sauce. Its not actually an authentic Asian dish but it takes me back to the 70's and 80's. Planning on making this tonight!

2:54 PM  

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