[title type="h5"]Friday, May 1, 2015.
A First Taste of Ming's[/title]
In 1970, when I took my test for the Federal Communications Commission's Radiotelephone Operator Third-Class license, one of the more arcane facts I learned is that if I have a microphone keyed on the air, it is illegal to say the word "Mayday!" unless I really mean that I am in distress. I would be fined a substantial amount of money if I did. I still have my Operator Third-Class license card in my wallet, even though I haven't needed it since October 1983, the last time I was the Operator On Duty for WGSO, 1280 AM. I'd also like to remind you that the first paragraph of the Dining Diary is always the most boring.
Dinner tonight at Ming's, a new Chinese restaurant in West End. It's in the converted house that hosted a number of restaurants over the years. The first of those was Wolfe's Of New Orleans, the first restaurant of Chef Tom Wolfe, around 1994. He had just finished a stint in the kitchen at Emeril's, which was a one-unit restaurant company back then. Emeril was just becoming a major star, and some of this rubbed off on Tom Wolfe.
Hong Kong native Ming Joe (that's how he spells it on the restaurant's website) opened in 2014 after a clean, colorful renovation of the dining room and a much-expanded parking lot behind the restaurant.
I hope for an innovative menu, but Ming's doesn't have it quite yet. For the most part, the selections here are from the local Chinese catalog of the late 1980s, after which few new Chinese-American dishes (let alone real Chinese) appeared anywhere. Then the adventuresome fans of Asian cuisine started going to Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese places, leaving the Chinese restaurants with the customers who never order anything other than egg rolls, fried rice and Mandarin chicken.
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Hot and sour soup at Ming's.[/caption]
That said, I can't complain about the goodness of Ming's eats. I begin with hot and sour soup. It's offbeat in its use of wide slices of pork floating at the top of the broth. (Usually, the meat is shredded or cut into matchsticks.) The broth has a shade too much cornstarch, but again the taste is right.
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Pot stickers at Ming's.[/caption]
Now eight pot stickers. A little oily, and little under-stuck, but once again the flavors are enjoyable.
The entree--Ma-Po tofu, which I like pronouncing--is found on many Chinese menus, but is a popular dish only among Asians. It's named for a man known as "Pock-Marked Ma," whose history I used to know. The dish is made of soft ingredients throughout: ground pork, a thickish sauce, and cubes of the namesake tofu. The flakes of red pepper makes the tofu cubes look like dice.
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Ma-Po tofu.[/caption]
Whenever I see Ma-Po tofu in a Chinese restaurant that has even a chance of being good, I order it. I've never had a bad one. It's a spicy dish, with a red-brown sauce of very large flavors. It is impossible for eat this with chopsticks (unless, I guess, you have been doing so all your life).
I manage to get through about a third of this before hitting the wall. The bathtub-shaped bowl in which it is served suggests that a family of four would be well fed with this portion. But even the last spoonful is tasty.
The service staff is sharper than most, with the moves of that of a gourmet bistro. The dining room and the u-shaped deck around the front are nearly full, and the clientele seems sophisticated enough for some adventuresome dishes to make it to the menu. I hope they give it a whirl.
[title type="h5"]Ming's. West End: 7224 Pontchartrain Blvd. 504-333-6341. [/title]
