Tuesday, December 1, 2009. Beijing. December began with a classic New Orleans winter day, and it's not even winter yet. It was in the forties when I left the Cool Water Ranch in mid-afternoon. The place was drenched from an all-day, miserable rain. This is good. I have a theory that when the cold weather comes early in the season, winter is less severe and breaks sooner. My thinking is that there's a certain finite amount of cold air that the North Pole can produce, and the more thinly it's spread the less concentrated it is. Meteorological science doesn't back me up on this, but the idea makes winter more bearable. And here I am at one of the southern extremes of our nation. How to people with real winter stand it?
I looked over my list of unreviewed ethnic restaurants, and found Beijing. A few readers and listeners told me it was pretty good, so I thought I'd give it a try.
Beijing is in the strip mall where where Pap's Supermarket--an icon of my past--met its end. When I was a boy, my Aunt Una used to take me along on her shopping trips to Pap's spiffy new Gentilly store. It had a "kiddie corral" with books, toys, and games. Decades later, when I was a student at UNO, I lived a few blocks from Pap's. It became my regular food store, and remained so for many years after I moved elsewhere. In the 1980s, Pap's built a second store in Metairie, near the I-10-Clearview cloverleaf. The store was quite visible, but the traffic pattern involved in getting to it was so inconvenient that the store failed, bringing down the Gentilly Pap's, too.
Beijing is where the produce department of Pap's once was. It's a nice-looking restaurant, but this night it presented a discouraging scene. The place was nearly empty. Well, it was Tuesday night, it was cold, drizzly, and windy. I jacked my hopes up and order hot and sour soup. Pretty good. So, how about some pot stickers? Uh-oh. These were enormous, with grossly overthick, gummy pasta wrappers and solid, featureless balls of ground meat inside. I ate two of the five; I should have stopped after one, but I felt sorry for these people.
I asked the server whether I should get the twice-cooked pork or the pork with spicy garlic sauce. I could not comprehend her answer at first, but I think her point was that the twice-cooked pork was very straightforward, while the version with garlic sauce had more going on. Okay, the garlic sauce, then. It was okay. A little too oily for my taste. Darn. I was hoping for a discovery to crow about.
Cold rain and blowing wind challenged me all the way home. It felt like Christmas. But I have a theory about Christmas. It's something like my theory about winter. When it comes too emphatically too early, it isn't as intense and doesn't last as long as when it doesn't.
Beijing. Metairie: 2222 Clearview Pkwy. 504-885-8881. Chinese.
