How can you not like a restaurant that offers a deep-fried pig's foot on the menu? It's a gloriously fatty piece of fried food, sticky and begging for chilies or citrus or mustard -- something, anything -- to cut the richness. But Chu Xiang doesn't play like that. They don't blush. Fried foot on a plate. Take it or leave it. (Take two, actually, as they come in pairs.) And really, you should. It's partially de-boned and wholly delicious, like fried chicken, if it was made of pork. You might want to smuggle in a lemon or tiny jar of Dijon.

That's the sensational side. Chu Xiang is otherwise a thoroughly earnest restaurant, going about their daily business of cooking simple and soulful Hubei food with their head down. There's zero flash to the place, though they've stuck a bunch of roof tiles to one wall and painted them white as a half-assed concession to decor. Next door is the Ivy, a boutique hotel with an ostentatious camoflage facade. Chu Xiang is a bit less conspicuous. They've got the Anonymous Chinese Restaurant design scheme down. It's number 725 on Jiaozhou Lu.

I was turned on to the place for their soups, a duck one in particular. I went back to the plain but delicious pork rib and lotus root version multiple times over winter, and went for a free-range chicken soup with red dates, wolfberries, and rice noodles last week. But I've never made it to the duck one, or the milky fish version that take prime position in the front of the menu. The rest of the dishes are too good.

There's two in particular that bring me time and again -- the french fries and the cauliflower. Yes, french fries, Hubei-style. Let's talk about the cauliflower first. Cauliflower is one of the more boring vegetables ever invented. Who thought of this thing? It looks like a bleached brain, smells vaguely of sulfur, and gives the impression of being an amateur attempt at broccoli. There are not a lot of uses for it. In classical French cooking, there's a creamed cauliflower soup, but that's only marginally more interesting for its odd name, Creme du Barry, which came from an 18th century high-class hooker who favored the stuff. She got the guillotine.



Chu Xiang rescues the cauliflower from such mediocrity. The written description on the menu -- Cauliflower Drypot (28rmb), or ganguo huacai -- doesn't give any indication to what they've achieved. What comes to the table is a small wok set over a flame -- that's what the ganguo means -- filled with chunks of cauliflower lounging in a deeply red broth, studded with small bits of salted pork, fermented black beans, dried chilies, slabs of ginger, and garlic. There's an underlying sweetness that I suspect is honey, and a chef friend speculates is brown sugar. It's splendid. There's more depth in this dish than the listing of ingredients implies -- sweetness, spice, a funky twang from the black beans, anchored by salted pork. Occasionally, the mild flavor of the cauliflower peeks out and as the broth bubbles away, it thickens into a perfect sauce to dip those deep-fried pig feet into. Try it.



The ancestral home of the French fry is somewhere around Lyon, I'd guess, not ketchup-deficient Hubei province. Who really knows, though? Maybe it will turn out to be like the noodle, or the landmine, invented in China twenty-six thousand years ago, and re-invented by those sticky-fingered foreigners. I hope to live to see the day that a graying scholar with knowledge of arcane scripts finds a recipe for Fry and Dry Potato Chips (26rmb, ganbian tudou si) carved into a turtle shell, collecting dust in the back of a Wuhan apothecary. If Chu Xiang's version is a direct descendant, it involves uneven hand-cut fries, Sichuan peppercorns, sesame seeds, Chinese celery, dried chili, and ginger, and is the best version of French fries in the world. There's a great visual trick going on here. Look at the picture. You can't tell, but there's ginger hidden all over that thing. It's cut the same size and shape as the potato, and it's the same color. When you're eating what you think is just a clutch of fries, you suddenly get a burst of ginger. The Chinese celery is a nice addition, too, saving you from fry fatigue with pick-me-ups of freshness, and then you've got the numbing Sichuan peppercorns, a scattering of dried chilies, and sesame seeds. Why hasn't anyone thought to put sesame seeds on French fries before? Innovation. That's what Chu Xiang is doing right here.

I like a lot of other dishes here. The Meat Ball with Rice, zhenzhu wanzi, is nice and essentially a pure pork dumpling that's traded out it's wrapper for chewy grains of rice. Ask for vinegar to dip them in. If you can get down with the crunchy texture of pig ears, Chu Xiang does a bright salad of them, sesame oil, and a heap of coriander. Roast chicken? I've had excellent ones at Chu Xiang. Even the steamed eggplant is good. I would never, ever think to steam an eggplant.

Chu Xiang stays open from 11am-10.30pm, seven days a week. Somewhere in the mid-afternoon they turn off the lights to save electricity. Over winter, customers were all bundled in their jackets because they wouldn't turn on, or don't have, the heat. That doesn't portend well for summer, but maybe they've got something up their sleeve. Like air-conditioning. The beers are cold though, and large Tsingtaos are 10rmb. Everything is cheap. It's difficult to spend more than a hundred per head. The fries are a must.

Chu Xiang, 725 Jiaozhou Lu, near Yuyao Lu.

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