Tentekomai is my neighborhood Japanese, though I never call it by that name. "Tentekomai" means nothing in my world (to online Japanese translators it's "humming with activity"). The literal translation of its Chinese name speaks to me, though: The Ancient Dance of the Heavenly Hand. It's mystical and grand, and I like that in my gyoza.

The Ancient Dance is a casual joint with a smoky dining room, cheap draft beers, and lots of drinking food. The Japanese customers seem to use it two ways: making dinner out of a simmering pot of congee or a light stew, or doing the drinking thing and munching salty, fried snacks and dumplings. I'm of the latter persuasion. (There's also a six-seater bar, great for solo dining. That's it, pictured.)



The Heavenly Hand has some delicate, dumpling-folding fingers. Their pan-fried dumplings, the gyoza, are tiny and come about fifteen to the order. Witness:



The menu politely informs you about the correct way to eat them. It's important, but not entirely clear. I'll clarify. There's three components: chopped spring onions, a chili sauce, and soy sauce. The waitress will drop off a bowl of the spring onions; the chili sauce and soy are at the table. Heap a spoon of spring onions in your sauce dish, use the matchstick-looking spoon to add almost an equal amount of chili sauce, and thin it out with the soy sauce. The dumplings come stuffed a variety of ways -- with garlic and potato, with cod roe, etc. ¨C but really, they're about the dipping sauce, and the dipping sauce is about the chili sauce, which is flavored with yuzu, a citrus fruit that's somewhere between a lemon and a lime. Like 7UP. The setup looks something like the picture below.



There's a whole section, a quarter of the menu, devoted to bastardized dumplings, but that¡¯s a forbidden zone. Don't go there, into the land of the Mexican-style dumpling pizza with mayonnaise and cheese if you're just casually exploring. It's Black Diamond territory, for professionals and drunks, and no one is going to pay attention to your cries of help should your curiosity lead you astray. It¡¯s not worth it, especially because there¡¯s plenty of other good things to order.

Go for the cheese croquettes instead. They¡¯re heavier on potato than cheese, but the filling is soft and runny, the outside is golden and fried, and there's a delicious sauce that tastes like honey mustard spiked with miso. It¡¯s everything you could want in a croquette.



What else is good? The beef tongue, the one called something like Prime Beef Tongue in English and shang niushe in Chinese. It's a fabulous plate of tender tongue, more flavorful than at many other Japanese places. They¡¯ve also got a simple fresh spinach salad. Bang those two together and you've got a nice cousin of the steak & salad, for 50rmb. I'm also a fan of the Dancing Hand's sour plum fried rice, livened up with fine threads of minty shiso leaves and crunchy pickled ginger. And the whole roasted gingko nuts that come on a bed of salt. And the meaty chicken wings stuffed with ginger, garlic, and more shiso. And the, and the... There's a lot of nice things on the Heavenly Dancing Hand's menu and no reason not to skip around and try a bunch of them -- even with a reasonable draft beer tab, the bill is usually a hundred, or a hundred and a half.



The address for Tentekomai can be confusing. It's in a building on the northwest corner of the Ruijin Lu and Julu Lu intersection that's home to two other Japanese restaurants: Hakkenden, an o-kay izakaya/yakitori with good French fries and a bamboo-prison interior d¨¦cor, and a bad all-you-can eat. The whole building is marked as 242 Ruijin Lu. The Julu Lu bathhouse is the anchor tenant to the thing.

The entrance to Tentekomai is on Julu Lu. Look for the dancing character sign, same as the red drawing in the first picture, and you'll find it. It's the westernmost restaurant in the 242 building. Hit the link for the full details.

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