On Mother’s Day I took my mom to Ed’s Potsticker House, a Mandarin restaurant in Bridgeport, outside the fray of Chinatown proper. I’d heard great things about Ed’s over the years, most important that it’s possible for a non-Chinese person like me to convince the waitstaff that you want the real stuff eaten in northern China and not the oversauced, Americanized glop that’s piped directly to food courts and strip malls everywhere from some central processing plant under the Nevada desert.
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But I wasn’t worried. I’d come prepared with a short list of good-sounding things someone had translated and described on Chowhound.com. I was especially keen to try Ed’s lamb with cumin, and the “fish-fragrant” eggplant, which has nothing to do with fish and is really just a nice version of eggplant with garlic sauce that renders the fruit light and puffy, with a crispy outer crust.
Everything else was terrific–the house pot stickers are long cigars of crispy, porky goodness and the complex lamb, stir-fried with dried chilies, seems to be carried from the kitchen with great regularity.
I returned to Ed’s with a friend, and my hard work was rewarded when the same waiter produced a menu I’d known nothing about–a handsomely bound bilingual version of my now irrelevantly translated Chinese-only menu.
The pork leg was served cold and cut thinly in cross section so you could see the varying textures of the different muscles, rimmed by a layer of caramelized fat. It was a great piece of pork the likes of which I’d only ever seen in sandwiches from Italy’s streetside porchetta stands.
