Chin Chin Chinese Chicken Salad Recipe

While making a Chinese Chicken Salad, the dressing recipe, which I thought was permanently etched in my brain, was suddenly missing a few items. Did I use rice vinegar? And was there soy sauce? I thought I could check the recipe online but I couldn't find it. I dug out my old binder full of recipes from cooking lessons I took years ago at Ma Cuisine, the cooking school at Ma Maison. The salad was a favorite at the popular restaurant Chin Chin.

The binder full of recipes brought on a wave of nostalgia. Many of the celebrity chefs of those days are long gone from the current food scene: Jean Francois Meteigner of L'Orangerie, Ed La Dou of Pizza fame, Patrick Terrail who owned Ma Maison. 

The Ma Maison cooking school was conducted in a kind of tent affair next to the restaurant. The whole place was a hodge-podge of mismatched furniture and kitschy decoration. In its hey-day, the restaurant had a celebrity list that was mind-boggling. One of the classes I took was taught by Martha Stewart, who was just gaining popularity. She left mid-class to take a phone call and apologized when she returned, saying it had been Jackie Kennedy and she didn't want to keep her waiting. Things have changed for Martha. I noticed she has a show with Snoop Dog. Lots of glitter and oodles of bad taste.

My home mortgage payment at the time was $148.00 a month. I guess that puts these prices into perspective. We thought the menu was pretty standard French for the time. The raclette and the fondue were hard to find then and I imagine hard to find now. Well, maybe not the fondue.

At another class taught by Roy Yamaguchi, Truman Capote sat in on the side, drinking one martini? after another. I just finished his classic coming-of-age story, The Grass Harp.

Here's the recipe. The creator of Chin Chin, Bob Mandler, taught the Ma Cuisine class so the following recipe is authentic. Meanwhile the Mandlers are opening something new.

My Little Dumpling is the work of Robert and Anthony Mandler, a father-son duo with plenty of experience in the restaurant business. The former founded the mega-popular upscale Chinese restaurant chain Chin Chin way back in 1983, envisioning the place as a see-and-be-seen spot for classic New York City-style Chinese food. Now the pair is keen to replicate the model in new ways, offering dumplings and a few other staples as well as beer and wine. This will be a full-service restaurant, with decor and ambiance provided by son Anthony Mandler.

Chin Chin Classic Shredded Chicken Salad

Salad Ingredients

 4 ozs. roasted chicken breasts (approximately 2 half-breasts) slivered

1/2 cup slivered green onion

2 cups shredded iceberg lettuce

1 cup shredded carrot

1/2 cup slivered toasted almonds

1 1/2 cups deep fried wonton skin strips

3 cups deep-fried rice stix 

Dressing (makes 9 ozs.)

1 tsp. minced fresh ginger

1/4 cup coarsely chopped preserved red ginger

2 T syrup from preserved red ginger

2 T minced green onion

2 T sesame oil

6 T red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp sugar

4 T light soy sauce

1/2 tsp. chili paste

Combine salad ingredients except wontons, rice stix and nuts and toss well. Add rice stix and nuts and fold in. Combine dressing ingredients. Pour a couple of ounces over the salad. Add wontons to the top. 

Coming up: The Loggione

"What's on at La Scala?" Richard asked.
"Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers."

"What the hell is that?

"Cherubini's longest opera and his last."
"Cherubini?"
"Luigi Cherubini—the German composer."
"What??"
"Just kidding," I said. "I guess they've run out of operas by Verdi and Mozart and Handel and Puccini. I looked it up on Wiki. The opera premiered in 1833 and was "not successful." Translation: it bombed. And La Scala did it again in 1963. Negative reviews."

"Just our luck to be in Milan when they're dredging it up again," he said.
"It's like a vampire. That opera should have died. But tickets are selling well anyway. My guess is the scalpers buy them up, no matter what, and sell to tourists like us. Why else do you think they'd schedule something like this opera during tourist season. No matter what they do, the tickets will sell."
"Maybe it's like Springtime for Hitler, designed to lose. Or to showcase something you couldn't do in any other opera? How much are the tickets?"

"Good ones, which aren't very good anyway, would cost 500 Euro for two."
"Let's skip it," Richard said.

From Wikipedia:

Performance history of Ali Baba. 

It was premiered in Paris on 22 July 1833. It was not successful, with Hector Berlioz calling it "one of the feeblest things Cherubini ever wrote."^[2] It ran for five performances.^[1] Felix Mendelssohn discussed the opera in his letter of 25 December 1834 to Ignaz Moscheles, stating, that Cherubini was so craven to serve the new style en vogue in Paris at that time.

It was resurrected by La Scala in 1963 but again faced negative reviews.^[2] A live recording was made and was subsequently issued.

The overture has found a place in the concert repertoire for symphony orchestras.

******************************************************************************

     Last time I was in Milan, my ex and I bought tickets from a scalper on the street who showed the location to us on the seating chart. We knew nothing about La Scala but thought they looked OK. I can't remember what we paid—a lot. The opera was Linda di Chamounix. Haven't heard of it? Neither had we. It was colorful; the singing was great. 

     But the seats were the most uncomfortable I've experienced since I flew to Europe on a Freddie Laker charter forty-five years ago. I'd almost forgotten Sir Freddie. Looking him up, it seems he was a trailblazer of the concept of economical air travel. The seats were jammed into that plane, possibly more jammed than they are today. I remember vividly when the woman in front of me put her seat back and her blonde head was in my lap. She rolled her eyes up and said, "Sorry, but.." In defense, I had to push mine back. The woman behind me groaned and pushed hers. On and on the groans continued as we strangers put our seats back and all realized the hell we were in for the next nine or eleven hours, whatever the time was. It seemed interminable. All we had to ease the pain with was alcohol—the whole plane was half-drunk so the line-up for the bathrooms filled the aisles. 

Freddie Laker left British United in 1965 and formed his own Laker Airways, in 1966, initially operating charter flights with a pair of turboprop planes acquired second-hand from British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). The livery was a mixture of black and red with a bold LAKER logo on the tailplane. He offered a new, revolutionary concept of economic air travel requiring passengers to purchase their tickets on the day of travel as well as to buy their own food. These flights were operated by Laker Airways and marketed under the Skytrain trademark. 

     Our La Scala seats were separated by a pillar that obstructed most of my ex's view of a sliver of the stage. We changed seats at intermission so I had the worst view for the second half. We kicked ourselves thinking we'd been had by the scalper. I've learned since that most of the seats in the hall range from poor to horrible. 

     The opera was long—three hours or more, and it was hot, sweat running-down-your-face hot. We could see only a little piece of the stage, the left upper third. Mostly, we looked at the curtain and the set unless there was a bit of unorthodox stage direction that called for one of the cast to drift way, way out of the center sight-line into our view.

     "Hey, I see someone! Something must have gone wrong," my ex whispered. I started to laugh and

couldn't stop. I had to leave, climbing over people, apologizing and laughing at the same time. So my ex started to laugh and he couldn't stop either. We both ended up in the hallway laughing that weird laugh when you're out of control and nothing will do until you just laugh it out. We must have looked insane.

     Thanks to modern technology, now you can see the view (non-view) from your prospective seat on one of those great camera things on the La Scala website. I worked my way through the seats starting with the most expensive available, through to the cheapest. As far as I could see (pardon the pun) there are few decent seats in the whole theater.

     So, how to have a La Scala experience with minimal discomfort? I decided I'd like to buy stand-up room in the loggione for forty euro each. Richard isn't enthusiastic so far. We can buy space at the last minute and if we get bored or uncomfortable, we can just leave. We might even get to boo, something I don't think I've ever done, even when we saw Jerry Lee Lewis playing Iago in the rock version of Othello. And that's something. 

"The theatre has more than 3000 seats organized into 678 pit-stalls, arranged in six tiers of boxes above which is the 'loggione' or two galleries. The loggione is typically crowded with the most critical of customers, who can be ecstatic or merciless towards singers. Even though these are the cheap seats, the most passionate opera fans stand back here and cheer or boo. 

La Scala's loggione is considered a baptism of fire in the opera world, and fiascos are long remembered. In 2006, tenor Roberto Alagna (pictured) was booed off the stage during a performance of Verdi's Aïda, forcing his understudy quickly to replace him mid-scene without time to change into a costume."

Stewed Donkey

We're getting ready to spend a month in Florence. I've been doing a little menu research whetting the appetite. After reading a short story in The New Yorker about a couple dealing with an emergency, I imagined a similar couple traveling together. Although this isn't biographical, I do proofread menus and cackle over errors. The rest of it is imagination.

Stewed Donkey

“Stewed donkey,” she read from the menu.

“Really?” he said, looking at her from over his reading glasses. He waited for the punch line, but she said nothing.

He flipped through the pages scanning the small print listing hundreds of Tuscan dishes.

“Where are you looking?” she asked. “You’re on the dessert page. What are you thinking—stewed donkey and gelato?”

“Ah, I found it —a regional specialty. Okay, that explains it.”

“Explains it? Maybe, but that copy sure doesn’t sell. It’d be more appetizing listed as braised donkey,” she said grinning, “As in bray-sed donkey.” She snorted an unexpectedly loud hee-haw. He cringed, looking around to see if anyone else had heard.  

He hoped that was her final cynical remark over this meal. After their last anniversary trip to Russia he’d asked her to stop criticizing and picking apart every menu. Before each meal, she’d find and correct all the spelling mistakes, expecting him to react to her sarcastic remarks. An editor, she corrected text relentlessly, no matter where it appeared.

“I can’t help it, Jerry. The words jump off the page at me.”

The constant stream of negativity, albeit funny, was wearing him down. As the vacation dragged on from Milan to Florence to Palermo, the Costco-sized bottle of Tums he’d packed was dwindling. His occasional indigestion had morphed into full-time gastritis and unlike most tourists in Italy, he was losing weight. As he sat listening to her, he could feel the lining of his stomach slowly dissolving. He watched her twirl a lock of her blond hair in that compulsive way he found so juvenile.

Why rip everything apart? He felt they should appreciate that restaurant owners attempted to translate for their English-speaking guests. Yes, chicken chest instead of chicken breast was hilarious, but it was only one word. She put too much importance on little things. These were menus— not the declaration of independence or instructions for opening a parachute. In his opinion, she jumped on details to gratify her own ego.   

He thought of himself as taking a broader view of the world.

“How good would you be at translating English menus, to...say, Chinese? Cut these folks a little slack,” he said. “And after all, it really is donkey they eat. You think it’s unappetizing but others might say it sounds delicious.”

“Hah! Look around, Jerry. Most of the people in here are tourists. For them, don’t you agree they could make it sound a little better? It’s just so damn half-assed.” She grinned, waiting for his reaction to her pun. “I say, dress it up. How about Ass braised with fennel and figs, drizzled with a red wine reduction and served with stuffed zucchini blossoms? They’d get thirty-five Euro a pop instead of seventeen.” She looked smug. He didn’t respond.

“And about translating into Russian?” She scratched her head. “That reminds me of that place in Moscow—you remember— they translated “assorted ice cream flavors” as Ice cream in the ass. As I recall you laughed hard at that one. It’d be the perfect dessert to follow bray-sed donkey,” she said. For weeks after their return from Russia, she looked at ice cream menus and muttered—”no ice cream in the ass?” He’d despaired that she’d ever quit.

When they first met, he’d found her witty and amusing. But over the years this menu thing had worn thin. So thin he’d considered making an excuse to skip the trip and stay home. Right now, he thought, I’d be calm—sitting in the kitchen eating Campbell’s soup and microwaved macaroni and cheese. The idea of eating alone usually snapped him back to reality and made him thankful for his wife. But at this moment, the solitude was attractive. Alone, he wouldn’t be popping Tums and squirming with embarrassment. He’d have the cats for company. They purred when they saw the copy on the cat-food cans.  

He’d talked to his friend Rod about his feelings.

“Jerry,” Rod said. “Surely you know this happens to all couples. The very thing that attracts you at first ends up repelling you as time passes. The novelty wears off! Hang in there. She’s wicked funny and you’ll find joy with her again.”  

The joy, as promised, hadn’t returned. Instead, he’d grown less and less tolerant and could swear she was becoming more abrasive. She was sitting with one foot tucked underneath her again—she knew that annoyed him. Any minute now, she’d take out that horrible silver toothpick and start poking around her molars. In public! Once, he’d suggested she cover her mouth in the European way, as she picked and prodded herself. She’d erupted in anger—accused him of being effete and prissy.

He glared at her as she bent over the menu hunting for errors and imagined her sitting on the john in a cloud of her own farts, searching for typos on the toilet paper labels. Sharing a bathroom with her in Europe without the civilizing benefit of exhaust fans had killed the last scrap of romantic interest he felt for her. He dreaded what was coming later. She'd order the donkey, of course, so she could dine out on the story. What havoc would the equine meat cause in her mean-spirited digestive tract? Perhaps the donkey would get his revenge. He gestured to the waiter for more wine.

Hee haw, he thought. It would be a long and noisy night at the Hilton.