Myers + Chang
1145 Washington Street
Boston, MA 02124www.myspace.com/myersandchang
Char's View:So Chris Myers (who own Radius) and Joanna Chang (who owns Flour) decided to open a place in the South End creatively titled, Myers + Chang. I've never eaten at Radius but I am obsessed with Joanna Chang. She opened a Flour Bakery and Cafe over in the Seaport District where my old office was located. I had sent her an e-mail to see if she would be open to apprenticing me and when she politely declined, I figured I would apprentice myself by eating at her bakery every day for lunch. (I highly recommend the BLT's, her cheddar scallion scones, banana bread, and *sigh* if I have to...her cupcakes.)
When I first walked in, it was definitely much more casual than I expected it to be. Rows of high tops and high chairs, some tables, and an iPod dock in the wall! Think dirty Chinese restaurant, but super clean, dark, and trendy. The mirrors on the back wall have painted "Confucianisms" on it. I decided to sit at the food bar while I waited for Vichu and so I could stare...I mean, watch the chefs cook. The kitchen is open and right on the other side of the food bar so that you are face-to-face with the chefs. But more about that later...
There's not really courses at this restaurant, more like you order and they bring it out as it's ready. Don't expect big dishes to come out, but Vichu and I got surprisingly stuffed with the dishes we did order! (The same phenomenon that happens when you eat dim sum!)
The first thing (and most important at the end of a Friday) to come out was my white sake sangria. I can't usually handle sake but this taste like pure fruit juice or even better, like the lychee juice you can get in cans from the Chinese grocery store. The waitress was even nice enough to bring me a little sip before I committed to an entire glass.
Next up, were the spicy schezwan salt and pepper shrimp and the king's fried rice. The spicy salt and pepper shrimp came out complete in shell AND head! Now that's Chinese style. It was crisp and flavorful (maybe a bit too salty) but not spicy...at first! The after taste definitely made me reach for my water glass, but all in all, tolerable. And that's coming from a girl who does not like spicy food all that much. The fried rice was very good. It had bits of bamboo shoots, carrots, chinese sausage, and edamame in place of the typical peas. I do not like peas. My mother used to put them in everything. I would use my chopsticks to pick out each and every single pea. These would then make the transfer into my mother's bowl. And yet, the vicious cycle just kept going throughout my childhood. So edamame was a welcome substitute!
Very quickly after the first two dishes, we received the next two: double oyster omelette and braised pork belly buns. Now, oyster omelettes are usually pretty hard to find served anywhere (or maybe I just don't know how to look for it) but when I saw it on the menu, I begged Vichu to order it. It was made with farm fresh eggs and very fresh oysters. It was cooked to perfection, the eggs were just fluffy enough and the dish was salted just right. Now braised pork belly buns are another Chinese thing that you don't often see served at restaurants. My late grandfather used to make these all the time when he came to visit (I believe we had them every night for dinner one week) and these definitely made me miss him. Traditionally, you eat the braised pork belly slices in Chinese buns along with some sour pickled cabbage. Instead, this modernized version had a nice (not too fatty) braised pork belly and cucumber drizzled with just the right amount of brandied hoisin sauce. The only weird thing that threw me off was the lettuce, but I didn't mind it too much.
The dish to follow that was the tea-smoked pork spare ribs. They came crusted in peppercorn and fell right off the bone...but not in a good way in my opinion. It was almost like beef jerkey and the peppercorn did not really add a good texture or for that matter, a good taste.
Being at a Chinese restaurant, you can't not order potstickers! Vichu and I decided on the Mama Chang's pork and chive variety. (We also got to see Mama AND Papa chang who were dining a few stools down from us!) Good thing Mama Chang left before I tasted these dumplings though. I didn't like the flavor of the pork and I felt like the wrapper was nice and crispy but the inside left much to be desired.
Now for the embarrassing part, seeing as we were sitting face-to-face with the chefs, they basically watched Vichu and me snapping photos of all the food and smelling our food and eating our food very slowly. Well, the head chef that night must have been so amused that he sent over complimentary traditional scallion pancakes. So...I proceeded to take another picture. See what I go through for our loyal readers? The scallion pancakes were good...because they're fried and anything fried is good. There really wasn't much flavor though unless you dipped it into the slightly sweet soy sauce and the scallions weren't in the "traditional scallion pancake" but rather sprinkled on top. However, thanks to the chef who sent them to us! The gesture was certainly a welcome one.
Another thing in keeping with Chinese restaurants is that there is no dessert menu. But instead of giving the boring plate of sliced oranges at the end, the waiter brings you a little tiny ramekin (okay, like half a ramekin) of tapioca pudding. Another hard to find treat on Chinese menus! I LOVE this stuff. It is my world and usually comes at the end of a big family meal at a Chinese restuarant. It's usually a little more soupy and can be served chilled or warm. I'd usually polish off my bowl and then turn the lazy susan and eat all the bowls of the people who were too finicky to try it. At Myers + Chang, it had a thicker texture but the tapioca was cooked perfectly tender and the small slice of mango was a nice sweet kick. I only wish they gave you a bigger portion of this!
Basically, I think that Myers and Chang have a winner here that will be sticking around for a while. They put enough of a twist on Asian food to keep people coming back. They do not take reservations but they do do take-out and as heard through the grapevine, will begin to do delivery. I don't know that I would make it my new hang out spot, but the service was good and the atmosphere fun.
Vichu's View:I’m going to talk about this restaurant in terms of atmosphere and the food. Overall I liked the atmosphere better than I liked the food. The restaurant and everything about it comes across as very campy, almost a parody of the Asian culture which the food celebrates. When I say campy I don’t mean in a bad way, but in an endearing kind of way. It’s like a geek who watches too much MTV and goes out and tries to emulate cool but just overdoes everything (I will deny any allegations to having ever done this, even if my brother claims to have pictures). From the website to the Chinese newspaper placemats everything has an aura of geeky chic overdone.
The first thing you notice when you arrive at the restaurant are the giant magenta stenciled dragons intertwined with pseudo Chinese patterns done in gold that runs the front of the restaurant. As you enter you see the hostess stand to your right and a long bar height table on your left with enough seating for about 8. Behind the bar height table you have the individual dining tables that line the outside wall of the restaurant. The heart of the restaurant, however, has to be the open kitchen/bar surrounded by stools where guests can sit and watch their food being prepared. The open kitchen is a nice touch; it definitely adds a lively atmosphere to the restaurant itself. The decor was an eclectic mix of modern and practical all with a slight Asian twist.
We got to sit around the center bar that surrounded the kitchen, so we had dinner theater; the chefs were all very efficient and worked like a seasoned team in the somewhat crowded kitchen. I love to watch people cook so this was great! The waiters were very friendly and efficient, my water glass was never empty for long and once a plate was empty it would be whisked away promptly. So the front of the house gets high marks for being casual but very skilled at what they do.
On to the food… I’ve never really been a fan of restaurants that try to specialize in more than one type of Asian cuisine (in this case, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese), for some strange reason they all fail to capture the essential differences in each distinct culture, and usually produce an awful interpretation of each. Myers+Chang didn’t try to reproduce the authentic dishes; they just borrowed the flavor profiles from these cuisines and created new interpretations and presentations of them. Some of these interpretations were successful some not so much…We ordered the: tea-smoked spare ribs, spicy Szechwan salt and pepper whole shrimp, braised pork belly buns, mama chang’s pork and chives dumplings, kingmain’s fried rice, double oyster omelet, and the chef sent us a dish of yellow chive pancakes on the house (apparently because we looked like we were enjoying eating). Each dish came when they were done and in random order, so I’ll review them in random order.
The tea-smoked spare ribs, was actually my least favorite dish, over-spiced with five spice killing most of the nuances of tea smoking. The whole peppercorns on top of the spareribs were also a bit much… I would like to enjoy my meal without the fear of cracking my teeth on whole peppercorn. The meat was falling off the bone, but about as dry as I’ve ever had pork. So I wouldn’t really order this dish again, it sounds very good on paper but just about everything was wrong.
The Szechwan salt and pepper whole shrimp was completely not what I expected. It was served in a bamboo steamer basket lined with newspaper and finished with a sprinkle of cilantro. First off the presentation was very cool the newspaper was optically a very nice touch, however, food wise it’s never a good idea to serve food on printed material. Even though this is probably not real newsprint, the combination of oil, paper, and ink produces an adverse smell that makes the dish less appetizing, also as the dish cools the newsprint sticks to the food; very unappetizing. When I took a bite into the head of the shrimp (I’m gonna assume like all other salt and pepper whole shrimp, I’m suppose to eat it whole) I was kind of surprised by how limey the dish was. Where was the salt, and pepper? It more closely resembled a really condensed tom yum soup rather than salt and pepper seasoning. I had quite a bit of time to ponder the interesting nature of the citrus and shrimp because the shells were quite chewy. The reason they deep-fry this dish in Chinese restaurants is because they want a crispy shrimp shell that behaves almost like a shrimp cracker. They also flavor it with salt and pepper so no liquid gets on the shrimp shells and makes them soft again. Overall this dish was quite tasty, sadly the concept was probably not thought out as well as it could have been. Salt and pepper shrimp should be crispy and crunchy like potato chips with a yummy shrimpy center… not so much a soggy chewy piece of shrimp shell that’s flavored nicely…
The braised pork belly buns were quite interesting. It was more of a pork belly taco rather than a bun. A filling of roast pork, picked cucumber, and crisp lettuce was stuffed in a soft Chinese tortilla that’s been folded in half! A very cool concept; but the different elements of this dish kept fighting each other. The Chinese tortilla had the familiar flowery sweetness, but rather than a pillowy soft container of porky goodness it was a dense, funny textured, holder of porky oddness. The roast pork was a bit salty while the picked cucumber was under seasoned bland and limp, and the interplay of the slightly tough pork and soft cucumber was a huge turnoff.
The following three dishes mama chang’s pork and chives dumplings, kingmain’s fried rice, and the double oyster omelet were all quite tasty but all suffered from what I’d like to call wok burn. Wok burn is that strange bitter taste that a wok (or actually the oil in the wok) leaves when the cooking oil overheats degrades. What a shame these dishes were some of my favorite minus the bitter annoying aftertaste. The pork dumplings were well made and tasty and went well with the soy sauced based dipping sauce. The friend rice was an interesting mishmash of different ingredients; it was like a treasure hunt trying to figure out what everything was. I discovered cubed carrots, edamame, cubed Chinese sausage, scrambled eggs, and cubed bamboo shoots. The oyster omelets were quite tasty, and the oysters were cooked perfectly. The Siracha sauce overpowered the oysters, but went great with the scrambled eggs! These dishes I think were really successful concepts unlike the previous three but executed rather poorly.
Now on to my favorite dish of the evening, the yellow chive pancakes. It wasn’t my favorite dish because it was free but because it was well conceived and well executed. This dish reminds me of Indian (American Indian) fry bread stuffed with tiny cubes of Chinese sausage. What in this dish is there not to love! I love fry bread, and when you stuff it with something as yummy as Chinese sausage it just elevates the dish to another level, add the sweet soy sauce dip and it’s a dish worth coming back for. This is probably the only dish I would recommend from everything we ordered or didn’t order.
So would I eat at Myers+Chang again? I’m not sure that I would. It was a fun dining experience but the food was sadly disappointing.
