Hung Tho Seafood Restaurant
1556 Noriega (at 22nd Avenue). Open daily from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. Credit cards are accepted; street floor is wheelchair accessible. Call 661-8860.
"I've seen plenty of chicken feet in my life, but they were still attached to the chicken," said TJ, for 20 years a rancher on the high desert northeast of L.A. The occasion was dinner at Hung Tho, when the first item to arrive was the Hung Tho special cured chicken claw.
Despite its unglamorous mid-Sunset location, Hung Tho, next-door neighbor and archrival to Jumbo (reviewed here a few weeks ago) looks almost intimidatingly "gold cup" -- resembling an elegant Hong Kong "business dinner" restaurant. It has white tablecloths and walls, large floral paintings, and a handsome wooden frame around the seafood tanks. Adding to the formal feeling, the uniformed waitstaff are hoversome -- annoyingly so, if your group wants to discuss the food. But if you're a guei lo it may be moot after all, since they're less English-proficient than the Jumbo staff. The beer selection is minimal, the few wines are abysmal; obviously, if you book the "private" upstairs balcony for a banquet, you BYOB. Despite the dressy decor, most of the other dinner customers were Chinese families in weeknight garb.
The ambitious menu includes such rarities as geoduck (long-necked clams), shark's fin, and abalone (any of which may or may not actually be available) with unlisted "seasonal" prices; Peking duck is listed at a remarkable $12, but since it's the menu's lone quacker and requires two days of prep, I have my doubts about it. At our first meal, when the waiter didn't try to talk me out of ordering the chicken claw, I knew we could do business. When I was a kid -- back in the Mesozoic -- chickens still had feet (though the heads were already extinct), and whenever my mom made soup she'd give me the tootsies, my favorite meat at age 3. More recently, I've dived happily into Dixie cups full of chicken foot souse (a fresh, spicy, poultry rendition of pickled pigs feet) in Trinidad -- and I still love them. "What did I get myself into?" asked TJ, who didn't have a Jewish or Trini mother. He gingerly tasted the "claw," and then tasted some more. The pedal extremities were colossal, served cold in a mild marinade of excellent chicken stock, sesame oil, Fresno pepper shreds, and cilantro leaves, with a thin sweet-sour dip on the side. "You've just gotta get past the thought of eating feet," TJ said, chomping happily at the soft skin covering small, succulent pads of foot flesh.
Then we plunged into a crab and corn soup ($6) that was slightly undersalted and had sweet, barely cooked crab meat (but not enough of it), so tender it had evidently been dropped into the lightly thickened egg-drop chowder at the last second. Despite the uncorny season, the partly pureed and partly whole-kernel corn was sweet and firm enough to pass for cob-fresh.
The waiter's suggestion from the live tank -- the lobster in ginger and scallion sauce for "just $10" -- wasn't so great: Our toy-size lobsterling was cut up awkwardly. There were too many segments, given its tininess, and most pieces included knobby swimmeret joints that soaked up the (overly gingered) sauce and made it hard to eat the meat.
The tail was invisible but for the finial. On the other hand, the special vegetables that day were sublime pea shoots (the leaves and vines of snow peas), which taste like a sweeter, pea-flavored version of the best organic spinach. (You can buy them most of the year in Chinese vegetable markets, but they're tastiest February to April.) These were cooked very simply, as befits something so ravishingly good, with a little broth, sesame oil, and a breath of sugar.
We returned a few nights later with our best Culinary High-Dive Team of Robert, Gail, Peter, and Anita. We started with the assorted cold appetizer plate ($10). It included jellyfish, but the subspecies was by nature thicker-fleshed and less flavorful than the ethereal slim jellies I've eaten in Hong Kong. The beef tendon, char siu (barbecued pork), and braised pork shank were all just OK. We also tried the fried squid with spiced salt ($6), which had a heavy cornstarch coating that required too much frying time for the good of the squid.
The dinner took a much better turn with the day's special green and orange carrot soup (on the house, since we were such a large party). A deeply flavorful broth held tender, juicy pork (perhaps a knuckle bone) and thick slices of the carrots. I've never eaten a green carrot before, but it was succulent and, well, carroty but without sweetness. We continued on a high note with a pair of roast squabs ($8.50 each). Squab meat is delicious, but the best part of all has to be the head. At Chinese banquets, the honored guest always gets the head of the fowl, and the crowning glory of fowl heads must be squab head, which (roasted or deep-fried) is totally crisp outside and lusciously creamy inside. You pick it up by the beak and just chomp the rest of it, skull and all -- exactly like French gourmets devouring the tiny songbirds called ortolans. (Only difference is, the Frenchies cover the heads with a napkin when they do it.) Deciding to honor myself, I took one head, and Robert tentatively agreed to accost the other. "This is really good!" he exclaimed after the first bite. "Next time, I'll eat the head," TJ said, trying the last tiny nibble of mine.
