MAGIC WOK
One of the stories I’m working on for the Herald’s sibling publication the Rutland Business Journal will be part of their regular New Businesses section. It’s about the Magic Wok, which just opened along Route 7 south of Middlebury, next to the A & W root beer stand.
That story will be a basic, just-the-facts-ma’am account of a new business venture. My editors have made it clear that I am NOT to write a “restaurant review,” talking about food quality and atmosphere and service and things like that.
This is a restaurant review. It is a review I did not expect to write, but feel impelled to because I have just witnessed something exceptional.
Owner and chef Sunny Chin insisted on giving me a sample of what they offer, in a way that would have made it extremely impolite to refuse. Feeling guilty and not wanting to cost a lot, I picked something fairly basic from what looked, on the surface, like a pretty standard Chinese restaurant menu: garlic chicken.
He was back in about five minutes with a rectangular plate that held two crisps something like crab rangoons only smaller, which were as good as any crab rangoon I’ve had; a small roll made with the sort of dough that is used for baklava, which could have done as an hors d’oeuvre at a fancy party; BROWN rice, which I asked about with little hope of getting any; and the specified dish.
In contrast to most “Chinese” food I’ve eaten, which seems intent on pumping the eater’s body full of oil, the chicken, broccoli, mushrooms and carrot slices were very lightly flavored by a spicy sauce that didn’t, for a change, remind me of the line in the play “Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor.” Earlier, he had told me, “We don’t use anything out of cans.” The garlic chicken made good on that promise.
Two people leaving the restaurant told me it had been wonderful (no one said the opposite). But the really wonderful part had yet to come.
Chin grew up in Singapore, a crossroads of the East, and started working in restaurants when he was 15. This helps to account for the presence of Malaysian, Thai and Mongolian dishes, here and there, on the menu; I have no doubt these could be expanded if public demand seeks it.
Wondering how to take a picture of all this, I learned that Chin had no objection to my coming into a kitchen for a picture of him at work. Doing so, I learned why it had taken so little time to create me repast.
The man is a kitchen athlete, moving rapidly from one wok to another in the constant heat, which is sometimes augmented by flames that roar out of the stove. Stuff gets flipped in the air, added to other stuff, and presto, in next to no time the next dinner is done. Magic wok indeed. Let me stress the athlete part: as in farming, just getting it all done takes a major physical effort, and only a lifetime in the kitchen arena made it possible for Chin to juggle such responsibilities (I use the word advisedly) in such heat. Only dedication to his craft would keep him going—there are easier ways to make a significant amount of money.
Sunny Chin is another chapter in a book that someone ought to write, on the expatriate Chinese. Asia knows them well, and America is learning. These are people who fled miserable and sometimes genocidal conditions, and brought with them intelligence and creativity that has been as much as force in transforming Asian life as the Jewish diaspora has been in Europe. The two experiences have similarities, the Holocaust having a counterpart in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), finally put down with the help of the British and French, during which somewhere between 20-30 million (Wikipedia) and 50 million (Colton & Palmer’s world history) died.
Bottom line, there’s a good new restaurant in the area. And if you feel hungry again after an hour, that may just be because you’re longing for another taste.
I’m appending a couple of pictures, one of the restaurant’s exterior and one of hot times in the kitchen.
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