Word count: 943 | Reading time: 4 min read
Food
In Jimmy Chu’s Fragrant Chives Restaurant, East not only meets West, but they also get to be good buddies.
Jimmy Chu, chef/owner of the Fragrant Chives restaurant on Walnut Street, wanted something different when opened the place back in November.
He wanted a different location.
He wanted different customers.
And, most importantly, he wanted a style that was completely different from the traditional Chinese seafood he offers at his other two restaurants, both in Chinatown.
“I like the way the French prepare the food,” says Chu, explaining what separates Fragrant Chives from traditional Chinese cooking, which he learned from his mother as a boy in Canton. “Unlike the other restaurants, here the food all comes out at the table at the same time. You like the way it looked?”
Actually, Jimmy, I did.
But more on that later.
Because, even before the food came, I noticed that this was no pu pu palace.
There is little on the surface that announces Fragrant Chives as a restaurant serving Chinese food.
The rectangular room is classily decorated in a fairly nondescript manner, with dark wood paneling and nary a nod toward Chu’s cultural background. The music piped into the room is Western classical.
And the menu?
There is a hint of Hunan and a clue of Canton.
Replete with items like traditional pan-fried chiu chow dumplings, grilled duck breast in red wine sauce with rice noodles, and grilled salmon in garlic sauce, it is Sino-French (or maybe Franco-Chinese) cookery geared toward the well-bred Walnut Street restaurant crowd.
There is more to the French influence than what Chu chooses to place on his menu.
It’s how he places the food on the plate that would make the fanciest French chef verdant with envy. And it rivals the more established Susanna Foo across the street.
At a recent lunch, I ordered the pan-fried dumplings filled with shrimp and oriental chives ($4) from the dim sum menu.
Three luscious dumplings were delivered to the table swimming in a shimmery soy sauce. The dumplings were exquisite, straddling that fine and hard-to-master line between doughy and dry. The thin skins were ever so crunchy and the shrimp filling played off the crunch in a texturally pleasing way.
Next up were the soups ($4 each), which, like the dumplings were easy on both the eyes and the tongue.
The hot and sour soup with shrimp, like the dumpling sauce, was a translucent brownish-green, with scallion slices and shrimp providing a colorful contrast.
Tangy and spicy, the soup challenged the palate as the vinegar and pepper tingled different parts of my tongue.
The fresh corn soup with crab meat was, to be honest, something I ordered only because I wanted to try both soups on the menu. Boy was I wrong.
When I saw corn soup with crab meat on the menu, I thought back to my New England days, to a friend of mine who spent much of his time pouring corn and cream and potatoes into a huge vat to make his famous corn chowder.
My friend, a Maineiac from outside of Portland, was about as Down East as you can get ,and so was his “carn chahwda.” I was surprised to see corn soup on the menu at the Fragrant Chives and even more surprised by the taste.
Pale corn-yellow with bits of carrot and white chunks of crab meat, Chu’s corn soup resembled the Maineiac’s only in that both tasted like corn.
But where the Maineiac’s was heavy with cream and potato starch, Chu’s was delicate, with a subtle hint of pepper and shredded crab meat, giving the soup the consistency of runny Cream of Wheat.
A few days after the meal, I just had to ask Chu about the corn soup.
“This is Chinese?” I asked, incredulously. “My friend from Maine makes the stuff.”
“Yes, but does he use cream? I don’t. This is a traditional Chinese dish without the cream.”
With the soups dispatched, it’s time for the main course. My colleague ordered the grilled salmon in garlic sauce ($10). After being informed by my waitress that the sauteed Maine lobster with ginger and scallion ($16) “was very, very popular,” I ordered it.
I think I should have tried something else.
Like the salmon.
Which was wonderful.
When ordering salmon, I cross my fingers, because it is not the easiest fish to cook. There is a very fine line, with salmon, between being undercooked and baked like a brick, and Chu hit the thing right at the moment of perfection.
The salmon was moist, the garlic sauce thick and delicious.
Sadly, the same could no be said for lobster, which, I should have remembered, is really best at its simplest: boiled and dipped in butter.
Chu’s ginger-and-scallion sauce was quite nice, but the lobster was overcooked into tasteless chunks of expensive crustacean.
Oh well, at least dessert was a real treat.
I had the crme brule, my colleague some otherworldly sesame concoction.
Neither disappointed.
The crme brule was crunchy on the top and gooey on the inside, the combination of textures — like a lot of dishes at the Fragrant Chives — bringing two completely clashing sensations together.
The Chinese black sesame souffl also comingled competing textures, in this case the smoothness of the ice cream base with the coarseness of the sesame.
At $69 with tip, lunch for two was hardly cheap.
But if you want a meal that will challenge your sensibilities and provide a mix of cultures and styles, the Fragrant Chives is well worth a splurge.
The Fragrant Chives
1623 Walnut Street
215-563-7776
Lunch served M-Sat 11:30to 3
Dinner served M-Th 5:30to 10, Fri, Sat, Sun 5:30to 11
