Ming's Café

Just outside Chinatown, a café that upholds the Chinatown paradox: lower prices mean better food

Dining Out by Robert Nadeau

160 East Berkeley Street (South End), Boston; (617) 338-8830
Open daily, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
No liquor
MC, Visa
Sidewalk-level access

In the movie, Jack Nicholson says, "Don't ask me about Chinatown."

But I always want to talk about Chinatown. Things are different there. One of the weird things about Chinatown is that the cheapest restaurants are often the best. This is partly because Chinese civilization, historically, has had to learn to feed poor people well, but mostly because many locals in Chinatown are price-conscious when it comes to eating out. Thus the least expensive restaurants tend to be patronized by the most knowledgeable customers, who help keep up the standards.

Ming's Café isn't in Chinatown proper, but it is close enough to be subject to the general rule. Crucially, it is aimed at the customers of the giant Ming's supermarket, around the corner, so it has to meet the standard of the good ingredients sold there. Here, smart and adventurous diners can get the advantages of the Chinatown thrift system in a restaurant that has a little more interior space and its own parking lot in back.

Like many restaurants with a lot of Chinese customers, Ming's has a bilingual menu, as well as a Chinese-only menu of specialties and daily seafood bargains. If, like me, you don't read Chinese, you can look around and ask about things that don't appear to be on the main menu, such as the eels that were in the live fish tanks recently. But there is plenty to be curious about on the main menu.

Most of the soups are a product of that first kind of thrift -- the culture of feeding poor people well -- but they may not be appealing to everyone. For instance, there are 10 kinds of "porridge" -- otherwise known as congee, a rice gruel with intensely flavored morsels to liven it up. The noodle soups, containing rice fettuccine or the wide noodles called foon, might be a more inviting point of entry for most of us. Unfortunately, my roast duck soup ($3.50) was based on a thin, watery stock, though plenty of duck-breast slices and noodles.

Nor do the standard appetizers get much respect, judging by the Peking ravioli (five for $2.45) and spring roll ($1.75). The prices are impressive, but our ravioli were not only doughy (a common occurrence with Cantonese versions of these Northern dumplings); they also had an unpleasant yeasty aroma. The filling was blandly porky (though the soy-garlic-hot oil dip was up to both Northern standards and mine). The spring rolls were only about an inch in diameter, which made them crispier but also greasier than I really like. The scallion pancake ($1.75), always greasy, was reasonably good here, especially when dipped in the Peking ravioli sauce.

But my recommendation would be to order some of the seafood main dishes as appetizers, such as the fried squid with spicy salt ($5.95), which was nicely fried and nicely spiced, not too fiery. For a crowd, go for the "three seafood delights with spicy salt" ($7.95). Another nice appetizer is the clams with black bean sauce ($5.95), made here with large cockles that have a nifty bite, and a sauce with plenty of fermented black beans and only a few jalapeño rings.

A more adventurous choice would be the seafood hot pot "with Portuguese sauce" ($5.95), which is curried. Curry got to most of South China via the Portuguese colony at Macao; evidently, the word Portuguese has been taken into Cantonese, since it appears on some menus re-transliterated as patuges. Like the curry in Singapore rice sticks (not listed at Ming's), the curry in this hot pot is rather peppery, bright yellow, and not too spicy in the cardamom/cumin sense. The stewed contents include fresh and dried squid, scallops, shrimp, green pepper, and lettuce. Stewed lettuce is good. More surprisingly, stewed dried squid is better than fresh, with a texture both crisp and light, like a sliced bell pepper. Dried squid is often found on Chinese menus because the Cantonese regard squid as tasteless (and it is rather mild, once you get over the idea of sea monsters with 10 legs). So Asian squid dishes involve either involve a lot of hot pepper or dried squid, which has a more concentrated seafood aroma.

Of the dishes that weren't on the menu, the best I had was poached sea conch with vegetables ($6.95), an absolutely lovely plate of thin-sliced seafood over a stir-fry of ultrafresh Chinese broccoli, snow peas, carrots, and scallions. As always with Chinese conch dishes, ignore the funky, anchovy-based dip. If you decide the conch part is too chewy, the best part of this dish can be purchased as Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce ($4.50); the sprouting broccoli is like rabe but much sweeter.

Yellow croaker with sweet pickle ($8.95) is a fried whole fish in sweet-and-sour sauce. The pickle part is candied cabbage. Even if you can't take much of the sauce, the fish is fresh and sweet, a white-fleshed variety like hake prettily fried.

I should mention that Ming's Café has truly excellent rice, almost as aromatic as Thai jasmine rice. Yang Chow fried rice ($4.25) is the white kind, made with salt instead of soy sauce, and more ham per eggs and peas than most. The tea is jasmine. Ming's has the clean, functional look of a cafeteria, and the service is partly cafeteria-style: there are waiters, but depending where you sit you can also order at the counter. The big windows reflect a lot of sound, but chopsticks are quieter than knives and forks. My servers on two visits had enough English to take accurate orders, but not enough to explain mystery dishes. At these prices, you can take a few gambles.

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Gee, Boston Globe restaurant critic Alison Arnett has been on leave for months, and other people have been writing the Globe reviews, and the star system is suspended, so they haven't been giving stars -- and no one has died! No outcry from restaurants who want to advertise those stars (which were always between two and three). No groundswell of public opinion as readers demand to count instead of read. No aggressive moves by competing publications that don't have a star system to adopt one. No TV cameras besieging the office. Nothing. Maybe when Ms. Arnett gets back to the old stand, she won't have to start up the stars again. To her credit, she began with an incremental reform, cutting down the almost unused top rating to four stars. Now maybe she can just write her reviews with words to explain what the restaurants are like.

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