Yes, this is a road trip, but not Kirk's; instead it's ed from Yuma who just had to get out of the 115 degree desert and into some good food.
The last time I spent an evening looking for a restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley, I was like a little kid who was told he could only pick one from a gigantic box of mysterious chocolates. Complete choice overload. Which one? Which is the best? How can I choose? Smoke must have been pouring out of my ears from total systemic breakdown before I settled on the path of least resistance and had a mediocre meal at a Korean barbecue. Knowing that I would be spending another evening in the valley on my way up to Monterey, I vowed not to let that happen again, so I did what any wise individual, faced with such daunting culinary choices, should do – I asked Kirk to recommend a couple of places and mentioned that maybe a Shanghai style place would be interesting.
"You could try Green Village," he suggested, linking me to a Jonathan Gold article from 2002 and explaining that he himself had not eaten at the restaurant since it relocated many many years ago. "Oh, yeh, then you could also write a post on it for the blog." Now I understood his thinking - I'd feel obligated to write it up in return for the advice, and he'd get another post out of me. OK, that seemed like a fair deal, and it did save me from a serious brain cramp.
When I stopped by to look the place over in the afternoon, 
I learned that one thing had changed since Gold's review : there was now a young waitperson who could speak English, and in fact, he seemed pleased and amazed that some old pony-tailed white guy would be interested in a meal there. Talking with him made me feel welcome, and looking the menu over made me salivate. Nonetheless there were pages of choices, most of them sounding delicious or at least weird and intriguing.
Being as food obsessed as I am, I spent the rest of the afternoon, after I left the place, pondering my choices (kid with candy box syndrome again). My first thought was to duplicate a couple of Gold's favorites, braised fish tail and the yellow croaker with liver moss (as Gold notes in his later review of Green Village, this second item is now listed in two places on the menu – once under its original name and once as yellow fish with seaweed – somebody must have showed them Gold's original article). But just ordering what Gold had already discussed would be too easy. And what could I say then? "Gold was right," or, "Gold was wrong." If I write the former, I have contributed nothing; if I write the latter, who is going to believe ME?
Therefore, I decided on two different items. First I ordered wine chicken ($5.50):
Serving the chicken in a little cup in this fashion was perfect. It insured that each piece of the chicken was in contact with the complex flavor notes of the marinade. Notice also that the meatiest breast pieces lay across the top of the pile of chicken, while the bonier bits lurked underneath.
What outstanding chicken it was. At first taste, the essence of cooked chicken flesh was intense. So often, we mask the flavors of chicken, drenching it in rich or spicy sauces or covering it with spiced breading and frying it. In this dish, on the contrary, the chicken flavor sang out like a rooster at dawn.
I am not implying that the wine sauce with its notes of ginger and hint of salt contributed nothing. In fact, the sauce was the perfect foil to show off the deep chicken flavors. As fast as the chopsticks brought the pieces to my mouth, I devoured them. Left with only the pile of bones, I looked through them, searching (the way one might search for a lost hiker in a forest) for missing slivers of flesh that had evaded my teeth at first. I wanted to taste every molecule I could.
For my main course, I went with the young server's recommendation of a whole fish dish. This fish was not listed on the menu and even the check contained the name only in Chinese characters with no translation, so I will call it Inside-out Fish, for reasons that will become apparent ($18.99). When it arrived at the table, it was truly a thing of culinary beauty and made me smile:
On the other hand, my dining companion for the night, Mr Fish, did not look quite as happy about his situation:
Those of you familiar with Shanghai cuisine may consider a fish prepared in this fashion pretty standard, but I had never seen anything like it. Prior to being deep fried, the fish had been deboned, the fleshy side of each fillet had been deeply scored with a crosshatch pattern, and the fish had been dusted with flour. In the deep fryer, the scored flesh had expanded while the skin did not, and then the fish had been arranged, inside out, with the meat on the outside and the skin hidden within:
Upon first tasting, I was delighted. The frying had added crunch throughout the fillets, but I could still taste the fish. The sauce was beautiful to look at and contained fresh little shrimp, peas, and cubed carrots. Coupled with the complexity of the fish preparation, it was almost a taste bud overload. The flavor of the sauce reminded me of an excellent sweet and sour sauce, making me think that this would be a whole fish dish that might get even Aunt Sadie to like whole fish – no bones, nice crunch, and a pleasant sweet sauce reminiscent of so much of the Chinese food a lot us Anglos (particularly those of us who grew up far away from places like the SGV) considered typical Chinese food.
Nonetheless, I have to admit that Mr Fish was not a perfect dish. As I was eating away, I noticed that occasionally there would be a hint of dusty flour, which I attributed to the fact some of the flour on the skin side of the fish had not been cooked:
Also, as I began the second fillet, the sweetness of the sauce began to cloy. I like candy as much as the next person, but I was approaching sugar overload. I found myself picking at the cheeks and tail of the fish to take a break from the unrelenting sweetness of the dish. Of course, the real problem was not with Mr Fish and his accompanying sauce; it was that I was eating this dish by myself. Had I been feasting with friends, and sharing braised pork, braised fish tail, stir-fried veggies, and yellow croaker with liver moss, the bites of this tasty fish would have provided a nice contrast to the other dishes. As it was, that contrast was lacking.
Overall, however, I liked the restaurant very much. Even though I was the only non-Asian of the 29 diners that evening (and probably the only one not speaking Mandarin), I was treated with respect and friendliness. The menu was full of dishes I wanted to try. I kept wishing that I could instantly clone myself half a dozen times (like in a bad B grade Sci-Fi flick) and create enough other diners for a proper feast; however, with 7 of me sitting around a table, I wouldn't have been able to get a word in edgewise, so maybe that's not such a good idea. Instead, it would be better to come back to Green Village with a group of friends and really explore what the kitchen can accomplish.
Green Village, 250 W. Valley Blvd (second floor), San Gabriel CA, (626) 576-2228.
with steamed rice
