Big Fish Seafood has jumped into about half the space of the Golden Palace restaurant, which had replaced Bob Lee’s Islander, the emblematic Chinatown restaurant of the 1950s, the ’60s, and the polyester side of the ’70s. From mock-Polynesia to dim sum to live-tank seafood: this is the micro-history of Boston’s Chinatown. Yet Big Fish Seafood still reminds me of my first forays there. Big Fish has two menus — a bilingual menu with Hong Kong seafood specialties framed by obligatory appetizers and rice plates, and a smaller, all-Chinese menu with lots of things that aren’t on the other one. Although the bilingual menu is much more useful than it was 30 years ago, when you had to root around for clams in black-bean sauce or chow foon, a gringo still has only three ways to crack the code (besides learning to read Chinese): 1) Go with a Chinese-speaking friend; 2) Look around at what the Chinese families are eating and ask the servers to bring you some of that one there; or 3) Cultivate a sympathetic server.
On our first visit we gandered and asked, and by the end of our meal, the guy with the shaved head who works Tuesday through Sunday nights had translated some of the Chinese menu for us. Deep-fried squab is a specialty of this restaurant, we learned, and the menu includes a list of cold appetizers such as sliced red-cooked (or soy-braised) beef, thin-sliced jellyfish, and chicken feet (which he insisted were boneless). I also spotted a very handsome plate of filleted eel and Chinese vegetables, and one of beef and Chinese broccoli.
But on our second visit, at lunchtime, a different waiter didn’t produce any of these things and insisted that everything on the all-Chinese menu also appeared on the other one. We gave up and ordered seafood specialties from the bilingual menu. As it turns out, we did very well indeed.
The center of the menu is classic Southern Chinese cooking, so the hallmarks of the best food are freshness and subtle, natural flavors, rather than elaborate sauces. But there’s also some effective fried food, such as the “spicy salted soft-shell crab” ($11.95). Here, the Hong Kong style of quickly deep-frying battered squid is applied to an even blander seafood with excellent effect. The pepper used in preparing the crab had migrated into a quick oil sauce, to which flecks of red chili and rings of green chilies were added; the sauce was then drizzled onto the seafood for extra flavor.
The fastest way to the live tank these days is “steamed live shrimp” (seasonal, recently $24 for a very large plate of very large shrimp). They come whole, with heads and protruding black eyes. You eat them by holding the head end, peeling off the shells, and optionally dipping them in a plain soy dip or a spicy soy dip with green chilies. The reward is the cleanest, mildest-tasting shrimp ever. If you like to crunch, you can eat a few of the shells. You are expected to eat these shrimp with your hands — a finger bowl of lemon tea is served with them, and packaged wipes are made available afterward.
“Steamed scallops in half shell” (seasonal, recently $4 each) are done, like steamed fish, with shreds of ginger and scallion. They are whole sea scallops, which means they have a flatter shell than the one Botticelli’s Venus rides, a large white “scallop” of muscle scored on top to cook more evenly, and a sac of bland orange roe as bright as summer mussels. This is how Europeans eat scallops. You will need a fork to pry them off the shells, and perhaps to cut them into pieces. They really are too large to eat whole with chopsticks. Again, the flavor is mild but clear and sweet — the Cantonese ideal.
Eel in black-bean sauce (seasonal, recently $24 for a two-pounder) is the only eel listed on the bilingual menu. The waiter brought around the eel in a bucket so we could see that we were getting our full two pounds. Eel in any treatment is oily and rich — yet four of us demolished this platter. The high quality of fresh eel transcends the treatment it is given: even the chef’s decision to cut our eel into steaks, which meant that each slice was rather bony, paid off beautifully. The black-bean sauce was not obtrusive, but it was well-made. The eel-shy should not miss out on that black-bean sauce; try it with the clams. As for me, I’m going to keep after that eel dish with green vegetables that’s not listed on the bilingual menu.
Lobster with ginger and scallions (seasonal, recently $20.95 for twin chicken lobsters) brings us to the one live-tank seafood New Englanders know and love. This was great eating, the first fully fresh and sweet lobster of my summer. Big Fish Seafood hacks the lobster into pieces and fries each piece in a little starch to lock in the juiciness, then tosses them with oil just-rightly flavored by chips of ginger and lengths of scallion. (The more adventurous can try the giant crabs, which are harder to eat but have a little more flavor.)
Anything besides seafood is anticlimactic here, but Big Fish does very well with vegetables too. The now-ubiquitous pea stems ($11.95) are currently at peak season, and when sautéed in oil with lots of garlic, they really do taste a little like asparagus. On one visit we tried a different green, and went with watercress ($8). Sautéing cress removes the bite, and what remains is an intriguing, resinous flavor that took us through most of a very large portion. We also tried “soyed duck (chau chow style)” ($8.95 half/$17 full). Like the eel, this required some dissection: in our culture we don’t like all that duck skin and fat, and the slices were served with the bones. But the effort was worth it: a lot of tender, lean duck meat, with a gamy poultry flavor that most birds lack these days. The dip for this dish was an especially piquant Southeast Asian–style vinegar-pepper sauce.
Big Fish’s tea is nothing special, but the rice is very, very good, almost as aromatic as Thai jasmine rice. I would favor the plain steamed rice over the fried rice ($8.50), especially if you brave the oily eel. The latter isn’t excessively greasy, but the shreds of dried scallion don’t add as much aroma as the plain rice has naturally. Still, it’s a fine platter of white fried rice with scallions and a few peas, with flakes of egg white scattered throughout.
We were served fortune cookies for our lunch dessert. At dinner, our server favored us with a typically Southeast Asian dessert of thin tapioca with chunks of purple and gray taro. This would be more to gringo tastes with more sugar, but even then it would be no replacement for chocolate. At both our seafood feasts we ended with that “great meal” sensation of having eaten quite a lot without discomfort, feeling very satisfied with the state of the world.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.
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