Goch Is Best When Served Live

Saturday, April 22. San Francisco: I don't know what Keller is thinking with this quivering plate of gutty tendrils, but the French Laundry better re-evaluate its menu.



I'm kidding of course. This was at a miserable hole called Dragon Noodle, which had good food, but wholly qualified as a dump with no charm, but from the people inside it.

Because I'm bored with life, I ordered cold duck in special sauce and jellyfish.



I picked this dish because I knew it would disgust the rest of the table, and because I wasn't that hungry, so being a disaster would only result in me losing a few bucks, not my whole lunch experience. I really picked these dishes because, short of flying to Canton, San Francisco is the only city where I could get authentic Chinese, and not oversugared, caffienated, glazed, expertly plated, Americanized glop.

I also realized my palate was most likely going to reject this for those very same reasons, but I wanted to give it a shot.

The duck was a good finger food, but mostly fat. If I were indigenous, I would have eaten the whole fatty chunk and spit out the bone. But, because I'm Pale Face Round Eye, I dumbly gnawed my way around the shards to get to the breast meat. The special sauce is soy, but what else would you put on it? I was going to get all the purees and reductions later, I didn't need that fancy crap right then.

Then came the jellyfish. Anointed with a light coating of sesame oil and resting upon a cushion of pickled radish and sweetened carrot, it looked like it spilled out of the camel Han vivisected to keep Luke warm.

It was alright, nothing horrific. Sweet and sesame, it had a good flavor, but the texture of slimy calamari. Noodles that were rubbery like julienned esophagus. Pretty good, but nothing I could have more than a few nibbles of.



As you can see, it was a thorough epiphany.



There's actually a tradition of shouting just before you eat this. "Gezuntheit"



Hey, we're eating at the French Laundry later, why waste lunch on haute cuisine, this place was pretty good and real. Everyone else ordered normal plates like beef with black bean sauce, sizzling beef, and Mongolian beef. I had my share of nibbles off those, too.