Chinese gem in Geneva
Visiting lovely friends back from Singapore times at their new home in Geneva and starting quite the food crawl over the four short days we spend with them.
One of my favorite places, that we’ve visited was ‘Xiang Yu’, a Chinese restaurant, they had not yet tried themselves.
We were welcomed warmly and brought to our table, swiftly everything was setup and our order was taken at once.
We ended up overordering a lil – this shall become a pattern during the course of this weekend – and almost every dish had some punch to it, Sichuan-style.
Exceptions were our selected sets of dumplings – ‘Xiao Long Bao’, ‘Jiaozi’ and ‘Har Gow’ – which we actually reordered three times.
I especially appreciated the soupy xlb, they were absolutely delicious altogether, skin, soup and filling. The jiaozi were nicely spiced and even the har gow, which I normally don’t fancy too much, head a pleasant consistency.
Smashed garlicky cucumber salad to mislead my tastebuds just nicely before and in-between the more tingling and numbing dishes, like the Sichuan fried chicken and mapo tofu, as well as the more tame mala mian and that almost glazed, spicy-sweetish eggplant dish.
All in, this was a wonderful lunch – J’s birthday lunch in fact – with just well done dishes, prepared in ways I haven’t experienced in a very long time. Geneva is quite the drive but ‘Xiang Yu’ just adds to the pros side of taking it.
Get Your Grub On!
Restaurant Xiang Yu 湘遇
Rue du Fribourg 16
1201 Genève
Switzerland
It felt like a hundred years that I had been to ‘Lao Beijing’ but tonight I wanted to refresh my memory big time and went berserk on their menu. I spotted ‘Xiao Long Bao‘ (小笼汤包) so it came naturally to start with those favourite little steamers. Not being the prettiest of its’ kind, they were quite nice, had thin skin and a generous slurp of soup in ’em but neither the meat nor the broth had a too distinguished flavour.
Dumpling time wasn’t over just yet so we had a round of awesome ‘Pork & Cabbage Jiao Zi‘ (boiled). The cool thing here was the cabbage, not very common and tasted great together with the fine meat mass. Aside another regular on my orders, some crunchy and slightly spicy, delicious garlic cucumbers.
Over to the noodles some ‘Beijing Style Zhang Jian Mian‘ (老北京炸酱面) came our way. The noodles were soft and and thin and the whole thing tasted nice refreshing with all those chopped scallions but wasn’t really like a bean sauce but more like a lightish bolognese, nonetheless good.
I read and heard so much about ‘Jing Hua’ a.k.a. ‘The Dumpling Nazi’ and so a friend and I paid the place with the apparently so grumpy guy a visit. To my surprise the shop seemed to be freshly renovated and really didn’t have anything from an old traditional eating house anymore. My biggest disappointment though was the missing impolite uncle scolding us or something, which I was so looking forward to.
We knew we over-ordered heavily but since it was something unusual we also got what they called ‘Chinese Pizza‘ (三鲜盒子), which was pretty much a crispy curry puff-like pastry filled with your usual dumpling mix – pork meat and scallions. This tasted quite great and was really something else.
My favourite however was the ‘Zha Jiang Mian’ (ひき肉みそのせ麺 ) which besides the fact that it could’ve used another scoop of the thick soy bean sauce came pretty close to awesome. Meaty, sweetish, great textures and brilliant unusually thick noodles, that even that I was already stuffed, I wished my bowl would’ve been was bigger.
We were actually planning on a sandwich lunch but one of my colleagues wasn’t feeling to brilliant and thought a hot noodle soup would do the trick and so we ended up going to ‘Liu San’, a Taiwanese restaurant at Bukit Timah Plaza I wanted to check out for some time now.
Get Your Grub On! 