大城小事

SOGO cuisine is my Othering culinary fantasy. Please, let me explain.

I’ve grown up lamenting the hard fact that I could never have a life like the characters in my coveted Hong Kong romantic comedies. My particular favourites were the ones about food. Drink Drank Drunk comes to mind. Literally translated as One Thousand Cups, Not Drunk, or, more correctly, Not Drunk After One Thousand Cups. It was the story of a young woman who, notoriously, could not get drunk no matter how much she drank. One night, she finds a poor drunkard, another Hong Kong native, crying in the streets wondering why no one in Hong Kong eats French food, wondering how he’s supposed to live, a social culinary pariah, because he couldn’t get into college and decided on a career as- well- a French chef. Needless to say, the two fall in love and open a quaint sixteen seater in the streets of HK, making pretzels, having awkward moments, not really selling French food, and so on, and so forth.

It was the kind of restaurant that caught my eye in the movie. Something I thought so impractical and impossible in these parts: the trattoria. The real trattoria. My family owns a supposed trattoria. But in my eyes, it’s a restaurant. Yeah, in some small towns in Europe they may exist, a lone chef sleeping in his own restaurant making new dishes almost every day, needing no one else except the company of his own hands. The same goes for, I imagine, Hong Kong, where food is so frequent and cooks so specialized that they all open their own little holes and have their own little dishes. A normalcy, I imagine. But not here. Until today. Today when I found myself stumbling through the neighborhood of a comrade who had moved away. The streets always made me feel a little less lonely when I missed him, but today I found a place that made me miss him even more. A place that could have very well been our hangout, which, up until he up and left, was reserved for a coffee shop run by a mainland Chinese woman that knew us well before she owned the place and made us, with the help of her young daughters, tea for whatever cash we had on us.

I once learned from an old Italian cook that the best restaurant was at home. Whether SOGO cuisine lives rightly by this belief is beyond me, but I took its Chinese name of 美食美客or ‘good food for beautiful guests’ as an apt sign that whoever cooked for me cared. The space certainly made me believe it, anyway. Because SOGO cuisine was my dream come true. It possessed that homey local charm. No more than two months old, it decorated itself with knickknacks, warm colours, a rococo patterned ceiling, white and ‘au so courant’ tables and chairs that seated a mere six guests, and a small, single person kitchen separated by a counter. If it made me think of anything, it made me think of that part of Shanghai that took its urban character from a more nostalgic Europe. Don’t know what I mean? Maybe you should watch more movies.

I might be romanticizing SOGO cuisine a bit too much though, because although it has a single woman manning a kitchen, the food comes and goes pretty quickly, the seating is a mere accommodation to the odd person (yours truly) who decides to eat in. Not to say that people shouldn’t; they should. But receiving my orders in takeout containers even after saying I’d be sitting in made me realize that SOGO treats itself as a place that is almost of the fast food persuasion. Well, I say this, dear readers. It shouldn’t! Sure, the space is small. Sure, it offers only canned drinks and bottles of water. Sure, it’s someone running a restaurant out of her home, but its food deserves more respect than that! It’s a small, cheap menu of curries, noodles, rice, steamed buns, and crepes, but it is welcomed. Its dishes cater to an assumed customer, because at first glance the menu confuses you with Japanese dishes, but if you ask nicely, and come boldly, you can have some rare and spectacular Chinese dishes.

Surprised by my candor, SOGO’s matron offered me a Chinese crepe. Fixed with sesame seeds, spring onions, coriander, a nameless sauce resembling Hoisin, and spice, the crepe was fricasseed and folded over a hot crispy wanton. Unconventional from the crepes we’re used to eating here, it was more egg than crepe, but I couldn’t complain about it in the least. Especially not for 3.50. I went a step further asking for a steamed meat bun having eyed the dough rising in a muffin tin on the counter, and she humbly obliged. However, before I went to my seat, I eyed the cook’s own teapot and asked if she wouldn’t mind giving me some of her tea: a deep oolong. Surprised, she poured some into a plastic cup and handed it to me.

I was astounded by my steamed bun. Another unconventional manifestation of a foodstuff I had eaten for years now. The light and airy bun was cut lengthwise and stuffed with minced pork flavoured with green pepper, coriander, vinegar, sugar, and garlic. Needless to say, I had never had a steamed bun reinterpreted this way. It wasn’t dull with a small portion of meat on the inside of a dull chewy dough, but assembled like a pull pork sandwich, more meat than bun, but perfectly balanced. The crispiness of the outer layer fought well against the moist slivers of pork buffered against soft airy bread. It was another great find for 3.50. I commended the cook. To her, it was nothing; to me, it was everything.

Lastly, I did something very unorthodox. I ordered the menu’s fried udon noodles. Now, I’ve been on a crusade against udon for quite some time now, believing it to be a foodstuff glorified more than it should be. Sometimes in a soup, sometimes as Shanghai noodles, but I can’t particularly say its chewy, elastic character is ever done well. Usually, the noodles are a chore to eat. This time, however, it wasn’t so bad. Fried in another nameless, yet savoury and sweet sauce, my noodles, accompanied with crisp vegetables and fish balls, were fried until soft. No chewy noodle eclipsed the other ingredients with starch here. The textures were well received and the chopped cabbage in the dish added a nice fermented feature to something that otherwise embellished a familiar malt flavor.

12 dollars later, I had stuffed my face. For me, SOGO Cuisine was a miracle, or a symptom of something happening in a suburb that I hope manages to stick around. It wouldn’t be the first place in the same neighborhood that tried to be a single person operation. If I’m potentially sad about anything it may be that it has to compromise a lot of its potential for consumer palettes, but so long as the cook is willing, one can still have access to some pretty incredible dishes. That said, my dear eaters, I implore you to eat as much and as often as you can at SOGO cuisine, before it’s otherwise too late.

SOGO Cuisine

(519) 888-6789

UNIT B11

619 Wild Ginger Ave

Waterloo, ON N2V 2XI

Mon-Sat 10am- 830 pm.

Sun: closed

Tweet