Zetetical Society Meeting Notes

Last week, we went to Blue Ginger, Ming Tsai’s famous restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

I’ve wanted to go for a long time. I read a New Yorker profile of Tsai years ago that made me aware of his reputation and I moved up to the Boston area around the time Blue Ginger opened, so for almost ten years I’ve believed that there was some place near Boston where there was simply better Asian food. Asian food of near-mythic quality is a draw for me. This place has been on my list of places to try.

For an appetizer, I tried the wonton-crusted colossal shrimp with wild mushroom ragout and Chinese black bean salsa. I remembered what’s funny about Boston-area fine dining of the Blue Ginger era.

There’s some recepie for the perfect Boston gourmet appetizer circa 1998 and it goes something like: take a piece of flat bread, pile up a mixture of vegetables cut very small and oily vinaigrette, add some sort of cheese crumble, put it next to a side of fruit salsa in a tiny metal bowl, decorate with pesto, red pepper sauce and some sort of mysterious white sauce from squeeze bottles, and then top with Kalamata olives.

Glancing over at the open kitchen, I saw the familiar squeeze bottles. The flat bread was instead the big crust on my giant fried shrimp. The vinaigrette and vegetable combo was the mushroom sauce and black bean salsa. My hopes began to vanish with every gloppy bite.

Sar had the Sesame Caesar Salad with Chinese Cruller Croutons. It was better. Sesame and caesar salad is actually a good combo and the croutons were very good, but they were not mythic croutons. I was not transported to another land by their powerful crunch.

We both had the same entree, one of Ming’s signature dishes, Garlic-Black Pepper Lobster with Lemongrass Fried Rice and Pea Tendril Salad. Contemplate garlic-black pepper sauce for a moment. No, please, you’ve read this far. Indulge me. Garlic and black pepper. It’s a nice combo in an Asian sauce: spicy, tangy, earthy. Imagine it as a subtle glaze over lobster meat, a foil to the meat’s light sweetness. Brilliant, no? Ok, let’s up the ante a bit. Let’s not make it a subtle glaze. Let’s say the lobster is sitting in some of the sauce and you have a lot more garlic and black pepper. Or we up the ante a little bit more: let’s say the lobster a whole lobster in its shell, cut into sections and it is drowning in the stuff. The pea tendrils are nice, but soon they are drowning in the sauce as well. The rice is, well you get the picture. All that sauce is compelling, but a little bit sickening too. The signature dish is more of a signed declaration of war.

Dessert was great. The pastry chef won us back briefly. I had the cookie plate and Sar had the Sesame Macadamia Carmel Nut Tart.

I might go back if I were in the area and friends wanted to go, but I would try to find things on the menu that were a lot more subtle. I wouldn’t go out of my way.