Taco Tuesday #3: Bao Bao Dumpling House
Whattup nerds, it's ya homeboy b cizzle AKA the food marathoner the one sent from Olympus to strike the hunger bolts into ya soul feel me family. This special week I opened my apartment to the sharing-economy by hosting two AirBNB guests and every party survived surprisingly enough. I find it an interesting commentary on our current social situations amongst us as over evolved primates that we will find ourselves trusting a random stranger on the internet more than flesh and blood cats & dawgs ya feel me? Like I'd rather sleep on a bed of spikes instead of host most of the people I've known throughout my revolutions round the sun b. Attach two people through a series of networked wiresand they both will lay their head in the presence of human's number one enemy: other human beings. Not just other human beings. Rando human beings yall. Luckily they were both tiny females - not saying there's anything wrong with that - it just made me feel at ease that, as long as I stay awake, I should be safe. That's why I locked them in my dog cage and stood watch all night. But I digress...during the first vacation held at el Chateau de Portland, I figured to pat myself on the back with the extra hustle dough that I was passively making by giving my lady A-sauce a walking, food tour of Portland: America's Arterial Plaque Epicenter. This town is into food like frogs is into lillypads. Like nerds is into puzzles and math problems. Like tinderellas is into Netflix & pipin' it up. Like Draymond Green into practicing his Keanu Reeves-like wannabe barely get ya leg off the ground spinning crane kung fu shot to Steve Adams netherparts nahmean. On to the reason you're here though, to hear my experience of triumph at Bao Bao Dumpling House. Or as I like to call it BLAO BLAO Dumpling Trap.
Pan-fried Kung Pao Chicken & Peanut
Shao Mai; Beef & Yellow Curry; Kung Pao Chicken & Peanut
On to the dumplings. The main attraction. The main dish dey dim sum. Holy cow, these cats want you to order several batches of these little meat bites. Not only you get 6 dumplings with each order, you don't have to get a second mortgage on the house, sell off the shares in your child's college fund, or become their indentured dish washing servant in order to get several batches. Their called batches right? I mean it's meat, cut with some other type of meat, the wrapped in a dough baggie. Sounds like someone cookin up a batch of something to me if you were asking. And if you're reading this far into this review, I'd say it seems like you're asking or at least want to know.
We'll start off at the ground floor, the Kung Pao Chicken & Peanut dumplings. You could start off with the plain jane, basic bitch Pork Dumplings, and you could also start every day looking into the mirror and saying "there is nothing special about me, I am the apex of average." Kung Pao Chicken to us was the difference between listening to Desiigner compared to Future. Not top shelf level dumplings, but it also ain't so boring that you'd rather move to the Sudan and rough it with those machete wielding mothafuckas while starving and being happy to walk 5 miles both ways to fill a hole-filled bucket with water seeping through mud. I don't care how good that ish is for making your adobe a-frame colonial, I ain't gonna listen to no rapper that steals some other rappers awful flow and then on top of that misspells his moniker because...it makes him cool? I don't know. These dumplings didn't turn the spice level up to 11 or nada, but it was a solid 6-7 on the heat seeker charts. It was the level of spice that caused Britain to go colonize India, but wasn't enough for them to be like "we gonna stay here forever" nahmean? Don't think that doesn't mean these dumplings ain't worth fighting a global conflict over, they just ain't at the level where diplomatic treatises are completely out of the realm of possibility.
Destination: Blao Blao Dumpling Trap
Hunger Sauce Levels: [11]
kung pao, shao mai (shrimp & pork), beef & yellow curry
Aight yo, this ish was silly. Place has plenty of seating - unlike most of Portland's trifling restaurants who count on the fact that they have 2 tables for 3 people each to create a stupid long wait outside the place - and my dining companion and I got down to business quick once escorted to our table by the fine waitstaff. Starting off with the Asian slaw, I always found it interesting how delicious pickled things are except when it has anything to do with the cucumber. Proper pickles are straight up cucumbers soaked in Beelzebub's post-swell-sesh ball sweat. The manufacturing plant for pickles is actually just a giant towel that belongs to every single YMCA in the country and gets wrung out over thousands of mason jars filled with cucumbers. Poor, defenseless, completely innocent cucumbers...straight real talk though I'll pickle anything else though. Kim chi? Bring the seconds and thirds to start cuz we going hard. Do Chua? Do chow-uhhhhhng on my pho. Cucumbers doused in evil? Fuckouttahere.
Eating this slaw got me thinking about the underratedness of the very versatile red cabbage yo. I mean, I don't normally want my vegetables to have gang affiliations, but I'll still fuck with red cabbage even if he looking for someone to dome with his chrome. Red cabbage can be pickled, not pickled. Put in salads, put as garnish on or around salads. This dude got versatility ya feel me? Then to wash this down, got myself a Chai Lemonade. Legit the hardest drink that a mothafucka can drink in the West End son. West End don't fuck around with it's libations yo. This drink is like the ultimate refresher. It's like listening to all of The Low End Theory by Tribe in a mason jar with a sprinkling of chair spices. I assume if De La Soul made a signature drink, this would probably be it.
Top: Beef & Yellow Curry pan-fried. Bottom: Shao Mai steamed. Throughout: Delishness
Next on the docket for judiciary review is the Shao Mai steamed dumplings. Steamed dumplings are like asian breakfast skillet or the asian fajitas or the asian Ruth's Chris sizzling plate nahmean. You get your order brought out in a piping hot, two floor row house looking container where your six morsels are continuing to soften until they are almost fall off the chopstick cooked nahmean. Obviously you knew that Shao Mai dumplings are filled with shrimp and pork, so I don't have to just come out and say that Shao Mai dumplings are filled with shrimp and pork. But DAMN, these are filled with shrimp and pork yall. The two undeniable kings of their respective human-consumption trees - beefs and shell-fishes - wrapped in one mandu-pi? Sign me up...twice. I'll register to vote so I can sign this petition namsayin. And now, when I call these the bombs, I ain't just saying that for hyperbole sake nahmean. These little nirvanalings are those special kinds of dumplings that have soup broth or some kind of lean filling the rest of the space that the meat isn't taking up to get you fiending for more. The worst part of these dumplings is that they make you thirsty...for more Shao Mai dumplings.
Lastly we getting to the big bazungas. The chief cheese. The nose candies. The hydrothermal deep sea vents of dumplings; the beef and yellow curry dumplings. Now I don't remember a lot of these dumplings because I was too busy reaching a oneness with the universe from the equivalent of a black hole of hot sauce. That red sauce next to the B&YC dumplings? That is spice singularity. It's the equivalent of Hilary and Trump merging like Goku & Vegeta to become even more super saiyan. And hopefully be like two negatives cancelling out all the bad ish ya feel me bruh. That sauce, as I found out, through the tears that burned like acid rain down my cheeks from the spice, is a dip the tip kinda sauce NOT the dunk and soak type of sauce. Small but meaningful difference between the two. Luckily, I soaked the first one, so there was no point for me to start dipping my tips. I just threw open the double layer garbage disposal and poured. Straight wood chipper status bruh.
There you go. If you hadn't eaten at the House de Blao Blao, I hope right here gives you a full-circle picture of what you can expect. Or not. I ate there already so I don't really need to care about your opinions, I already enjoyed myself b. You should too, but I ain't gonna start losing winks of sleep. I'll actually be sleeping like an infant after getting some of that good-good boobmilk because I've been fulfilled and satisfied with these dumplings nahmean. But seriously, go czech this place out. You'll probably get a table in a decent amount of time, not have to backhand your server because of their ineptitudes and shit, and you probably'll soak up some of the good chi or whatever feng shui stuff rubs off on you from the giant dragon on the wall. Stay tuned later in the week for this week's post-mortem and the other ish you know too good to not read. Right? Right.
b