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Diving into the sensational snakehead and sauerkraut soup of Fish With You
Bowlfuls of unfamiliar ingredients land in Convoy with arrival of global Sichuan chain
A hot and sour soup featuring snakehead fish, sliced celtuce, rice noodles, and pickled mustard greens
"More than 2500 Stores in 360 cities," announces a mural on the wall of newly arrived Convoy restaurant Fish With You. That would make San Diego rather late to the welcoming line for this juggernaut of a restaurant chain out of Beijing, and therefore late to discover the specialty the mural goes on to describe as suan cai yu, or "sauerkraut fish."
Even after the restaurant's marketing team sent a press release explaining it to me, I had to spend an hour on Google trying to figure out what it is. But I wouldn't really understand until I'd sampled it myself.
"Sauerkraut fish" makes a convenient shorthand for what turns out to be a hot and sour Sichuan soup. They call it sauerkraut because we in the U.S. aren't expected know the term suan cai, the Mandarin name for the traditional Chinese fermented greens that make the soup sour. These pickled greens had already been around for thousands of years by the time Mongol invaders developed a taste for them in the Middle Ages. Eventually, those same Mongol hordes swept into Eastern Europe too, and that, according to this New York Times story from the late 1970s, is how Germans learned to make sauerkraut in the first place. (Though they adapted to make it with salt rather than rice wine.) Ultimately, sauerkraut is just a term modern Americans are expected to know because we eat so many hot dogs.
San Diego may now experience what hundreds of other cities have, with the arrival of Fish With You
All of this alone would have made Fish With You's sauerkraut soups interesting enough for me to make a mad dash to Convoy. But the suan cai yu did not come alone. For food lovers who like to try new things, Fish With You turns out to be a bonanza.
Start with the soup base itself — what I'm told is a chicken and fish stock flavored with pickled mustard greens. It's worth a try whether you opt for variations featuring boiled beef, fried chicken, and/or stewed tomatoes. However, I recommend ordering the restaurant's Signature Suan Cai & Fish ($18), because swimming in this generously large bowl, I found multiple ingredients I had never seen before.
That starts with the suan cai itself. Despite its influence on sauerkraut, those pickled mustard greens differ engagingly from the fermented cabbage topping the bratwurst I enjoyed last week.
The Fish With You mascot
Standing out even further is the fish. While many of the soups offer a choice between two fish, including a cheaper option, the farmed catfish basa, the signature bowl sticks to something a bit more toothsome: the eatery's premium fish option, snakehead fish.
The California Department of Fish & Wildlife describes snakehead fish as a "long, torpedo-shaped" (and invasive) freshwater fish that can survive for days out of water, because, when push comes to shove, it can breathe air. It sounds a bit scary, and it's illegal to import live snakehead fish. However, some have already infected American waterways, so eating them is actually encouraged, from a sustainability standpoint.
It's the pattern of the freshwater fish's scales that are most immediately snakelike. You can see that pattern on the thin slices of snakehead fish that populate the soup — leaving the delicate, wholly edible scales intact helps the flaky fish hold form within the broth. The flesh completely takes on the flavor of the rather bold soup, so the independent texture certainly helps.
Wide rice noodles and snakehead fish are couple of the intriguing ingredients swimming in suan cai yu
For most of the $15-18 soups on the menu, add-on toppings are recommended. Premium toppings, ranging from quail eggs to meatballs to crab sticks, go for about $4 apiece. Free add-ons include bean curds, enoki mushrooms, vermicelli noodles, and sliced lettuce stems. However, the latter two are included with the signature bowl, and neither are quite what they seem.
Most times you see vermicelli on a menu, whether in an Italian restaurant or an Asian one, it refers to noodles that are quite thin. In Asian restaurants, vermicelli tends to mean rice noodles, and that is the case here. However, these are thick, wide ribbons — long and slippery and quite nice to chew.
As for that sliced lettuce: "lettuce stem" is a name sometimes given to an Asian stem vegetable otherwise called celtuce, which in its natural form looks more like a cross between artichoke and bamboo than a leafy green. Here, sliced into flat, green, roughly inchwide strips, its taste and texture land somewhere in the mix of lettuce, bamboo, and celery. In other words, much more pleasant to eat than a lot of ingredients packing a comparable amount of nutrients. I'll be looking for celtuce again.
Same goes for the suan cai yu soup. The broth brings a bright balance of sour and spice, as bobbing within it are Sichuan peppercorns and red chili peppers, while the stock is finished with hot oil, ensuring the rich flavors creep into every corner of your mouth. Speaking for own mouth, most of those corners have responded by asking for more.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Diving into the sensational snakehead and sauerkraut soup of Fish With You
Bowlfuls of unfamiliar ingredients land in Convoy with arrival of global Sichuan chain
Diving into the sensational snakehead and sauerkraut soup of Fish With You
Bowlfuls of unfamiliar ingredients land in Convoy with arrival of global Sichuan chain
A hot and sour soup featuring snakehead fish, sliced celtuce, rice noodles, and pickled mustard greens
"More than 2500 Stores in 360 cities," announces a mural on the wall of newly arrived Convoy restaurant Fish With You. That would make San Diego rather late to the welcoming line for this juggernaut of a restaurant chain out of Beijing, and therefore late to discover the specialty the mural goes on to describe as suan cai yu, or "sauerkraut fish."
Even after the restaurant's marketing team sent a press release explaining it to me, I had to spend an hour on Google trying to figure out what it is. But I wouldn't really understand until I'd sampled it myself.
"Sauerkraut fish" makes a convenient shorthand for what turns out to be a hot and sour Sichuan soup. They call it sauerkraut because we in the U.S. aren't expected know the term suan cai, the Mandarin name for the traditional Chinese fermented greens that make the soup sour. These pickled greens had already been around for thousands of years by the time Mongol invaders developed a taste for them in the Middle Ages. Eventually, those same Mongol hordes swept into Eastern Europe too, and that, according to this New York Times story from the late 1970s, is how Germans learned to make sauerkraut in the first place. (Though they adapted to make it with salt rather than rice wine.) Ultimately, sauerkraut is just a term modern Americans are expected to know because we eat so many hot dogs.
San Diego may now experience what hundreds of other cities have, with the arrival of Fish With You
All of this alone would have made Fish With You's sauerkraut soups interesting enough for me to make a mad dash to Convoy. But the suan cai yu did not come alone. For food lovers who like to try new things, Fish With You turns out to be a bonanza.
Start with the soup base itself — what I'm told is a chicken and fish stock flavored with pickled mustard greens. It's worth a try whether you opt for variations featuring boiled beef, fried chicken, and/or stewed tomatoes. However, I recommend ordering the restaurant's Signature Suan Cai & Fish ($18), because swimming in this generously large bowl, I found multiple ingredients I had never seen before.
That starts with the suan cai itself. Despite its influence on sauerkraut, those pickled mustard greens differ engagingly from the fermented cabbage topping the bratwurst I enjoyed last week.
The Fish With You mascot
Standing out even further is the fish. While many of the soups offer a choice between two fish, including a cheaper option, the farmed catfish basa, the signature bowl sticks to something a bit more toothsome: the eatery's premium fish option, snakehead fish.
The California Department of Fish & Wildlife describes snakehead fish as a "long, torpedo-shaped" (and invasive) freshwater fish that can survive for days out of water, because, when push comes to shove, it can breathe air. It sounds a bit scary, and it's illegal to import live snakehead fish. However, some have already infected American waterways, so eating them is actually encouraged, from a sustainability standpoint.
It's the pattern of the freshwater fish's scales that are most immediately snakelike. You can see that pattern on the thin slices of snakehead fish that populate the soup — leaving the delicate, wholly edible scales intact helps the flaky fish hold form within the broth. The flesh completely takes on the flavor of the rather bold soup, so the independent texture certainly helps.
Wide rice noodles and snakehead fish are couple of the intriguing ingredients swimming in suan cai yu
For most of the $15-18 soups on the menu, add-on toppings are recommended. Premium toppings, ranging from quail eggs to meatballs to crab sticks, go for about $4 apiece. Free add-ons include bean curds, enoki mushrooms, vermicelli noodles, and sliced lettuce stems. However, the latter two are included with the signature bowl, and neither are quite what they seem.
Most times you see vermicelli on a menu, whether in an Italian restaurant or an Asian one, it refers to noodles that are quite thin. In Asian restaurants, vermicelli tends to mean rice noodles, and that is the case here. However, these are thick, wide ribbons — long and slippery and quite nice to chew.
As for that sliced lettuce: "lettuce stem" is a name sometimes given to an Asian stem vegetable otherwise called celtuce, which in its natural form looks more like a cross between artichoke and bamboo than a leafy green. Here, sliced into flat, green, roughly inchwide strips, its taste and texture land somewhere in the mix of lettuce, bamboo, and celery. In other words, much more pleasant to eat than a lot of ingredients packing a comparable amount of nutrients. I'll be looking for celtuce again.
Same goes for the suan cai yu soup. The broth brings a bright balance of sour and spice, as bobbing within it are Sichuan peppercorns and red chili peppers, while the stock is finished with hot oil, ensuring the rich flavors creep into every corner of your mouth. Speaking for own mouth, most of those corners have responded by asking for more.
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