Back in 1993 when we first moved to Warsaw the city was alive with expatriates of all nationalities who had ridden into town with their foreign companies. They had money to burn but no place to spend it.
These hotshots rented all the expensive homes and drove ostentatiously around town in their imported BMWs and Audis, much to the consternation of the locals in their tiny ‘Polski’ Fiats and ‘Ossi’ Trabants. Many of these exotic imports were promptly stolen and ‘re-exported’ to Germany or across the border to Belarus. Our much more practical Landrover Discovery was also nabbed and ended up in war torn Chechnya, but that is another story!
The city’s restaurant scene was confined to a few high end but very traditional Polish places and if you wanted to cook anything out of the ordinary you were limited to haggling with fearsome looking babushkas in the hard currency markets for your ingredients. Sabrina remembers once buying a whole fillet of beef for less than $10 and she and the stall-holder both thought they had made a killer of a deal. And it was in those same markets that we first developed a dangerous addiction to those large blue tins of Ossetra Caviar (I can call it that after 25 years of rehab).
Warsaw’s climate is similar in its extremes to Chicago’s but back then the buildings and the sky in wintertime were a uniform grey, so when a colourful, upscale Asian restaurant opened, we could hardly believe our luck. Tokio Restaurant soon got used to seeing us at least three nights a week and the restaurant’s owners, Toshihiro Fukunaga and his lovely Chinese wife became our good friends. Toshihiro now has a small restaurant empire but I’m sure he’ll never forget how things were at the beginning, when the only way to buy all the ingredients he needed, from raw fish for sushi to Asian vegetables, was to drive the treacherous 700 mile round trip to Berlin every week in a refrigerated van.
Here’s Sabrina’s faithful re-creation of one of the dishes from Tokio restaurant’s original menu. It’s the incredibly simple but delicious Crispy Shanghai Noodles with Pork.
Toshihiro’s Crispy Shanghai Noodles with Pork: Serves Five
1 pkt fresh egg wonton noodles
1 lb pork tenderloin, cut into 1/4″ wide x 2″ strips
1/2 pkt of shredded carrots
1 lb bean sprouts
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp white pepper
1 tbsp sesame oil (Asian style)
Marinate the pork with soy sauce, white pepper, sesame oil, sugar and cornstarch.
In a large pot boil some water (like you would for pasta). Heat a wok; then add 1″ of oil. Quickly drop one of the “balls” of noodles into the boiling water and use a strainer to retrieve it and shake as much of the water out; then put it into the hot oil (stand back while you are doing it because the oil will spatter). Don’t touch it until the edges are brown, then turn it and do the other side. Remove, strain on paper towels and place on a serving dish. Finish doing the rest the same way (you may want to cut them in half after they’re cooked). In the same pan heat 2 tablespoons of oil, add the pork and stir fry until cooked, then add the carrots and the bean sprouts. Cook until the vegetables are done, (you may need to make a slurry with 1 heaped teaspoon of corn starch and some water to add to it, to make a sauce). Pour the pork mixture over the noodles and serve.
What a great find this restaurant must have been, amidst the grey landscape! I have added this recipe to favourites :-)
For more black and white memories of Warsaw, watch the 1941 film, Dangerous Moonlight, with the evocative Warsaw Concerto from Richard Addinsell's score.