Food
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Mongolian Hot Pot unifies and satisfies a friendly gathering
01:00 AM EST on Thursday, November 9, 2006
The Mongolian Hot Pot is surrounded by numerous ingredients waiting to be cooked.
The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl
PROVIDENCE — Usually when making restaurant-review suggestions, food editor Gail Ciampa doesn’t give any marching orders except to say, “Enjoy!”
But before we went to MuMu Cuisine, the new Asian restaurant on Federal Hill, she suddenly got specific: “When you go, you MUST try the Mongolian Hot Pot!” She’d heard good things about that cook-your-own-meal-at-the- table-in-a-boiling-pot-of- chicken-broth entrée. She’d even wanted to review Sophia Cuyegkeng’s restaurant at lunch, but when she phoned ahead, she was told that the hot pot doesn’t boil that time of day, so she went somewhere else instead.
Lucky me.
MuMu Cuisine, all red walls and black accents, looks like a Chinese lacquered jewel box inside, belying the rather ordinary brick wall exterior.
The menu is a blend of familiar Chinese items — hot and sour soup, Moo Goo Gai Pan and Kung Pao Chicken — and the not-so-often-seen: Jumbo Shrimp Dancing in the Pond, Smoked Tea Flavor Duck, Crispy Crab in Hong Kong Style, Lion Head Pork Meatball in Clay Pot. We’d heard the Crispy Chicken was something to savor.
But where, oh where, on the menu was the Mongolian Hot Pot we’d heard so much about?
Our bubbly, helpful server, Tawni, had the answer: Nowhere! Not only was it a relatively new item, but it was ordered mostly by people who just knew about it.
Tawni also told us that it was usually ordered by a big table of customers to share. We were only two.
“It’s a lot of fun when you have a table full of people,” she said, explaining that thin slices of Kobe beef from Japan, sirloin, chicken, seafood or tofu (you can choose which you want as the central item), plus Chinese cabbage, baby bok choy, mushrooms and more, are delivered uncooked to the table. Each person selects a piece and dips it into the communal boiling pot of broth in the center of the table. The ingredients cook very rapidly, in the style of a fondue. There’s usually lots of food on the table.
Tawni said we might be able to order a smaller hot pot for two. But, we insisted, we wanted to try other things on the menu as well. Couldn’t she come up with a hot pot for one that we could share so we could order other things as well?
Tawni pondered a moment, then disappeared toward the kitchen. A few seconds later, Sophia Cuyegkeng herself, a woman possibly even more bubbly and outgoing than Tawni, appeared at our table to sort things out.
Of course, she said, we could have a hot pot for one. And then she burst forth with dozens of suggestions about not only what kind of side ingredients we should have for our hot pot, but the other things we should order as well. (Our reviews are done anonymously and we received no special treatment.)
In a followup phone call a few days later, Sophia said she was born in Taiwan and owns about 10 restaurants, from New York and New Jersey to Taipei, Shanghai, Nanjing and Tokyo. She fell in love with Providence after visiting son Henry Mu, who runs Lot 401.
She said that in China, serving a hot pot means “We get together,” and it’s served at a round table so everyone can dig in. “We put out separate utensils,” she said, so one can keep one’s dipping utensil separate from one’s eating utensil.
But first, other things beckoned. We’d already been sipping a pair of specialty martinis — the Flyin’ Hawaiian with Curzon coconut, amaretto, pineapple orange juice and grenadine ($8) and the Pretty Kitty ($9), described as “a fruity blend of liquors” that Tawni said would be very sweet but actually wasn’t — so we were up for just about anything Sophia suggested. Except maybe for the Smoked Tea Flavor Duck ($11.95), which was one of the first things she suggested.
Gauging our indifference, she offered up the Crispy Chicken ($12.95) in its place. Bingo!
Shrimp lo mein as well, we decided. And for appetizers?
She felt the MuMu Grill Platter ($14.95), with its assortment of appetizers sitting around a flaming bowl, might be too much, considering everything else we planned to have. So instead, we ordered some of her favorites: Crab Rangoon ($5.25), boneless spare ribs ($5.95), a scallion pancake ($3.95).
Crab Rangoon is a mixture of minced crabmeat and cream cheese inside a little fried wonton wrapper, but every restaurant has its own style of making them, some better than others. MuMu’s was top of the line, a half-dozen pieces shaped like lotus petals with a wonderfully crispy top and sweet sauce on the side.
The scallion pancakes, lightly pan-fried and with bits of green onion in the batter, were sliced into little pizza-style wedges. Crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and the light brown sauce didn’t mask the fragrance of the onions.
The real stars among the appetizers, though, were the spare ribs. The succulent meat had been taken off the bone and cut into little slices that were exceptionally tender and deliciously sweet in a light oil — not greasy at all. They filled a large plate, an order big enough to be an entrée all its own, and so tasty I gladly could have had just an order of them and left the table satisfied.
When we’d finished, Sophia brought the hot plate on which the hot pot would sit. She also brought three little bowls of dipping sauces: sesame (her favorite), garlic and sweet and sour. While she fiddled with the hot plate, Tawni arrived carrying the Crispy Chicken and, soon, the lo mein, which turned out to be vegetable rather than the shrimp we’d ordered, although we weren’t arguing. A big mound of soft noodles, it had julienned carrots and onions, plus green onion and bean sprouts in the dish with a light sauce to bring out the many flavors.
Even better was the Crispy Chicken, skinny strips of tender chicken in a sauce that had a bit of a bite, but not too much. Little half moons of very thin-sliced cucumbers edged the dish, and there was even a half strawberry.
When we were finished with our first entrees, or as much of them as we decided we could eat to save room for the Mongolian Hot Pot, Sophia and Tawni returned with a big metal bowl of chicken stock to set atop the hot plate.
This dish originated a millennium ago with the nomadic Mongols, who carried a cooking kettle with them on their travels and prepared their meals in it over hot coals.
Before long the chicken broth was bubbling away, ready for dunking the Chinese vegetables and mushrooms, two jumbo shrimp, a small plate of sliced-very-thin Kobe beef and a collection of fish balls, shrimp balls and beef balls, the latter a bit like a sausage.
Some things, such as the Chinese cabbage, take a few minutes to cook. The Kobe beef takes but seconds. When cooked, it is put in the little bowl on the side and you add one of the three sauces, each of which gives the cooked piece a different flavor. Our hot pot contained only chicken stock, but if diners prefer something a little spicier, Sophia will bring a dish separated into two compartments, with Chinese hot red peppers and water in the other.
Each piece of meat, shellfish or vegetable enhances the flavor of the broth with its own distinctive flavor as well. This ultimately makes for a very rich broth, which is then ladled into the little bowls. It was one of the best chicken broths one can imagine.
Asian restaurants are not known for their desserts, but MuMu has a winner in its fried banana ($12.95 for the full order we got, which is about double a regular order). Two bananas were quartered, wrapped in a thin batter and deep-fried for an instant. Then they were topped with rich chocolate sauce and placed on a plate around a bowl containing scoops of ice cream in two flavors — a refreshing green tea and a chocolate chip espresso.
It was a blend of familiar flavors done in a new light. And this is what MuMu is all about.
A bill for a dinner for two at MuMu Cuisine might look like this:
Flyin’ Hawaiian martini…$8.00
Pretty Kitty martini…$9.00
Boneless spare rib…$5.95
Crab Rangoon…$5.25
Scallion pancake…$3.95
Crispy chicken…$12.95
Vegetable lo mein…$6.25
Kobe beef hot pot…$17.95
Fried banana (full order)…$12.95
Total…$82.25
Tax…$6.58
Tip…$17.17
Total…$106.00
MuMu Cuisine,
220 Atwells Ave., Providence. (401) 369-7040. Dressy casual. Handicapped accessible. Highchairs available. Reservations preferred. AE, MC, V. Valet and on-street parking. Serving 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sun-Thu; to 11 p.m. Fri-Sat. Appetizers $2.95 to $6.25. Entrees $3.75 to $17.95. Wines are $6 by the glass; $16 to $475 for a bottle.
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