The name of the dish immediately catches my eye at Kungfu Kitchen: pan-fried Peking duck buns. Rarely have five words — okay, three nouns and a hyphenated adjective — elicited such anticipation. They’re the menu version of that tension you feel as you climb, slowly, via a rickety chain lift, the main drop on the Coney Island Cyclone. They’re the dark chocolate right before you pop it in your mouth.
The appetizer itself arrives on a heavy plate with craggy edges but a smooth, matte surface. At the center of the plate, a star appears to go supernova in an unforgiving universe, but the design is partially blocked by a pair of thick pucks, their skins golden from a brief sear in a hot pan. They look like pot stickers bloated with helium, but on first bite, you realize they’re more like fluffy pan-fried dou sha bao, the red bean paste replaced with a cache of sweet, savory duck meat.
Because they’re listed under the dim sum section of Kungfu Kitchen’s menu, the pan-fried Peking duck buns seem like they should be the first taste of a multicourse feast at this minimalist, meditative Alexandria restaurant. But these bites are substantial. I mean, if I had any sense of portion control, these mouthwatering bundles would be my entire meal.
It’s only after talking with Kungfu Kitchen co-founder Amy Liang that I understand the role pan-fried Peking duck buns — not to mention crispy sweet-and-sour pork slices and homestyle crispy pork loin — play in the diet of her native Jilin province in Northeastern China. The winters are long and harsh, she tells me. The mean temperature in Jilin in January, according to one source, is 2 degrees. As in degrees Fahrenheit. As in 2 bad you don’t live somewhere warmer.
People eat heavily in Jilin, Liang says. Stews, deep-fried pork, anything with a lot of calories that your body burns like a furnace. It was a tough transition for Liang when she moved to the D.C. area in 2011 to work on her doctoral degree in environmental engineering at Catholic University.
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“It was a culture shock for me at first because everybody was having salads for lunch. I was like, ‘I need something warm and comfy. And also, I need a nap,'" says Liang, who still holds her daytime job as a data scientist for a federal agency. “Our food is really heavy.”
Kungfu Kitchen is a joint project between Liang and her business and life partner, Teang Liu. They met in Washington, even though they’re from the same hometown, Changchun. Liang says their childhood homes were five minutes away from each other. They speak the same Dongbei dialect common to Northeastern China. They share a love of restaurants and hospitality, too: Liang’s mom once ran her own Chinese restaurant in Seoul (long story but worth noting that Jilin province abuts North Korea), and Liu’s family used to operate a hotel in Changchun.
Their restaurant shares a name with a similar operation in New York, but they’re separate entities. They’re more like “buddy stores,” Liang tells me. Liu used to work for the owner of the Kung Fu Kitchen in Times Square, which offers some of the same dishes as the Alexandria storefront but also wanders farther afield. You’ll find ramen with hand-pulled noodles and chicken wing skewers in the Manhattan restaurant. The Kungfu Kitchen in Northern Virginia is purer of concept.
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Liu and Liang hired two chefs to run their kitchen. Liang told me their names, but she says they prefer to remain anonymous, which I respect. I also respect their cooking. One handles the Sichuan and Shanghai dishes, the other specializes in Manchu cuisine, the cooking found in the historic and geographic region known as Manchuria. This is the owners’ native turf, home to those dishes that get you through the winter.
The crispy sweet-and-sour pork at Kungfu Kitchen is more like the dish Liang knew in Changchun, not the version you might find at a counter next to Sbarro in the mall. You know the one: soft pork nuggets, gloppy with a sticky, beige sauce, tasting of cornstarch and sugar. The superior Manchu version supplies the crispiness promised in its name but also an element missing from its Chinese American counterpart: a steady current of acid, supplied by white vinegar.
Pork also stars in two other Manchu preparations: the spicy shredded pork with cilantro and the homestyle crispy pork loin, a pair of dishes that basically occupy opposite ends of the heat spectrum. The former are thin strips of pork, coated lightly in a cornstarch batter, and stir-fried with dried chiles and what seems like a whole bunch of cilantro, stems and all. Fair warning: The herb’s prime characteristics are on full display, particularly the soapy quality that drives people to create Facebook hate groups, but I find the greens the perfect foil to the electrifying heat of the dish.
The latter Manchu dish is the homestyle crispy pork, these thin slivers of loin coated with a cornstarch-and-potato-starch batter and then fried twice, once in a deep fryer and then again in a wok with a little oil and aromatics. The dish has a quiet, mild, seductive quality, so different from its noisier shredded pork cousin.
Kungfu Kitchen does Shanghai soup dumplings, too, paired with a black-vinegar-and-syrup dipping sauce, which fortifies and acidifies the delicate broth that explodes from the dough walls on the first bite. These are every bit equal to the soup dumplings you’ll find in Rockville. The noodles are hand-pulled here, just like those at trendy Lanzhou noodle houses, and they’re ideal for either the soups or stir-fries, naturally absorbing all the flavors built into these dishes.
Sichuan province is well represented with mapo tofu and fried pig’s feet, though both may suffer by comparison to those served at Fahrenheit Asian in McLean (mapo tofu, the definitive version) and Big Wang’s Cuisine in Derwood (now Wang Manor, which offers a terrific Sichuan pig’s feet), but only a little.
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The best spicy-and-numbing dish on the menu may be the Chongqing poached fish in hot chile oil. It’s a large white bowl in which ivory fillets bob in crimson oil. Chile seeds and dry husks float on the surface, like wreckage from a destroyed ship. As I pluck each fillet and pop it in my mouth, I’m struck by a particular interaction: fish that almost melts on the tongue and heat that could forge steel. It’s power and delicacy, softness and strength. In a way, the dynamic reminds me a lot of Kungfu Kitchen itself.
Kungfu Kitchen
3221 Duke St., Alexandria, Va., 703-566-0007.
Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
Nearest Metro: King St.-Old Town or Eisenhower Avenue, with a mile-plus trip to the restaurant.
Prices:$1.50 to $22.95 for all items on the menu.
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