Yuan

A Chinese Newcomer Where Fish Is Prepared Tableside | Eater NY

At 537 Washington Boulevard, near the North Garage Driveway, I found a sleek new Chinese restaurant with an outdoor courtyard dotted with potted plants and an interior that holds about 80, where lights hang from the high ceiling like crumpled constellations and a dangling chain-link curtain circumnavigates the room; booths clad in dark woods offered the most comfortable seating while tables jumbled in the center. On my first visit a teenage pianist played Beethoven’s sonatas on a grand piano in the middle of the room; on a later visit she and the piano had vanished. The restaurant’s foremost specialty is whole fish—pick sea bass or croaker—that can be done five different ways; the fish weighs about a pound-and-a-half or slightly more and can easily feed three or four. The “whole fish in foil” ($42) was the most astonishing: a raw fish wrapped en papillote, ferried to the table on a brazier, briefly lit and then ceremoniously unwrapped to reveal a steaming fish in a chunky sea of bright red layered with pickled red chiles. More conventional is the province’s braised fish in Sichuan bean sauce, with multiple types of chiles, Sichuan peppercorns used with a restrained hand, and an intense fermented bean sauce; there is also a whole fish in tofu pudding I did not get to. The vast menu (after three visits I’d only tried about a fifth) includes a pig ear appetizer ($12) as soft as a glove, pig kidney carved into flower-like shapes with a mild minerally flavor, beef tendon with peppers ($28) served in great wobbly chunks flavored with dried and mild fresh chiles, eggplant preparations such as eggplant with minced pepper ($10) and a wok-fried yu xiang eggplant with bean paste, chiles, ginger and black vinegar, a mild Dongbei stir-fry of corn and pine nuts ($13) that tastes buttery, shredded potatoes lightly sautéed with black truffle sauce, and a cold gluten salad of spongy beige cubes in a sweet brown dressing decorated with roasted peanuts and lily shoots. Taken together, these dishes point to Yuan as an exciting addition to Jersey City’s burgeoning Chinese restaurant corridor. - Robert Sietsema