Quick restaurant note: Chilli Garden, Medford, MA

I'd wanted to try Chilli Garden for quite a while. I pass it every time I go to Ebisuya for Japanese groceries, which quite often. Yesterday we finally went in.

Chilli Garden
45 Riverside Avenue (in Medford Square)
Medford, MA 02155
Tel: +1.781.396.8488
Fax: +1.781.396.8489

MBTA buses 94, 95, 96, 101, 134, 326: 37 Riverside Ave @ Medford Sq. (Stop ID: 63241)

Su-Th: 12 noon-9:30 PM
Fr, Sa: 12 noon-10:30 PM

Chilli Garden's ma po tofu (麻婆豆腐) is sufficiently spicy that I brought the leftovers home and seasoned another entire box of silken tofu with the remaining sauce. No shortage of sichuan peppercorns here.

We had the Ma Po Tofu with Minced Beef ($9.50), the Dan Dan Noodle with Minced Pork (擔擔麵, 5.95), and an order of Wonton with Chili Sauce (红油炒手, 5.95 for ten wontons). All three are mainstays of Sichuan cooking.

I was less impressed by the dan dan noodles than the other dishes, mainly because of the noodles, which were somewhat generic thin white noodles, somewhat limp. The sauce in all three dishes was quite similar. All were equally spicy and full of sichuan peppercorns, leaving that characteristic tingle in the mouth. They all had the same kind of character and lots of it.

I think I need to go back and try the Double Cooked Pork Belly (四川回鍋肉, 10.25; 6.95 as a lunch special with soup and rice). That's another typical Sichuan dish.

Chilli Gardens menu has their Sichuan specialties on one side of the menu and its American-Chinese selections on the other side, along with some lunch specials. Tellingly, the Sichuan specialties and the lunch specials are the only ones translated into Chinese. We did not order any untranslated English language dishes and do not recommend that you do so, either.

Belle Waring on Sunday night's riot in Singapore.

Today, Belle Waring posted in the Crooked Timber blog about Sunday night's riot in Little India, Singapore.

Our family just moved house, out to the wilds of Bukit Batok (a lovely apartment, actually, next to the Bukit Gombak MRT). Up till October, though, we were living right up the road from the spot where it took place, like 700m away; we would have been able to hear the yelling no question, and the bus exploding with what I imagine would have been rather startling ease. The riot started when a private bus, driven by a Singaporean, struck and killed an Indian worker while backing up. The bus driver was injured in the riot, and the bus itself destroyed completely. There is video of the windshield being smashed, and later footage of the bus completely aflame, suddenly punctuated by the gas tank bursting. Ambulances and, later, police cars (??! there aren’t enough interrobangs to express my feelings about typing this sentence) were also turned over and torched. A number of policemen were injured in the riot, as were some rioters, but the police never fired on the crowd, and got things under control within two hours, and happily no one else died.

But for all the detail in her post about the riot and the context in which it took place, her description of tropical heat is what stayed with me the most:

The sun at the equator is not friendly. My father told me this when I was little, because he was a sailor for a while and one time worked on a boat with my godfather that went down to Brazil and up the Amazon river. He told me this and I always wanted to feel. When it is only 9 o’clock in the morning, the sun already has that weight to it, that power. This is a thing that I love. I love it when it is August, at the beach, in East Hampton, and there is a breeze, but I can lie down and feel this heaviness. I love it then. I feel as if someone had taken the lead aprons they make you wear during X-rays and pushed them down all over me, but made of gold, and equally, everywhere, even between my thighs, even in the hollows of my temples, even among my eyelashes, pushing down heavily—you couldn’t shake this cover over someone. It has only…come down. Forcefully. I like that it pushes me down into the sand and makes it difficult to sit up. Even in Singapore I like it, but next to the pool, and briefly, because there is the golden heavy weight, the true weight of gold that is like lead, but the covering has been heated also before being applied. You want to get out from under it before it burns you. It is like sitting too close to a well-made fire in the fireplace, you must turn your face away at a certain point, you cannot keep it there and look at those leaping things any longer.

Images and video available from Al Jazeera and the Daily Mail.