“Amateur Eats” is The Sopris Sun’s food review, written by Carbondale resident and eating enthusiast Jake Skardon and published on the third Thursday of each month.
There are 1,300 miles between Beijing and Tokyo, covering eastern China, the Korean peninsula and Japan. To eat your way from one to the other would be impossible, lest you be cursed with immortality or conscribe an army; thousands of years of culinary history, tens of thousands of regional cuisines and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of restaurants.
Does Carbondale’s own Beijin-Tokyo do its namesake justice? Perhaps not to the implied scale, but there is an impressive menu with dozens of “Americanized” Chinese classics. There is also, allegedly, sushi on their online menu, but I’ve never seen it on their dine-in menu, or heard of anyone ordering it for that matter. Secret sushi aside, Beijin-Tokyo is a true Carbondale mainstay, its decades of longevity driven by a balancing act of service, convenience, affordability and quality.
I visited on a Friday evening expecting a crowd, but aside from a large takeout queue, the dining room was only moderately full. No issues there, because I had brought a crowd with me: a bunch of rowdy, unscrupulous man-children who chomped at the bit of eating on my dime. For my part, I had fasted all day to prepare for a family-style feast.
After being seated, the service was fast and attentive. Within a minute or two, we had drinks on the table: bottles of Sapporo, carafes of hot sake for my friends and a small pot of jasmine tea for myself (in observance of Sober October). Before our waiter returned, a few of the beers and most of the sake was gone, and I observed one friend who had “a very busy Saturday morning” get bullied into another beer or two, or three. These lads were going to need a lot of food to wash down the drink.
To start, we ordered the Po Po Platter, a sampler of several classic deep-fried appetizers, and the Scallion Pancakes. The Po Po Platter came with pairs of egg rolls, spring rolls (we ordered extra of these on the side), fried dumplings, crab rangoons, chicken wings and pork ribs. Standouts were the dumplings, which had a pleasantly juicy pork meatball filling, pairing very well with table soy sauce rather than the sugary syrups on the platter, and the chicken wings, which had crispy skin, moist meat and no overwhelming sauce or seasoning. My only contention was the pork ribs, which were not bad, but I was thrown off by the overly sweet red-40 glaze. A bonus of the Po Po Platter was an open flame hot rock, which served no function on a plate of already fried foods, but certainly gave it some pizzazz.
The Scallion pancakes were a hit on our table, devoured seconds after it arrived. I would call them flakey pastries rather than pancakes: savory, melt in your mouth goodness, with a hint of rich scallion-ish flavor buried in its oily layers. Whatever soy sauce based sauce came with it was also great, and I favored it over the sweet and sour sauce that came with the Po Po Platter. Along with the pork dumplings, the scallion pancakes are a must-order appetizer at Beijin-Tokyo.
In between appetizers and entrees, my friends had forgotten their Saturday obligations and were on their second or third carafe of sake. I had rigged a time bomb that surely exploded the next morning. Does working on Saturday really count as work? If so, should that “chill, low key” Friday night be considered a weeknight? If weekend-eve can become a work day, can weekdays become weekend nights? If my friends were so preoccupied with the concept of waking up early on Saturday, were they now effectively drinking on the job? You might as well drink every night, or not at all. Who am I to say, try it yourself and find your own answers.
The entrees arrived quickly after we had finished the appetizers, plates of beef fried rice (ordered “spicy,” with emphasis), sesame chicken and pork moo sho. The beef fried rice was, to my disappointment, not discernably spicy. It was still quite tasty, the fried rice still had some moisture about it, giving it a great bite. The assorted veggies all had a nice “crunch”, which I will always prefer over soft and soggy vegetables in fried rice. The beef was of ample quantity: a tiny bit chewy, but not enough to detract from the dish.
The sesame chicken was a strong iteration of the Chinese-American classic. It is a large serving, arguably enough for two people on its own. The chicken is nuggeted and deep fried in such a way that, if I had a bottomless pit of a stomach, I could eat all day. The batter is crisp on the outside, but then dissolves all the way to the meat once the tooth breaks ground. The sesame sauce/glaze was a tad sweet for my taste, but the rest of my table disagreed. I am a savory over sweet kind of man anyway, and this was good enough for me to recognize my bias.
The pork moo shu was probably the strongest entree of the night. A stir fry of thin pork slices, scrambled eggs, cabbage and other veggies, served with a bowl of hoisin sauce and flour tortillas. This dish is less saucy than others, with a texture contrast between softer bites of pork and egg with crunchy cabbage, and lets the veggies and egg carry the flavor. With hoisin sauce added, it gains a distinct umami, spiced flavor, although the hoisin is best deployed in small dabs. The tortillas were of the generic, somewhat dry variety, and I would have preferred crepe-style wraps that usually accompany moo shu. However, with plenty of filling and hoisin sauce, they get the job done. Probably for sharing, although I could have eaten all of it myself.
As I eased out of my food coma, I realized it was almost closing time, and my friends were engaged in some sort of vulgar political debate, which probably can’t be printed here. We paid and made a quick exit. Overall, Beijin-Tokyo provides the best dollar-to-calorie ratio in Carbondale, with a great dining room and phenomenal service. While the menu isn’t ambitious, they cover the basics so well that there’s nothing more to be desired. If you want to eat like a king without spending like one, Beijin-Tokyo is the place for you!