Q-Tea, an itty-bitty Chinese table in the ninth, has been on my list since the stellar reviews started rolling in early this year, but I only got around to trying it last weekend.
It’s a closet of a space, decorated in polka dots (q cute!) and colors my eleven year-old self would have very much liked to have had in her bedroom. The prices are low (10-13€ for mains), and the husband and wife team who preside over this little lavender domain are utterly kind. In other words, the place has its charms. Unfortunately, the food is not one of them.
We started with Shanghai style dumplings, crisped on the bottom, filled with savory, aromatic pork. They were perfectly fine. They were not, I knew from another source, made on the premises. No matter.
Things went downhill from there. Lion’s head meatballs were bland, wrapped in undercooked cabbage leaves and wading in a wan broth. Eggplant with pork was heavy and under-seasoned, with an odd Italianate note of fennel seed in the meat. An ounce of redemption came with the spicy fish. It was spicy, yes, showered with chopped red chilies, and the fish was delicate and fresh. But there was no depth to the dish; it was all hot high notes.
This was a real head scratcher for me. Was it an off night? Or could it be, as my dining companion suggested, that the state of Chinese food in Paris is so bad that judgments of it are inflated, like grades or ice dancing scores or women’s clothing sizes?
“There has to be good Chinese food in Paris. THERE HAS TO BE,” he said with gravitas, and then near-teary determination: “WE WILL FIND IT.”
Maybe, on different night, it would be at Q-Tea. But I probably won’t return to find out.
Q-Tea 19 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 75009 Paris, +33 (0)1 55 32 04 68. Closed Sundays.
Read more about Q-Tea on Paris by Mouth.
I was all excited when I saw that first picture. I guess I should have stopped reading there..and just let those dumplings rest in my memory.
Hm. I actually really like Q-Tea, though it’s been a long time since I’ve ordered the Lion’s Head and I’ve never tried any of the other things you sampled. Except for the pork dumplings. I still think they’re the best fried dumplings I’ve found in Paris.
I will say, however, that I was disappointed the last time I ate there. I ordered the lunch special of Taiwanese-style noodles, which I was surprised to find came full of fatty pork belly. It was darkly salty and much too rich for lunch.
David – The first picture is actually the Lion’s Head meatballs, still wrapped in the cabbage. They looked (much) better than they tasted. The dumplings were actually pretty good.
Ann – Most of what I’ve read about Q-Tea has been glowing, so I was surprised by my experience. The dumplings were definitely the highlight. Also, do you happen to know if fennel seed is normally used with pork the way it was in that eggplant dish? It truly tasted like Italian sausage.
They don’t have a second menu that is in Chinese?
Stephen – There’s only one menu I know of, written in both French and Mandarin.
Well, there are items than only a Mandarin speaker squeezes out of them (and I am not sucha speaker but go to Q-Tea with one). Is that fair? – no. But….
I remember being told years ago when I ate for the first time at a real Chinatown resto in New York, order the stuff on the paper pennants written in Chinese not the the stuff in English on the menu, even if you don’t know what it is. It requires a suspension of belief and a certain yuck-factor but what’s eating adventuresomely for anyway.
Hi Barbra!
My parents are from HK, so I rarely go out to eat Chinese food, since I get to eat Chinese pretty much every day. Nevertheless, one of the best restaurants featuring Cantonese food that I’ve tried in Paris (though it’s far from the quality you can find in HK, and I guess other cities in Canada/US/UK where there are bigger HK diasporas) is “Le Palais de Choisy” in the 13th arrondissement. Have you ever tried it?
I highly recommend the “tofu aux crevettes” (I forgot the exact name in French): basically, it’s tofu filled with shrimp, and steamed with a light sweet soy sauce.
Coralie – I haven’t been there yet, the friend I had dinner with at Q-Tea and I are now on a quest. We’ll add it to our list.
Sadly, you won’t find it. I lived in the 13th at one point and thought I hit the jackpot, but eating my way down the main drags I found both Canto and Vietnamese food to be hugely disappointing. Most of it’s fine but nothing will blow your socks off. It makes some sense since there aren’t a lot of Cantonese people in Paris but it’s baffling why the Vietnamese food is so average. When I asked my French-Chinese friend’s parents about this travesty, they just laughed at me and said not to expect so much from France.
There are some excellent Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants in Paris. Not a huge number but more than some seem to believe.
The important point is not the quest, it is how we go on that quest, what spirit we put in it. That is one thing I wanted to reply to this famous expat figure gastronomique I was recently arguing with concerning the “Asian offer” in Paris. I didn’t because I already had had the “more-authoritative-than-you” argument as an answer, and to me that marked the final point of the conversation. Come to think of it, the figure was also on a “quest”. I thought it would be a long one and I left it at that.
I’ll be less allusive concerning Q-Tea: I always had delicious meals there. However, they were all pre-planned with the chef by this friend John T. and I have in common. They were celebration meals and each one of them was memorable. Some of the dishes wonderful, some less so. But one thing to bear in mind is that 1) it is home-style Chinese cooking (a style that few are familiar with), and 2) it is based on several influences. The chef is from Shanghai and sometimes takes his inspiration from more remote places like Hunan, and his wife is Cantonese. The food could be defined as canto-shanghai-homestyle, with a personal touch.
As for Vietnamese restaurants, there’s a huge malentendu between Parisians who are familiar with their best Vietnamese restaurants and Americans who have the US Vietnamese restaurants as a reference basis. It is simply not the same cooking. There’s a reason for that. I won’t go into it here because it involves geopolitics.
It sounds like Q-Tea might be a restaurant with good days and bad days. For the people who did like it — John Talbott and Ptipois — what did you like about the dishes that you thought were successes here? From my experience with Barbra as her dining companion, I found it to be relatively bland that night and am curious if you think that what we interpreted as bland was something you saw as good. We went into the meal expecting bold flavors and maybe that’s something the chef isn’t going for. On the other hand, the textures of the food we ate were not good, and that could have been because of an off night.
Qwestlove:
What you interpreted as bland may well be food that was not seasoned the way you expect it to be in a Chinese restaurant outside of China. I am not only thinking MSG – they use none. It is just that, as I wrote above, the cooking is “homestyle”, with very fresh ingredients, and the right seasonings applied where and how they should be, not less, not more.
Now it is possible that you were out of luck, because lots of dishes at Q-Tea have “bold” flavors. But they are not exactly the type of “bold” flavors you get in a more conventional expat Chinese restaurant or in US Chinese restaurants. The authentic taste of China (bearing in mind the huge and numerous provincial variations and the diversity of China’s cuisines). They often have a definite “funky” dimension that puts Westerners off. Q-Tea has that, and IMO it is more an Eastern/Central Chinese feature (Shanghai, Hunan, etc.) than a Cantonese one; Cantonese tastes tend to be more delicate and, in a way, “cleaner”.
As for the textures you got, I suppose the same comments might apply. Textures in homestyle Chinese food are not the ones you find in restaurant food. Personally I never had a problem with the textures at Q-Tea, except for a lamb and tofu knots casserole which I did not much care for. This time the flavors were too bold for me, and the textures were too much of a roller-coaster. I blame the fermented tofu.
Sorry – should have reread myself. Please read the middle sentences of the second paragraph as “The authentic taste of China… often has a definite “funky” dimension…” etc.
To sum it up and going back to the “quest” concept. If you and Barbara are on a quest for good Chinese restaurants in Paris, it depends on what you mean by “good”. Does that mean restaurants that suit your tastes and idea of what Chinese food should taste like, or restaurants that offer a very close, if not identical, version of what Chinese food really tastes like in China?
If you are looking for the latter, I can tell you that Q-Tea does qualify in the way that it is a good synthesis of a few Chinese popular styles, with the chef’s personal talent added. There are other authentic Chinese places in Paris which deliver different tastes, since of course there is not “one” Chinese cooking.
Hi Ptipois – Thanks for chiming in.
To be clear: We were not expecting the expected, which was actually what the attraction of Q-Tea was/is: I have never had home style Chinese cooking of any region* and was eager to try this chef’s food, which has been so widely praised.
I don’t have anything close to your knowledge base, so I wouldn’t (and didn’t) dare say what the food we ate at Q-Tea the other night “should” have tasted like. But I can tell you that it had no funk whatsoever, funk being something neither I nor “qwestlove” (I have to talk to him about this alias) find off-putting. The drab slices of eggplant were heavy with oil, and the lion’s heads were bland. Not delicate, not subtle, but bland. I can also say that I didn’t particularly enjoy it.
(I am genuinely curious about the pork in the eggplant dish. To me it tasted like Italian sausage, but I am aware that there are myriad flavors in Chinese cooking that westerners are rarely, if ever, exposed to.)
I would like to believe that it was an off night, and I have little doubt that I would have enjoyed the celebratory, linguistically-aided meals you and John had at Q-Tea more than the one I had the other night. But this raises another set of issues which, though I find them very interesting, I don’t have time to respond to right now
Maybe over dinner at one of your favorite Chinese addresses in Paris?
As for the “quest”, I’d say we’re looking for reasonably authentic examples of regional Chinese cooking, and it’s heartening to hear you say that it exists here.
*It just occurred to me that what Margaret Xu is doing at Yin Yang in Hong Kong could possibly fall under this rubric, though the range of influence she shows may be too broad. I honestly don’t know. (But I loved my meal there).
“…the cooking is “homestyle”, with very fresh ingredients…”
Perhaps the main courses, but what about the frozen dumplings, as described by Alec Lobrano?
Those dumplings were cardboardishly awful when I ate lunch there last week. The soy sauce seemed to have some kind of sweet citrus mixed in with it. There was no succor.
As someone who has eaten a fair bit of different regions of Chinese cuisine in New York—Manhattan and Queens—I don’t stand in awe of something purported to be “hard to understand.” Oh, come on. We were not all raised on blanquette.
I have yet to eat good Chinese food in Paris. Q-Tea certainly was not.
Hi Barbra!
Over dinner, yes, with pleasure!
In all fairness Q-Tea does have ups and downs. The downs, I believe, are caused by inferior sourcing for some products. For instance at times you’ll be able to taste there some incredible cured sausages directly brought back from Canton by the chef’s wife, but when it comes to fresh products I believe the chef should try and find better-quality stuff – avoid pangasus fillet for instance.
Sharon, I do not quite get what you mean. The authenticity of a cuisine can be measured by comparison with the experience of tasting it in its place of origin. Nothing should be “hard to understand” about it. Either you like it or not, and that is beside the point of authenticity. Either you can tell it is close to the original or not, and that is beside the point of it tasting good or bad to you. Eating Chinese food in Queens and Manhattan, however good it is, does not give you the means of comparison, as eating Chinese food in Paris, even the best I can find, would not give me those means either if I hadn’t tasted food in several regions of China in China itself. Only because I have been there regularly and repeatedly I can tell that some restaurants in Paris deliver some sort of authenticity. Now that Barbara has eaten in Hong Kong she has a precise idea of what Cantonese food, very near its place of origin, tastes like.
[...] day after dinner at Q-Tea, my dining partner sent me a heavily-researched dossier of Chinese addresses in Paris (this friend [...]