Originally cooked during the nineteen-forties by laborers near the meat markets along the Yangtze River, who couldn’t stand to see the gristle and offal go to waste at the end of the day, mao xue wang became the regional chop suey of the working class. Next up was mao xue wang, a stew of ox tripe, duck blood, and beef tongue-which, legend has it, was conceived by a butcher named Wang-that arrived burbling in a lavalike soup that packed the heat of firecrackers ignited on your tongue.
Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker Szechuan Mountain House, with its koi pond, bamboo groves, and delicately pruned bonsai, styles China’s most famous regional cuisine for the ambience-conscious age, happily challenging the notion that vibrancy of flavor must come at the price of presentability. But the trio agreed that, although the portion was considerably smaller than usual in this fancified iteration, the crunch of the cucumber had been preserved, pairing more effectively with the marbled, gamy meat. “Ten years ago, everything would have come mixed together and marinating in the chili oil,” the older Gen X-er said, as he curled the meat around his chopsticks. Liang yi, which means “hanging clothes” in Chinese, is intended to evoke the way the strips of pork and translucently thin slices of cucumber are presented: draped on a miniature wooden rack, which is tented over a small bowl of minced garlic and chili oil. When the first appetizer came, it took a long, halting moment of silence for everyone to recognize the liang yi pork belly as a revamped, poetic version of the homely classic dish garlic with fatty meat.
On a recent Tuesday, two Gen X-ers and one millennial, all Sichuan natives, sat down under silk lanterns and poured themselves jasmine tea from a cast-iron pot into bone-china cups so fine they resembled the pearly inside of seashells. The best of what’s on offer at Szechuan Mountain House may be characterized as creative proletarian fare that is trussed up, made bourgeois, and consummately plated.