If you listen carefully, you can hear crackling inside the scorching-hot glazed casserole. It’s the sound of fan jiu, crispy rice, forming at the bottom of the clay pot, the vessel that this subterranean Cantonese restaurant in the East Village has taken as its name.
When the pot arrives in front of you, straight from the stovetop, a server lifts the lid, releasing a poof of rousing steam. The surface of the rice is crowded with toppings: maybe a shower of scallion rings over curls of shrimp and succulent chicken, which the server paints with sugar-thickened soy sauce. Now is the time to fluff the grains — gently, to avoid disturbing the transformation happening at the bottom.
Alexander Yip, who opened Clay Pot on St. Marks Place in February 2018, said he felt compelled to open a restaurant dedicated to the dish, which dominates his small menu. Bo zai fan, as it’s called in Cantonese, is an economical comfort food eaten throughout Hong Kong. But as restaurants like Yummy Noodles and A-Wah have closed in New York City, the dish is becoming less common here.
“For me, opening the restaurant was a way to preserve the memory of getting a clay pot on East Broadway,” said Mr. Yip, whose parents moved to Manhattan’s Chinatown from Hong Kong in 1976.
CreditAlfredo Chiarappa for The New York Times
Mr. Yip, 24, opened Clay Pot with the help of Julian Yu, a family friend and chef from Guangdong Province, China. The two spent several months testing the rice, merging methods from Mr. Yip’s family recipe and Mr. Yu’s professional one. “It really is an art,” Mr. Yip said.
The restaurant is barely wider than its double-door entrance, and if you sit at the counter seats you can watch the choreographed process. A pot of water and washed jasmine rice is set over a burner until it bubbles voraciously. The flame is reduced, and the pot is tilted to one side and then the other, redirecting the heat and preventing the rice from burning.
When the grains of rice are plump, but not quite finished, a medley of precooked toppings is added. After a few more steamy minutes, the dish is done.
The finished product is proof that this humble ingredient can be nuanced, walking the line that separates sticky from distinct, tender from glutinous. Alone, the rice is modestly flavored; potent cured meats are traditionally used to season each bite.
At the restaurant, there are seven toppings for your clay pot — you can choose two, three or all of them. Each one is as flavorful and texturally pleasing as the last, like velvety strips of beef and creamy fillets of glazed eel. But if it were up to me, slivers of glistening lap cheong, cured pork sausage, would be a requisite for those who can eat pork. The jerky-like sausage sweats into the dish as it steams, coating each grain with savory sweetness.
If you need more flavor, there are condiments: another version of the sweetened soy sauce (thinner and made with less sugar) and an otherworldly mince of ginger and sweet scallions tempered with lots of oil.
By the time you make it to the bottom, the rice will have formed a hardened shell. It can be loosened with the edge of a spoon and some leverage, releasing nutty, toasted chips.
The clay pot rice is finished cooking in roughly 18 minutes, but it rarely takes that long because there is always a cluster of pots on the burners. Snacks make the wait feel even shorter. Sliced, seared pork belly topped with soy and salted chopped chiles is as good as it sounds.
A second location of Clay Pot opened in the West Village in March. It is roomier, with a bigger kitchen and different small plates, like crisp salt-and-pepper chicken wings.
The quick success of the restaurant surprised Mr. Yip, but to anyone familiar with nurungji, tahdig or any kind of bottom-of-the-pot crispy rice, fan jiu is an equally evocative pleasure.
For Mr. Yip, it’s nostalgic: “It reminds me of my childhood.”
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