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Sauerkraut Fish Gets Headliner Treatment in the East Village
Photo: Grub Street
Last week, on the stretch of Third Avenue just below 14th Street, a new restaurant opened with a name that may seem curious to anyone who’s unfamiliar: Sauerkraut Fish. It conjures Bavarian bouillabaisse, but the phrase is a common translation for the Sichuan dish suancai yu, or “sour-vegetable fish.” The sour vegetable in this case is pickled mustard greens, a member of the cabbage family, hence “sauerkraut,” though suancai is much saltier, and drier, than the German stuff with a cruciferous, earthy depth that permeates this fish stew.
Sauerkraut Fish, the restaurant, is mall-bright and lined with orange banquettes that sharply contrast the teal of Fantuan delivery bags waiting at the host’s stand. The menu is centered on the house specialty, in original or spicy — with mix-ins like vermicelli or mushrooms — served in a massive bowl, even the single portion, for $26. It’s filled with sliced white fish surrounded by a golden, greens-dappled broth and a pile of dried red chiles in the center. The poached slices of flaky snakehead fish — like a less muddy catfish — go gelatinous by the skin, which has a soft chew. The combination of seafood stock and umami-dense pickled greens is pungent, tangy, and steamy, like taking a warming swig from a jar of peperoncini.
In The Food of Sichuan, Fuchsia Dunlop dates suancai yu’s origin to the 1980s, when it “became all the rage in urban Chongqing, and later in Chengdu, in the 1990s.” Here in New York, the dish is available, though it’s hardly a mainstay: At Szechuan Mountain House, which has a few locations around town, it goes by Fish in Sour Cabbage Soup; Uluh on Second Avenue serves flounder with homemade pickled cabbage. So I was surprised to see sauerkraut fish as a headliner in non-Chinatown Manhattan. Sauerkraut Fish offers enough dishes to function as a regular Sichuan restaurant and delivery-app go-to, but nobody dining inside the restaurant treats it that way. When I went, every table had a bowl of brothy fish stew.
Outside Manhattan, Nai Brother, with locations in Borough Park and Long Island City, just opened on the Upper West Side about a week ago. Flushing is home to Fish with You, Seven Fish Cuisine, and Tai Er, in the Tangram mall, where 12 other groups were ahead of my party on the wait list this past Saturday night.
A glass wall between the restaurant and mall gives a window into the pristine Tai Er kitchen to the path of shoppers on the other side. I watched two synchronized cooks prepare sauerkraut fish, one hoisting a raft of poached seafood with a wok-size strainer and arranging it all in the center of an ample dish of soup strewn with wilted greens that their partner had just poured, followed by a bubbling waterfall of oil into which the chef had tossed a scoop of whole dried chiles and green peppercorns from a large wooden bin next to the station; it took approximately 30 seconds. This efficiency is no doubt owing to experience: While Tai Er Tangram was its first restaurant to open in America, the company operates 600 locations across eight countries with logistics that include a dedicated farm for mustard greens in Yunnan Province that are pickled at a facility in neighboring Sichuan.
Those greens slightly disappeared in the soup compared to the version at Sauerkraut Fish, where the pickle is saltier and more robust in addition to being cut into larger pieces. I preferred the spicy broth at Tai Er, however, which has a more potent peppercorn buzz, an effect that was elevated to its final form in an order of Sichuan peppercorn fish. It’s bathed in a smooth gravy containing a dose of aromatic green peppercorn that refreshes as it numbs — and it’s already my pick for au poivre of the year.
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