What was this Chinese tofu dish?

Cafe Society
1

There used to be a restaurant in Chinatown that I would go to with my Chinese college friends that had a certain tofu dish that I liked a lot. It was basically a single large chunk of very soft tofu served warm in a bowl with some kind of black sauce, a drizzle of spicy sesame oil and a sprinkling of peanut crumbs.

Unfortunately, like an idiot, I never managed to learn what it was called, just which page on the Chinese-language menu I had to point at to order it (I do remember that one of the characters in the name looked like an R, if that helps any).

I wandered through Chinatown on the weekend and thought I might drop in to said restaurant for lunch, but apparently it has closed since I was last there, and my college friends are long dispersed, so I turn to the Dope for your collective wisdom. Does this ring any bells for anyone?

2

Could you be a little more descriptive?

At the mention of the black sauce, it reminds me of black bean sauce (savory/spicy) or hoisin sauce (sweet), possibly plum sauce. From the sound of it, it seems like a rather generic dish, probably invented by the chef on staff.

3

This may be too simple, but there’s a dish I love that’s sounds like what you are describing. I don’t know the chinese name for it, but on the English menu it’s simply panfried tofu with black bean sauce.

It looks pretty much like this…

4

JaneSaintClair, nope, that’s not it. The tofu isn’t fried or anything, just warm.

Taenia spp., I don’t know what the sauce is; something salty/savory, maybe bean-based (definitely not hoisin or plum), but there’s a lot of it, to the extent I thought of the dish as a “soup”, but my friends said it wasn’t.

5

Sounds like a vegan version of mabu dofu.

6

It might be tofu in oyster sauce. LINK

7

How so? Mabo dofu looks like little pieces of tofu cooked in a red sauce; this is one big piece of tofu in a black sauce.

8

I’m pretty familiar with oyster sauce, so I’m going to say no. The sauce was relatively bland, probably necessary since it was about 1/2 of the contents of the bowl…

9

You did see that the recipe is diluted with a fair amount of water, right?

10

Was it something like this?

It sounds pretty generic actually. You could experiment by buying sesame oil, soy sauce, silken tofu and some other garnish of your choice.

11

Nope, that’s not it. The mystifying / interesting part of the dish is the sauce (the tofu was a pretty quick ID :slight_smile: ); it was thick (opaque) and soupy and tasted like something which I can’t quite put my finger on (sorta nutty?), definitely not soy-sauce or oyster-sauce based. I’ve searched around Image Google and found some sesame and tofu dishes which look sorta similar but appear to be sweet and served cold…