Last year, we had this great idea for the Missouri Botanical Garden’s annual Chinese Festival.
Set up a griddle for making jiangbing—bing, for short—the street food crepes that are a Chinese food stall standard, right in the middle of the garden’s Gladney Rose Garden.
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Advertise it as “Bing Around the Roses.”
We never pursued the concept. And now we’ve been beaten out. Not at the MBG, but on a little side street in the middle of the Delmar Loop.
Bing Bing (567 Melville) opened recently, featuring those crispy, savory crepes that have become one of the newest food sensations that’s drifted West from the East.
Jiangbing are Chinese cuisine’s answer to that age-old culinary question: How can we maximize our dining opportunities by coming up with a food suitable for eating while we are in transit from one restaurant to another?
Let’s say you’ve had the pulled pork plate with slaw and herb and garlic fries there at Salt + Smoke on Delmar, and now your destination is down the street to Seoul Taco for a late-lunch bowl of kimchi fried rice. But hey, that’s a hike. How about a tiffin and bever to fortify you on the journey?
That’s where Bing Bing comes in, a perfectly comfortable and cozy eatery inserted just off the Loop. Figures of some long-necked Nubian women adorn one wall; presumably they are not an artistic effort at appealing to the jiangbing-loving Nubian-American population in St. Louis but are leftovers from the recently departed Ethiopian café that previously did business here.
If you have been to China, especially in the northern parts of the country, jiangbing stalls are familiar; they’re the equivalent of dirty water dog carts, found on street corners everywhere. There’s a big, flat griddle, a tub of batter, and an array of ingredients. Place your order and a ladleful of the batter is spilled on the griddle, firming almost instantly into a papery crepe.
If the idea of a Chinese crepe sounds as culturally tumbled as poutine sushi, remember that rice grows mostly in the more temperate south. Northern China, including Beijing, includes a lot of grain flours in its cooking. Bing is a catch-all term: it refers to all kinds of flat breads. Jiangbing is just one of the skinnier versions.
Bing Bing has the griddle, all hot and ready and you just need to let the cook know what you want on your order. This is where it can get a little complicated; you need to study the menu—or just go with one of the many standardized options.
Bing Bing’s jiangbing all start with the basics: The batter’s spread, as soon as it sets, the chef breaks and egg on top and swirls it around to add a fine layer. After that, it’s a smoky-sweet schmear of Hoisin sauce, then choices expand—lettuce, chopped scallions, piquant pickled Chinese vegetables, ham, roasted pork, grilled chicken, even fried fish.
The eatery’s principal clientele so far are Chinese college students who have descended here and on other happily authentic Chinese eateries that have opened recently in St. Louis. Although “authentic” is loosely defined in the case of Bing Bing.
We ask what is the most popular jiangbing here for the Chinese students. The owner grins. “They like fried chicken.” Not one of the uh, “classic” ingredients of jiangbing, but it’s interesting. So is the pan-fried pork cutlet Japanese tonkatsu, chopped and scattered on the crepe.
The menu advertises, without any real explanation, jiangbing “Shandong” and “Tianjin” style. Shandong crepes are usually made of batters with coarser flours, corn and soybean, which leads to a rougher, hardier texture in the crepe. Tianjin style means green, mung bean powder is used; the texture is finer and more delicate.
Tianjin, up on the northern coast of China, is the home of jiangbing. It’s been serving it for more than 2,000 years. (There’s a totally believable tale about soldiers under the command of the brilliant military strategist and literary giant Zhuge Liang using their shield in the field to cook the first jiangbing, which is worth mentioning only because Liang’s literary name, Wolong, obliquely inspired a movie title: Crouching Dragon.)
Anyway, we went with the Tianjin original. Our crepe is layered with lettuce, scallions, Chinese pickled mustard greens, and—wontons?
Where’s the youtiao?
Youtiao is a kind of fried bread. Think of the consistency of a fried pork rind, without the fatty saltiness. It’s a stable in Tianjin jiangbing; it adds a crusty, airy crunch. It’s so essential to the crepe that even on the menu it says, “Tianjin Jiangbing Guozi.” The guozi refers to the fried bread youtiao.
“We can’t get it in the lengths we need yet,” the chef explains. “So we use fried wonton skins.” While he’s in a confessional mood, he also admits the batter, rather than being made of green mung bean flour, is a composition of soybean and wheat flours. “It’s going to have a different consistency to the crepe.” Tianjin style crepes without that flour is like making pizza without… well, we were going to say “mozzarella” but this being St. Louis, let’s just say it would be strange.
But we let it go. We watch while he folds the big crepe into thirds; it looks like a long burrito or an Indian dosa. Using what resembles a wide putty knife, the crepe’s sliced into two lengths; it goes on a plate or slipped into a paper sleeve if you’re on the go, headed to your next dining destination.
We opted to eat there at Bing Bing; there’s a minimalist décor and a giant screen TV being installed. We also want to try some of the drinks here.
“Aurora” is a good translation for the Chinese on the drinks menu: “Polar lights.” The name comes from the appearance of the drink when it’s poured, a darker layer underneath a lighter one in the clear tumbler; it looks like the Northern Lights. Stir it and the layers swirl. Raspberry, cantaloupe, strawberry, soy milk. We tried one with passionfruit that was intensely fruity, like a drinkable dessert. Bing Bing also has milk tea, which is served amusingly in what look like light bulbs. It’s a Hong Kong thing, black tea mixed with condensed milk. The light bulb cup’s amusing but it prevents one trick for evaluating milk tea by examining the frothy residue that remains in the glass, proof of the condensed milk’s high butterfat.
The jiangbing’s delivered to the table on a beautiful black plate. It does, as the chef noted, have a slightly different texture than the street side versions made with mung bean flour. It’s a bit less crusty, a little softer, more like a flour tortilla. The wonton skins? They’re not bad. You’re expecting that light crunch of fried bread; the wonton texture is heavier. It’s like the difference between a potato chip and a thick tortilla chip. The rest is just what one would expect of a jiangbing: It’s light, faintly spicy, the spongy layer of scrambled egg, the bright, sour kick of the pickled greens, the smack of Hoisin sauce, the roasted aroma of the black sesame seeds scattered across the top.
Bing Bing has a lot going for it. They’ve hedged their bets by adding side dishes like fried chicken slathered in hot sauce, beef bowls. Plans are being made for duck soup with noodles and slowly braised oxtail soup, two other street food standards. But the jiangbing, while definitely “foreign,” are not bizarre and should be tempting to non-Chinese diners. The drinks, including smoothies, will help.
On the other hand, with only a single griddle, things can slow down on a busy day. (It’s the same in China. Long lines are typical in front of a jiangbing stand. The trade-off is that when you finally reach the griddle, you know your crepe is absolutely fresh.) Our waitress says the wait, even when the place has been full, has never been “more than half an hour,” which is nice, but 30 minutes is a long time to wait for a snack. (The Thai ice cream place not far away suffers from the same limitation.)
It’s entertaining to eat at places like this, places that are taking chances on introducing new foods. Jiangbing are already one of the hot “in” dishes, with stalls opened in West Coast locations and in Boston and NYC. Can Bing Bing make its crepes a thing in St. Louis? Try one next time you’re strolling in between meals and need a snack and you’ll see why it should.
