Ask a Foodie: New Kahala brings the steam buns in Carbondale

I took a short trip a little off of my beaten path last week and ended up in Carbondale, Illinois. It’s been a bit since I’ve been able to go there, and now that the bridge and connected highways are thankfully open, we were on our way.

Of course, I took the opportunity to try somewhere new and hopefully exciting. I picked the right place to try. New Kahala: Chinese Cuisine, at 600 East Grand Avenue. It has been open since 1992, which surprised me when I found out. It truly feels like a newer and more modern place than that, which is a good thing.

Situated across an intersection from one of the dorms of Southern Illinois University, New Kahala serves traditional Chinese and Taiwanese dishes. No buffet here; it is plate meals, but oh man, you will not leave hungry. More about that later.

They cut all of their vegetables and meat in-house, and it is all cooked fresh. I was prepared for a long wait, but it wasn’t really that bad. Take out orders rang on the phone steadily, and at one point two servers were both on phones taking orders. This place bustles.

I was delighted to see Pork Belly Sliders (Gua Bao) on the menu. Fall-apart soft pork belly was stacked into a steam bun and layered with green onions, peanuts and pickled mustard greens. Steam buns are a wonder, and I absolutely love them. Hard to find at a restaurant around here, they are a soft bread that is a little spongy, kind of like a marshmallow but more tender. To finish cooking the bread, it is suspended in a basket just above a pot of boiling water, letting the steam swell and soften it. The result is a slightly sweet pure white piece of heaven, soft and tender, with a chewy texture and a slightly sticky exterior. I’m trying, but I’m not doing it justice. It is different from anything else, and when stuffed with this pork belly, they are pretty close to perfect. My husband and I commented on how we could come here and just order these and be completely content.

But we didn’t! We ordered main courses, and the results were not disappointing.

I ordered Chicken in Garlic Sauce, and it came out on a huge plate. College students, please don’t waste your time with fast food. Come here, order some real food, and eat off of it for three meals, no joke. There were at least two pounds of fried rice, green peppers, carrots, water chestnuts, celery, bamboo shoots and thinly sliced chicken on that plate, all stir-fried together with spicy garlic sauce. It was spicy, but not unbearably so, and the flavor was garlicky and rich.

But my husband got the winner. Taiwanese Chicken Leg over Rice, such a simple, unassuming name for this meal, but it was amazing. Not just a chicken leg, but a whole slow-cooked quarter, tender and still on the bone, lay atop a mountain of rice and drizzled with brown gravy. Under it was a minced pork sauce, a highly seasoned ground-meat mixture I could have eaten all by itself. There was also some sort of pickled cabbage on the side, which was delicious when eaten with a forkful of the rice and chicken.

To round it all off, there was a “hard-boiled brown egg” on the side. This was the strangest thing, a brown hard-boiled egg. When he cut it open, the egg was brown all the way through, darker than the yellow yolk that still shone in the middle. Made in-house with a secret recipe, the egg was boiled and then marinated in a mixture that had to have contained soy sauce. It had a rich complex flavor embedded right into it, unique and delicious. I had never expected to find such rare flavors here, but I was exceedingly glad I had.

The prices here for the amount of food you get are crazy. We took home leftovers and ate two more lunches out of them, enough for both of us.

If you find yourself on the Illinois side and are craving authentic Chinese food, give New Kahala a try. Order the chicken leg and the steam buns. Your mouth will thank me.