Che Che's Chinese Restaurant, Kutchan

Che Che's, Shei Shei's ... I don't really know it's romanji equivalent but when you're off to Che Che's in Kutchan there's only one place you're headed. At the traffic lights past homac heading towards Niseko-cho sits this little un-assuming suburban Chinese restaurant.



Inside there’s lots of red and gold and screens partitioning parts areas of the room apart.



Kim orders a Kirin, the Gold. It’s a longneck of beer that comes with the smallest beer glass I’ve ever seen …



We start the evening off with thinly sliced pork with chilli and cucumber. Paper-thin slices of steamed pork belly are topped with a cucumber ribbon salad. It’s all drizzled with a soy dressing and chilli oil and is just delicious. The bright red chopsticks that are sitting to the side of the big white bowl are the perfect tools to attacking this delicious combo.



The chilli prawns are cooked to perfection. Plump little morsels sitting in a velvet-corn-starch chilli sauce full of ginger and spring onion. There were exactly 5 little green peas sitting on top.



But the crab omlette had exactly 6 little green peas sitting on top. The omlette itself was paper thin, encasing a mountain of sweet crabmeat. It was all swimming in a pool of some silky brown sauce that all seemed to work really well together.



Oh, the egg soup! I do love a good soup … This one a peppery broth laced with ribbons of egg and black fungus. It’s a big bowl, but we have no problem finding the bottom.



I always manage to save just a little room for dessert. The specialty here is apricot kernel sweet tofu. A generous spoon of the sweet curd is sitting in a little syrup. There is a nice marzipan taste that lingers in the mouth and it’s topped with a few slices of rockmelon, 3 tiny little ju-jubes a few red beans and a sprig of mint.



It’s kinda cool to still have a pretty decent Suburban Chinese Restaurant just down the road, even though we’re now living on the little island that is Hokkaido, way up north of Japan.