Pre Fixe Date Night Dinner Series With Woo Can Cook

Join us for Woo Can Cook's Date Night Dinner Series, a prix fixe dinner series designed for an intimate and elevated dining experience, served at the Woo Can Cook counter at the Prescott Market. Hosted personally by Chef Wesley Woo, each evening features a four course menu served literally feet from the wok burners that its prepared on, going beyond our regular offerings. Featuring seasonal ingredients, experimental dishes, and inspired takes on Woo Can Cook classics.

Throughout the night, Chef Woo will share the stories, techniques, and inspirations behind each course, offering guests a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process that shapes every dish.

This Week's Menu:

First Course -

West Lake Soup is a classic Chinese-style egg drop soup that’s both comforting and deceptively simple. Our version starts with a rich house made broth base, infused with garlic, ginger, and rehydrated shiitake mushrooms for depth. Soft tofu, crab, and wisps of silky egg with a touch of white pepper and cilantro.

For me, this soup will always taste like childhood, our recipe is inspired by the version I ate as a kid from the long-extinct "Dragon House" in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

Second Course -

The Shanghainese "qiang bing" flat bread at its core is not too dissimilar from the more commonly found Taiwanese "cong you bing" or "scallion pancake/green onion pancake." Both are assembled very similarly, with a high hydration flour and water dough that is then rolling out very thinly, layering in scallions and sesame oil, and finally wrapping into coils to create nice flakey layers. For our qiang bing, the addition of yeast and baking powder is going to create a significant amount more rise, first in our proofing process, and again in our frying process, resulting in what I can only describe as more of a foccacia like texture, due to its fluffy, oily qualities.

Third Course -

The lion’s head meatball is a traditional Shanghainese classic most iconically made with larger, tennis ball-sized pork meatballs, then braised with bok choy and dark soy sauce, and finally served family style with rice. Most iconically, the lion's head meatball is unique from other meatballs you may have had because it is bound using exlusively corn starch (in lieu of the panko breadcrumb that you may more commonly find in European styled meatballs). The lighter, thinner texture of the corn starch both makes the meatballs uniquely tender and deceptively delicate to make.

Fourth Course -

"Jian Dui" is a dough ball made from glutinous rice flour that’s coated in sesame seed, and then filled with a sweet paste. It can be filled with many things, but most commonly you’ll find these filled with either sweet red bean paste, or sweet lotus paste (today we’ll be going with the latter of the two). Since glutinous rice flour and mochiko rice flour are very similar, you'll notice the jian dui has a similar chewy/sweet texture to the Japanese mochi ball, with the key difference in that the jian dui is deepfried and coated in sesame seed, giving it a crispy and crunchy exterior bite.

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