My dinner with Andrea and the fuqi feipian gang

It’s not exactly Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Paris, but in its own way, it’s definitely a movable feast.

A hungry, adventurous band of Angelenos -- a core group of about five, usually augmented by three to seven ever-fluctuating invitees -- has gone out to an early Sunday dinner three or four times a month for most of the last nine months.

The fare is almost always Asian, usually Chinese, and as befits the polyglot culture of Los Angeles, the group is ethnically mixed. The first time I accepted an invitation to join them, our party of 12 included seven of foreign origin -- one Chinese, two Japanese, four French -- and five Americans. Occupations were as varied as psychiatry, photography, geology, hairstyling, doughnut-making and graphic artistry. The doughnut maker is Jim Nakano, known in food circles as “The Donut Man,” the name of the Glendora shop where he makes and sells meal-sized, fresh strawberry and peach doughnuts.

Other participants often include a chef or two -- Chris Behre from Cinch, Robert Gadsby from Noe, Ricardo Zarate from Sai Sai and Kimmy Tang from Michelia, as well as Catherine Elliot and Keith Williamson, parents of Brooke Williamson, chef and co-owner of Amuse Cafe in Venice.

For my first dinner, we went to Shenyang in El Monte, where we had 17 different dishes, including kidneys with cumin; pork brisket soup; pork belly with pickled nappa cabbage; dry tofu with shredded beef and hot peppers, and several dishes whose translations don’t do them justice.

The total charge, per person, tax and tip included: $10.

These gastronomic excursions began last fall, after Andrea Rademan, a freelance food and travel writer, heard about a new book, “Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles,” written by Carl Chu, a 31-year-old Taiwan native who grew up in Downey.

“I love Chinese food, and I got so excited when I found out about this book that I almost jumped out of my skin,” Rademan says.

Rademan is garrulous, with bright blue eyes and hair somewhere between white and platinum. (She won’t say how old she is.) Like many non-Chinese who are passionate about Chinese food, Rademan had long been convinced that she never got the “real, authentic stuff, the dishes they serve the Chinese people” in Chinese restaurants. So she not only bought the book, she tracked down Chu and invited him to dinner with friends, at a Chinese restaurant of his choosing, with instructions to order dinner for everyone.

“We had so much fun I asked Carl if we could do it again, with more people,” Rademan says. “For the next several months, we had Chinese food every Sunday night until he finally said, ‘I’m sick of Chinese food.’

“So we started mixing in Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, even Mexican and Afghan food. But we still do mostly Chinese.”

They’ve eaten such dishes as wowotou (a bread made of coarse cornmeal); fuqi feipian (brisket and tripe cooked together, sliced and served cold with crushed peanuts and a drizzle of extraordinarily hot chile sauce); “candied flossing” (deep-fried yams coated with caramelized sugar and dipped into an ice-water bath), and water-boiled beef (slices of beef simmered in a broth seasoned with chile peppers fermented chile bean paste, soy sauce and Sichuan peppercorns).

Having had three meals with the group in its varying configurations, I have the sense that most of them see their outings as a rare opportunity for culinary exotica on strange terrain. It’s like going to China with a personal, Chinese-speaking guide who knows where to find the best, most authentic food and who clearly enjoys his role.

Chu, who’s also writing a book on the Chinese immigrant experience in America, takes special pleasure in finding restaurants whose menus have dishes that are new even to him. “You don’t see kung pao chicken in every Chinese restaurant anymore,” he says. “There are now so many Chinese here, from so many different regions, that they don’t have to cater to Americans.”

Rademan, who lives in Venice, grew up in Philadelphia, near that city’s Chinatown, “where we ate at least once a week. Chinese food was always my favorite.”

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In the beginning

About 15 years ago, Rademan began inviting friends to join her for occasional dinners in Chinese and other ethnic restaurants. Often, she’d make reservations in the name “Ahn Li,” hoping to be taken for Asian, at least until she showed up.

But it wasn’t until she met Chu that the dinners became institutionalized. Now she spends a great deal of time every week organizing each meal, deciding who among her many friends and acquaintances would like which of her other friends and acquaintances.

“I would never find restaurants like these on my own,” says Japanese-born Miyoko Nakano, president of the Glendora Sister Cities Assn. and one of Rademan’s group. “I like the Chinese places best. The food is so unusual and new and exciting, and there’s more variety than there is in Japanese restaurants here.”

That variety -- that exoticism -- was much in evidence when I joined the group a second time, at a Chengdu restaurant in San Gabriel. Its name translates as “The 12 Dishes of Badu.”

As is usually the case on their trips, the Anglos in the group were the only non-Chinese in the restaurant. This time the menu and signs were in Chinese; none of the wait staff spoke English.

Chu ordered 13 dishes for us, among them: white tree fungus; whole pork rump simmered with soy sauce, rock candy, star anise, cinnamon bark and rice wine; pigs’ feet with pickled mustard greens, onions and chile peppers; cubed tofu with fermented beef paste; hacked frog with mushrooms, and stir-fried chicken with peppers so hot that one of the guests couldn’t speak after swallowing two bites.

Total bill, including tax and tip: $9 a person.

The restaurant is listed in the newly published second edition of Chu’s book, titled “Chinese Food Finder,” and he hopes to do similar books in New York and San Francisco.

I’ve heard him say that he thinks Rademan “secretly wishes she were Chinese,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if she followed him, chopsticks in hand.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.