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Yam Fon Restaurante in the Dorado Mall

Go there for the oysters

by Eric Jackson

According to all the conventional medical wisdom, this reporter should not go there for the oysters. That's gout food.

Alas, it's a hard and dangerous job, but someone has to do it.

I was with my mother on a mission that took us to the El Dorado area about lunchtime. It had been awhile since I had been inside one of the smaller parts of the shopping complex in El Dorado, the little Dorado Mall. It's faded and peeling on the outside, but being renovated inside. The doctors of acupuncture and Chinese herbalists who used to maintain their offices upstairs seemed to have moved, at least during renovation, but the building is still primarily an outpost of Panama City's prosperous new Chinatown. On the ground floor in the back there's this unpretentious-looking place, the Yam Fon Restaurante. Neither of us had been in there before, but we went in for lunch.

I mourned a few years ago when Alfred's, a Chinese restaurant near the Hotel Continental, shut down. They used to have these sizzling oysters, heavy on the ginger and with lots of green onions, that kept me coming back time and again. I hadn't found anything remotely similar since.

Until, that is, I did lunch at Yam Fon. We ordered a pot of tea, pot stickers, combination chow mein and oysters a la plancha.

The concept of pot stickers as an appetizer didn't quite register and they came last rather than second after the tea. No big deal at all. They were very good: dumplings with a mildly spicy filling of pork and vegetables, browned on one side and then steamed just right.

The tea was with jasmine and in the Chinese style, loose rather than in a bag. The great advantage of this over the Orange Pekoe American standard is that you wouldn't want to put sugar in it.

The chow mein was standard, nothing to complain about but nothing extraordinary.

But the oysters! They came out on a sizzling plate with sliced bits of fresh ginger root and sticks of green onion, and were quite a visual and olfactory show before the taste test.

(Chinese restaurants are often problematic for occidental kids. Certain tastes are acquired by adult taste buds, and one of the usual attributes of childhood is a reluctance to try different things. But especially for preschoolers, one of the best ways to distract their attention and get them to behave in a restaurant is to order anything sizzling or flaming. When the waitress brings in the sizzling oysters, the kids will have their attention fixed on them. Whether the child will have a taste for oysters, which will have to be cut up for the little ones, is another question. Some do.)

As compared to what they used to serve at Alfred's, these oysters were a bit more well done --- safer from the health perspective --- and not as heavy on the ginger. I think you can get them heavier on the ginger if you ask for them that way.

The oysters at Yam Fon are great, and reason enough in themselves for you to check this little place out.

This was, however, my first visit and there were things on the menu that intrigued me but which I didn't order. I shall return.

(By the way, I ate all those purines and lucked out. I was not hobbling around on a sore foot the next day. Sometimes a reporter has to go in harm's way, and comes out unscathed.)