Crazy for you Stirring up the hot pot for you all day, every day BY ANDY KING
	Stir Crazy Stir Crazy 579 Congress St., Portland, (207) 871-1689. Open Sun through Thurs, 11-9:30 Fri and Sat, 11-10:30 Visa and MasterCard accepted Take-out available

As late as last week, and perhaps still today, the entrance to Stir Crazy was adorned with scaffolding, due to some repairs being done to the surrounding building. In larger cities, it’s commonplace to walk under these support structures while moving from block to block. But here in not-that-bustling Portland, it’s an unusual sight. Eating inside the restaurant, then, with its steamed-up windows framed by the repairs, conjures up feelings of being — as strange as it sounds — someplace a little more cosmopolitan. And since here in Portland we’re used to the typical Chinese restaurant as a sprawling, dark, and buffet-laden warehouse, a modestly sized, brightly lit place right downtown is a well situated addition to the city’s ever-growing ethnic dining culture.

Like a lot of the newcomers, Stir Crazy’s emphasis is on fresh and fast. But not too fast. That’s a good thing. You’ll wait for your food just long enough to know they’re cooking it, and not heating it, to order. Listen carefully and you can hear the scream and hiss of the vegetables you ordered hitting hot oil in an even hotter wok.

You’ll have more of a restaurant experience than at any of the Chinese joints with "express" in their names, and your food will be, hands down, better. For take-out customers, try to call ahead, and be happy that your take-out order of stir fry doesn’t come flying through the door as soon as the words come flying out of your mouth — that guarantees something scooped and soggy, and you can do soggy at home.

A brief aside: Why do home stir frys tend to come out soggy? Unless you undercook the vegetables, many home attempts to replicate what they do at places like Stir Crazy come out, well, not at all like what they do at Stir Crazy. Ninety percent of the time, if you’re doing everything else right, it’s your stove. Home gas burners, the ones most home cooks opt for, go to a maximum of 15,000 BTUs on even the best models, like Viking. As we all remember from science class, a BTU stands for British Thermal Unit, or the energy it takes to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. So while BTU output is not necessarily an indication of how hot you can get your wok, it will determine the recovery time of the heat of your pan, which is essential for quick-frying multiple components in a short period of time. Fewer BTUs means more sogginess. To contrast, commercial burners go up to 60,000 BTUs, and you can even buy outdoor home stir-fry burners that go up to 167,000 BTUs. They’ll cook your sesame chicken and vegetables in less than a minute, total.

So now that I’ve thoroughly depressed you about your home cooking — hey, if you like what you make, feel free to ignore the last paragraph — I can go on and say that Stir Crazy does a great job with the stir fry. On their special menu section dedicated to it, they have 24 sauces listed, which can go on your choice of beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, or scallops, all served with steamed rice. The rice was not the pressed, malleable type you normally see at Asian restaurants, but a looser, seemingly longer grain.

We like the sticky stuff better.

The dinner portions hold true to the centuries-old edict that one entrée at a Chinese restaurant should serve three, and in the case of the Pu Pu Plate for two (traditionally known as the Pu Pu Platter), 63. If you do choose to get the larger Pu Pu with a friend, get it for dinner rather than a starter, and for the love of God don’t order anything else. That sampler comes with fried spring rolls, crab Rangoon, chicken fingers, teriyaki beef stick, BBQ pork, and chicken wings, which are not the little pre-frozen bar-sized ones, but fried whole wings of real chickens.

The Steamed Meat Dumplings were much more flour casing than interior meat, but still enjoyable with a sweet house-made dipping sauce. Both sampled soups, the Won Ton and the Hot and Sour, were decent — the man next to me was raving about the Hot and Sour, so I ordered it and was pleased as well. The Stir Crazy Special Shrimp was floured and stuffed with breading, then fried and served in a brown sauce (the chef’s sauce) with steamed broccoli; the Crispy Sesame Beef was adorned with toasted sesame seeds and orange slices. All were ripping hot, extremely filling, and nothing was overly salty or greasy. They make it a point to print on the menu that they use no MSG.

If you want this food on the cheap, however, you’ll have to hit it up for their decent luncheon deals. Lunch for two, with appetizers, ran about $20, while a dinner for two was about $40, but that also included at least two meals of leftovers. What’s Chinese food without taking home those little white boxes?

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com