Lion's head meatballs (獅子頭)

During my first few years in the Bay Area, my fellowship friends would invite me to go after church with them to this restaurant called Bamboo Garden for lunch. It was one of the few restaurants that our friend AL (who had food allergies) approved of, so we ended up going there a lot! We usually let the older friends (or the ones who could speak Mandarin fluently) do the ordering, and we would usually end up with dishes like xiao long bao, pan-fried buns (生煎包), stir-fried rice cakes (炒年糕), as well as lion's head meatballs (獅子頭). Before moving to the Bay Area I had never had this last dish before, and it quickly became one of my favourite dishes there because a) MEAT and b) the sauce was *AMAZING!!!*. I loved the dish so much that I would internally panic about having to split the dish evenly among the table hahaha. I may or may not have snuck entire meatballs at a time onto my own plate ;)

A couple years ago, I suddenly stopped seeing reviews for "Bamboo Garden" on Yelp—because it turns out the owners had sold the restaurant and set up shop elsewhere! I eventually tried out their new place (XLB Kitchen) and once again attempted to order the lion's head meatballs, but to my dismay they had changed their menu and were now serving the clear soup-based version of the meatballs. For a while I was pretty sad about the loss of this beloved dish, and it wasn't until quarantine this year that I realized I could try recreating the dish at home. Surprise, surprise, it turns out the dish was not so hard to replicate after all! It tasted almost exactly like how I remembered it from Bamboo Garden, and my roommates declared it good enough to finish in one sitting :') The only tedious part is the deep-frying: I ended up shallow-frying the meatballs instead (3 at a time) in a small saucepan, and that worked well. As soon as I get another pound of ground pork I'mma try this dish again; it was that good and satisfying :)

(original recipe from The Woks of Life)