XO Sauce

Chinese restaurant chefs occasionally delight in mystery. You need only look in some restaurants at the wall posters full of Chinese writing, detailing dishes that chefs believe no Westerner would be interested in eating. One of the most recent exercises in restaurant mystery surfaced in Hong Kong less than a decade ago, when small dishes of a spicy, pungent, oily paste that had been placed on restaurant tables for years began to attain culinary status and to attract attention. It was calle