Since Savannah Flavors launched earlier this year, I have had a blast writing the ‘Chefs’ Cravings’ column each week, transcribing the casual conversations of food folks as they talk about their favorite restaurants and go-to orders.
Though I have not made an official tally, I know that no other eatery has been mentioned more often or with as much gusto as E-TANG.
Back in March, Savannah Magazine ran “Where Chefs Hang Out,” a piece perhaps inspired by my own, in which Caroline Hatchett’s words and Jason B. James’s photography captured professional cooks’ adulation of our town’s China doll. In one of those photos, owner David Xin smiles as he watches chopsticked chefs Juan Stevenson and Steffan Rost tuck into a dozen E-TANG dishes.
Xin has every reason to be ecstatic, having created an authentic Sichuan restaurant that earned esteem and popularity almost immediately.
Only a few weeks from now, every happy family that loves E-TANG’s eats will be even happier when Xin and his partners open its dim sum sister restaurant in the erstwhile home of CO on Whitaker Street.
Because of what he calls “great leadership and servers,” the amiable restaurateur feels good about being able to split time between both restaurants as the second one comes to life not even a mile from the first.
“I have a bicycle,” Xin said with a smile.
Eight minutes door to door: piece of mooncake.
‘TOUCH THE HEART’ WITH FOOD
Even though Whitaker’s closed upstairs a few months back, E-TANG Dim Sum will occupy only the ground floor space in the building that sits a block south of Bay Street.
The dining space includes a similarly sized bar as the one at E-TANG, left largely unchanged from its Bier Haus days, and Xin estimates Dim Sum’s seating capacity will be just three tables fewer than the forebear resto despite the smaller overall space. Instead of distinctly isolated booths, long benches and rectangular tables will be separated for dining duos or put together for larger parties.
The concept is right there in the name, an eatery that features a wide range of dim sum, which translates not to “dumpling” but to “touch the heart.” Originally, such filled doughs were intended to whet, not to sate, an appetite. Yum cha - Cantonese for “drink tea” - is when enough dim sum are eaten to make a meal.
At the new restaurant, dumplings of all kinds will comprise one menu, and the other will offer a short list of “classic Sichuan food” from the grill, said Xin.
Filled with chicken, pork, shrimp, seafood, and vegetables, each petite pocket is handmade and scratch-made in-house. Those fabulous E-TANG soup dumplings will be there along with char siu bao (barbecue pork buns), jiaozi (pan-seared potstickers), siu mai (steamed), scallion pancakes, and more.
With 9-to-9 operating hours, Xin hopes E-TANG Dim Sum breaks into the breakfast market, too.
“If they want some Asian food, they have nothing,” he said of early-rising downtown denizens and Savannah visitors. “In the morning, they want something light and easy because three hours later, they are going to have lunch.”
Very common in China, a morning meal of coffee or an iced tea and a couple “not too oily, not too heavy,” dumplings may find a following.
E-TANG EMPIRE
At the end of 2023, Xin and his E-TANG group started actively looking to expand their Sichuan foodprint in the Hostess City.
“First of all, Savannah is growing really fast, so we’re trying to bring some authentic Chinese food, North, South, Hong Kong,” he explained. “We were thinking dim sum was a really good idea.”
For anyone curious about the enterprise’s moniker, Xin said, “E stands for ‘eat’ and ‘East’, and TANG stands for the Tang Dynasty,” which he called China’s most famous imperial era in which lands stretched from Shanghai and the East China Sea inland to Chengdu and the cuisine’s namesake province in the country’s heartland.
“Our dishes have lots of spice,” Xin said proudly of his restaurant’s take on Sichuan recipes, rich in chili peppers, garlic, and the eponymous pepper. Food fanatics who crave E-TANG’s crispy spicy chicken know full well the uniquely delicious flavor.
From the outset, the goal of Xin and his partners was not to dive deep with a prospective property’s cost, preferring to put that money toward the food and the crew.
“The chef and the workers, give more benefits to them than spending the money on the grease trap and hood,” he reasoned, so it took a while to find the former CO location.
“We started to talk in December, and we signed the lease in May,” Xin recalled, those big ticket kitchen infrastructure pieces already in place. Renovations began by the end of June with brand-new appliances, reimagined interior layout, and updated decor.
Xin is eager to open the doors on Restaurant #2. All of the city paperwork has been filed. The fire inspection was done on Monday.
“We’re just waiting for the Health Department,” he said and plans to open the day after that gauntlet is run, hopefully by the end of the month.
“Good,” Xin said about how he feels in this proverbial home stretch before he paused and addied, “and nervous. You know, everytime a new restaurant opens, it has a lot of issues.”
“After maybe a couple weeks, it will be okay.”
Actually, after a couple weeks, I will be sitting down with Xin again to talk about E-TANG’s next new concept: a noodle bar that will open in the longtime Persepolis property before the seasons change.
FROM 212 TO 912
In 2020, Xin’s Taste of Sichuan closed in New York City after a six-year run, a culinary casualty of the pandemic. Later that year, he followed the advice of some food friends and made the big move south.
“I have friends in Savannah, and they are in the restaurant business doing sushi,” Xin shared.
“When we talked on the phone, they said, ‘Hey, you should come to Savannah because we have sushi, American, Italian, Thai, everything’s very good, but no Chinese food. Not at all.”
Instead of reopening another restaurant in the Big Apple and facing the competition of a metropolis, they suggested he corner the market in a smaller city.
All things considered, E-TANG happened pretty quickly. In May of 2020, Xin had his idea and started looking for the right space, though he said, “We have confidence with our food, so we really didn’t care about the location.”
“We had one requirement: a grease trap with a hood,” he added.
E-TANG opened in 2021 in the space dearly departed by Bier Haus after chef-owner Marshall Urstadt passed away after a months-long battle against COVID-19. Xin kept the bar and the steins, so former fans of Urstadt’s bona fide Belgian-German brew pub feel a familiar presence in what is a distinctly Asian eatery.
“The previous owner, Marshall, a lot of people have told me about him. It’s so sad. He was a very good person,” said Xin.
A restaurant space that fittingly went from one good person to another.
In my admittedly brief time writing about Savannah’s food scene, the unquestionably best part has been meeting and becoming friends with hundreds of genuine, generous, delightful, dedicated, and talented people.
To call any one owner, general manager, chef, bartender, or server ‘the best’ would be unfairness and folly, but I dare say that E-TANG’s David Xin is right at the tippy-top.
E-TANG Dim Sum (10 Whitaker Street) will soon be open seven days a week (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.).
