Black Ginger

Located at 435 Dolley Madison Road in Greensboro, Black Ginger offers Asian fusion cuisine for lunch and dinner seven days per week. There is a sushi bar, and private dining is available.

I was surprised and disappointed when Chinese Kitchen abruptly closed as it was one of Greensboro’s better Chinese takeout spots. Black Ginger opened quickly in its stead late last month and while the concept is different, it is a worthy inheritor of this location.

For the unfamiliar, Black Ginger isn’t visible from Dolley Madison Road proper. It instead may be accessed via Tomahawk, Mapleleaf, or Milner Drives. For those who know the spot from its Chinese Kitchen days, the interior has been pleasantly refreshed. New booths and better lighting make for a clean, bright, and contemporary space.

Black Ginger’s menu skews Japanese. Bento boxes, miso, and an impressively large sushi menu (including deep fried rolls) are among the offerings. However, there are also Thai curries and a few Chinese standards (Kung Pao and orange chickens and Mongolian beef). Vegetarians won’t be put out trying to eat here, either.

For our first visit, my wife and I went with a chicken bento box and a steak house fried rice respectively and split a tornado roll. The tornado roll, a fried sushi concoction featuring spicy tuna, cream cheese, pineapples, jalapenos, and a wasabi cream sauce, was easily the highlight of the meal. It was crispy, the flavors balanced nicely (my wife, who hates wasabi, found no complaint with the sauce), and there was plenty of it to go around. Sushi definitely seems to be Black Ginger’s strength, and their other rolls merit future investigation.

The rest of the food was more uneven. The bento box included a nice salad with a ginger dressing that featured hints of citrus. Accompanying gyoza (fried unless you request otherwise) and cucumber roll were fine, but the chicken was a bit rubbery. The steak fried rice offered a welcome medley of vegetables (corn, peas, carrots, and onions) and made for perfectly satisfying comfort food though I would hesitate to call it exemplary.

What is exemplary is Black Ginger’s service. My wife and I were greeted warmly upon entry, our server capably answered questions and brought food out with a smile, and staff checked on us throughout our meal to ensure that we were enjoying everything.

For the quality and quantity offered, Black Ginger’s pricing represents a good value. Bento boxes (protein, vegetables, sushi, gyoza, salad, and rice) range from $9 to $12 depending on the protein, and many entrees are priced about the same. A lot of the fried and specialty sushi rolls go for around $12, including the tornado.

Given how recently the restaurant opened, Black Ginger is off to a good start. Some dishes are stronger than others, but stellar service and a bountiful sushi menu make it worth trying. Now if only they’ll add cold sesame noodles.

8.25/10 if you stick to sushi

7.5/10 otherwise

Hillbilly Elegy

In this memoir, Marine veteran and Yale Law graduate J.D. Vance describes growing up in a dysfunctional family in the Rust Belt of Ohio and the influence of the rural Appalachian values instilled by his Kentucky-bred grandparents.

Admittedly, I approached this book with skepticism. Theories of social rot/moral decay rank up there with the purported impact of violent video games in terms of eye-rolling and dead-horse tropes. Nevertheless, I am glad that I gave it a chance. Vance has a powerful tale to tell, and it’s one worth hearing no matter who you are or where you come from.

With commendable candor, Vance describes the difficult circumstances faced not only by him and his family but by the economically depressed communities they inhabited as well. Raised by a drug-addicted mother and her string of short-lived husbands and boyfriends, the overweight J.D. is propped up by his fierce gun-toting grandmother and encouraged to make something of himself. He eventually does, but not without considerable difficulty, first as a Marine disdainful of authority and later as a conservative white man from a poor background at Yale.

The portrait that Vance paints of working-class white America is not a flattering one: he shows hillbilly culture to be insular, distrustful to the point of paranoid, and prone to addiction and violence. Though some have attacked him on this point – and he arguably does paint with too broad a brush — the book is not a hatchet job. Vance also talks about the loyalty shown by family and the positive influence of his grandmother, traits that served him well later in life.

If this were the extent of Hillbilly Elegy, it would be a fine example of a contemporary memoir. Unfortunately, Vance also dips his toe in the pool of sociology and political science, and these aspects of the book are far less convincing. To Vance’s credit, he creates distance between himself and the conspiracist vitriol embraced by white hillbillies. His contention that certain bureaucracies (i.e. Social Services) are ill-equipped to meet their needs is also not without merit. And yet Hillbilly Elegy is very light on solutions. Perhaps unfairly, this book was hyped as something that could explain the rise of Trumpism. By that measure, it’s a failure.

If you ignore the faltering attempts at achieving broader relevance and focus on the personal story told within, Hillbilly Elegy is an engaging, inspiring read, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, but never insipid or canned.

7.5/10

Property: Stories Between Two Novellas

In this collection of ten stories sandwiched between two novellas, Shriver explores what it means to own and not own everything from belongings to housing to even one’s self. In “The Standing Chandelier,” an artist’s quarter-century close friendship with a former lover irks his insecure fiancée. In “Domestic Terrorism,” a thirty-something son steadfastly refuses to get a job and leave his parents’ home. In “Kilifi Creek,” a carefree young woman abuses her hosts’ hospitality while vacationing until a close call forces her to reconsider her perspective. And in “The Subletter,” a pair of American expat writers in Belfast feud over who has more right to live in and write about the city while uncomfortably sharing a flat.

Far too often, short story collections are marred by both maddening inconsistencies from one story to the next as well as an annoying tendency for stories to peter out toward the end. In Property, Shriver deftly avoids both of these pitfalls. While some pieces stand out more than others, there is a unity of theme and purpose here. Her endings are also resolute and often appropriately flavored with a cruelly ironic twist.

This is not to say that the collection grows repetitive. The stories vary considerably in setting, transporting readers everywhere from London to New York to North Carolina and Kenya, all with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude. Similarly, Shriver deploys narrators both young and old, male and female. What unites them all is a sense of being dispossessed: of the comforts of home, of parental authority, of common courtesy, and more. Shriver uses her savage wit to lampoon lazy and self-involved millennials, the permissive generation that preceded them, pretentious would-be artists, and all other manner of rootless wanderers through life. Her blunt critiques come across as excessively mean-spirited at times and the absence of likable characters can prove exhausting in large doses, but on balance, there is enough dark humor and insight to render Property a worthwhile read.

8/10