Healthy Chinese: Song Song's Zhou & Bing

Right across from the "Skybar" on 5th Street NE, you may or may not have noticed that a placed called Song Song's Zhou & Bing opened on the Downtown Mall with little fanfare around the first of the year. The owner, Song Song (a name her grandmother bestowed), says she has done no advertising. Her husband is a professor at UVA, and they have been here for about two years. When Dish visited, she was all alone behind the counter.

After getting her graduate degree in biochemical engineering, Song Song left China to do cancer research at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Later, she earned her MBA at Case and landed a high-powered  job in Connecticut working for a medical research corporation.

But all those years of study and research led to a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome, crippling her hands and fingers.

If there were a silver lining, she says, it was her interest in healthy Chinese cooking, which she learned to help her own healing and now offers at the small restaurant to help yours.

Song says her carpal tunnel was so severe she couldn't even hold chop sticks, and that it was from working too hard.

"I had to do exercises every day," she says while stirring a pot. "It was not easy to get here."

The menu is simple, featuring zhou, a kind of porridge that the Chinese have been eating for thousands of years; and bing, a wheat flour-based flattened bread that's filled with things like pork and leeks.

A pork and leek bing is just $2.50, and a porridge of hearty zhou is just $2, which, Song says, improves the health of the stomach, bowels, and kidneys. Everything, she says, is made from scratch, with no MSG or color additives.

"I am setting the price low," says Song, " so I can make it easier for people to eat healthy food."