Ruminations- On Chinese Food

I don’t like food. I love it.

If I don’t love it, I don’t Swallow.

Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Since I am Chinese, having eaten Chinese food all my life. I consider myself somewhat fluent in the ways of Chinese cuisine, but particularly in the Chinese food here in these United States as I spent most of my life here.

My perspective is also colored by the foods that I ate while I was growing up in Taiwan, the foods that my mother prepared while we lived here, the foods that other Chinese ladies made as a part of our cultural celebrations. So it is that I observe with equal parts bemusement and befuddlement the way others view and experience Chinese food in the US. I mostly stay silent as my American friends rave about their personal favorites. I don’t want to burn bridges, and I don’t want to insult my friends, as they are mostly enthusiastic but lack the experience with the Chinese cuisine. I am sure my Indian, Greek, Italian, and Mexican friends feel the same about my bubbling enthusiasm.

We love food for many reasons, not the least of which is the eating experience, involving all five senses: taste, texture, aroma, aesthetics, and the sound of food being cooked or eaten, all make the experience unforgettable. Chinese food for me however, is something more. It is an emotional and nostalgic experience reminding me of the past, the people who were in my life at those times: my relatives, friends, and people who look like me, speak like me, and feel like I do because we shared the common culture and heritage. Hence my attraction to the “authentic” Chinese food. It is a way to regain that emotional center in turbulent times and reminders of emotional attachments to who I was, who I am now, and forever.

I have been to some very fancy culinary palaces along with some real hole in the walls, all in search of the elusive authentic Chinese cuisine.

Authenticity is a food court stand brave enough to serve deep fried stinky tofu filling the food court with the unique smell of frying stinky tofu while knowing that the people who matter don’t mind and the people who mind don’t matter.

Authenticity is a Buddhist temple operated vegetarian restaurant that serves vegetarian dumplings so full of flavor,  with the perfect mouth feel, so aromatic as to make me feel like smelling the fresh steamed dumpling was worth the trip; and so satisfying that almost every American vegetarian cook would fall to their knees and join the Buddhist temple in reverence.

Authenticity is a nondescript dive housed in a basement in the side alley of Boston’s Chinatown, hidden in the shadows of the massive chop suey palaces that caters to the tourist crowd; but whose food is so real and so good that it brought tears to my parent’s eyes as they were transported to their childhood tastes from their memories of China. That little basement dive, parenthetically, ended up owning all three floors of the building where they started.

Authenticity is walking into a serendipitous discovery in Muncie Indiana, a restaurant that just happened to be owned by the same person who owns the Asian grocery store next door. A restaurant where they served real hand pulled noodles that had just that perfect tension and bite as I devoured a steaming bowl of Zha Jiang Mein; where I hesitantly ordered a dish of mouth-watering chicken and experienced the most exquisite heat, spices, soft texture of the chicken, and the pleasure of the hot oil dripping down my throat, drop by heavenly drop.

Authenticity is walking into a seafood palace with multiple walls of aquarium which houses uncountably many different kind of sea creatures, where the unknown sea creatures are brought to your table to demonstrate that not only are they alive, but they are so vicious that they may eat you for dinner instead of the other way around. Yeah, seafood for the Chinese has to the alive and vicious or else they are no good.

Authenticity is also going into a nondescript American Chinese chop suey house in a forlorn town, have the owner walk to your table apologetically and begging your pardon because none of the dishes that he serves is recognizable to a Chinese person, and then having the chef cook up a simple but magical bowl of noodle soup that fills your heart as well as your stomach.

Authenticity is having the waiter of your favorite local place sidle up nonchalantly and whisper their specials that day that are not on the menu because they don’t often get the ingredient; it could be as simple as fresh pea shoots stir-fried with garlic, or as exotic as fresh razor clams. The magic word is fresh.

I treasure those authenticity experiences, but my taste in Chinese foods isn’t limited to the specific, elegiac experiences. As the following quote on the walls of Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton spells out:

Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.

Quidvis Recte Factum Quamvis Humile Praeclarum

Henry Royce. British engineer who was a co-founder of Rolls-Royce.

There are happy discoveries of little gems throughout the mass of Chinese restaurants throughout the world.

There is a Chinese buffet that always have steamed flounder on their steam tables. Contrary to the belief that most American customers will not often opt for steamed fish, that dish disappears quickly. Steamed flounder is not a unique dish, many sit down restaurants offer it on the menu, but their version just doesn’t meet the quality of this buffet place. I once asked the owner what the secret was. He said: we go to Windsor Canada every couple of weeks to buy the fish, to make sure we have the best fish in the area. He does this for a buffet place!

There are specific dishes that I will order repeatedly at specific restaurants, whether it is a simple stir fry dish or a soup, or a dim sum dish, they execute the dish the best out of any other, for whatever reasons. This does not guarantee that they do everything well, it is just that dish, or a few dishes. The chef has achieved mastery for a very limited bunch of dishes.

There was a very tiny Chinese restaurant in the downtown area where I grew up, it seated four tables of four, at best. A seemingly dismal listing of the dishes available was at the order counter, I was disappointed that we were eating there. My dad proceeded to converse with the lady at the counter. He came back to the table grinning from ear to ear, saying that we were in good hands. We were. It was an amazing tour de force by the chef. I lost count of how many dishes we had, each one more spectacular than the last one. My parents would have dinner parties in this tiny little place and their friends would spread its reputation by word of mouth.

Another place that I discovered myself was in a small strip mall. They offered a lunch buffet, nothing spectacular, just a couple of buffet tables worth of food. I found shrimp toast on that table. It was amazing because shrimp toast is expensive and difficult to execute. It is very easy to fry the toast too long and make the bread too greasy and soggy, and having it sit in the bin for too long can make the toast taste stale. This was perfectly executed. Intrigued, I started to order off the menu. As I became familiar with the owners, I come to find out that the chef, one of the family of owners, was a line cook in the Grand Hotel in Taipei, the showplace hotel and restaurant in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Taiwan. The state dinners for the government are often held at the hotel because the hotel is owned and operated by the government. The food at this little place was simple yet sophisticated.

There is a practice amongst the Chinese places of having Chinese menus available for those who can read Chinese characters. Many will complain that this is discriminatory, but the real reason they do this is because the waiters are tired of apologizing for those who insist on ordering these dishes and then complaining that they are not what they are familiar with, the stereotypical Chinese restaurant fares: egg fu yung, General Tso’s chicken, crab Rangoon, and moo goo gai pan. This separate Chinese menu business has disappeared somewhat because of the many American customers who have travelled to Asia. They have learned to know and like the traditional dishes there, and they, like us, are craving for those dishes. Note that as I also enjoy Korean and Japanese restaurants, those owners have quietly slipped a short menu in Korean or Japanese with the regular menu because they think I am Korean or Japanese.

As I had stated previously, I consider any dish that is rightly done worthy of my praise. I have found that the American Chinese restaurants can execute amazing versions of the stereotypical Americanized dishes, although they are rare. There are definite turn offs as well.

I never understood the crab Rangoon. The irony is that many Chinese people develop lactose intolerance. I grew up not eating a lot of dairy, when I moved to the Americas, I developed a definite love for cheese. I hit the pizzas hard and often when I was in undergrad, especially as I had access to some excellent Chicago deep dish pizzas. But middle age stopped all that dead in my tracks. The idea of cream cheese in fried wonton skin seems an anomaly at best, and stomach turning at worst. I do enjoy some fried wonton skin scattered through my hot and sour soup, so it isn’t the fried wonton skins.

The glow in the dark sweet and sour glop some call a sauce is another head scratcher. Too much of both, too sweet and too sour.

For me, a test of the chef’s “chops” at a Chinese restaurant is how they cook beef. Beef and broccoli are a good test. Mike Xing Chen of Strictly Dumpling YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/strictlydumpling fame rails against broccoli in any Chinese dish. I actually like broccoli, but it is very hard to stir fry correctly. It is either too raw and end up breaking teeth or too soggy and muddying the taste of the dish completely. It takes skills to stir fry broccoli, I don’t even try. The trick, as I understand it theoretically, is to blanch the broccoli and hold it out of the wok until the very last possible moment. One needs to cook the beef until it is still rare and then throw in the broccoli for a quick stir and then immediately send it to the table. The residual heat from the quick stir fry will cook the beef the rest of the way while the broccoli still retains an al dente texture. Understand that this is all a theoretical exercise for me as I have yet to succeed in doing this. I usually err on the side of overcooking the beef and undercooking the broccoli. I also don’t order the dish unless I had to. This skill of knowing the sequence and timing of cooking protein and vegetables applies across the menu for all stir fry dishes. Chinese connoisseurs call it controlling the heat. The family Chinese restaurants adds carrots, bamboo shoots, pea pods, water chestnuts to “fill out” a stir fry dish; that is to make it seem like the dish is more substantial than it is without using too much meat, saving on cost. But there is nothing worse than undercooked vegetables to detract from the dish. By the way, I have not seen places like Panda Express or PF Chang’s pass this test, it doesn’t fit the business model, although many Chinese owned restaurants cannot pass this test either.

I have had some decent General Tso’s chicken in my life. Not many, the sauce is usually too cloyingly sweet, and the breading makes the chicken too crunchy to chew.

Lemon or orange chicken is the same, too sweet.

Don’t even bring up chop suey.

The egg roll is a ubiquitous part of the Chinese menu in the US, the thick-skinned chewy egg roll is an unknown part of my youth. What I did know is the spring roll, thin crispy skin, tender and hot filling. The spring roll is the way to go, the egg roll is an abomination. Although some Chinese places are corrupting the spring roll as well.

Since I have become a fan of Uncle Roger, a British comedian whose schtick is to critique the fried rice techniques of celebrity chefs https://www.youtube.com/c/mrnigelng, I became much more discerning about the restaurant fried rice. What was once just fun and games as I watched the Uncle Roger videos became reality to me as I explored the nuances of cooking egg fried rice My own line in the sand is the brown colored egg fried rice. Brown comes from drenching the rice with too much soy sauce. Not only is the rice too salty but it changes the nature of the rice so that the soy sauce obscures the taste of the other ingredients. I am not saying don’t put soy sauce in the fried rise, tried that as well, to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but a balance of salt, MSG and soy sauce does the trick. How to get the correct proportions? Trial and error for your own taste. This is yet another test of the chef’s “chops”.

An interesting book written in 2008 by Jennifer 8. Lee is titled: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, http://www.fortunecookiechronicles.com/blog/about/author/. She tracked the historical artifacts of some of the dishes I have spoken about. Very interesting read.

There are some specific types of Chinese places that hold a place near and dear to my heart. These are culinary specialty establishments that makes my heart go pitter patter.

The Cantonese dim sum place and the roasting place usually are co-located. Dim sum had always been a special treat for those of us who do not live in cities where there is a large Chinese population. The diversity of selection is the key, they must have the traditional dim sum dishes, but they also must also have some variety; most places have incorporated the Shanghai dim sum along with the Cantonese dim sum. The roasted ducks, chicken and pigs hanging in windows of restaurants are ubiquitous in the cities with large Chinese populations. It entices my vision and my stomach, to the point of almost visibly drooling.

Relatively new on the Chinese restaurant landscape is the hot pot restaurant. Chinese hot pots are very different from the Swiss fondue yet are similar in principle. The Swiss use cheese or oil as the cooking medium, the Chinese hot pot uses a broth. In Szechuan hot pot, the broth is filled with a deadly combination of hot oil and Szechuan peppercorn, a dangerous surprise in every spoonful, especially as the broth cooks off as people cook the meats in the both. The Szechuan hot pot place became popular relatively recently, I welcome the innovation, although my own digestive system groans in anticipation of the pain elicited from both ends of my body as it realizes we are approaching a Szechuan hot pot place.

While ramen noodle places are becoming popular in many cities, and I love a good bowl of ramen, I still crave a traditional bowl of noodle that is not ramen.

I love the jam-pong, a seafood laden noodle soup from the Korean Chinese restaurants, as I do the Zha Jiang Mein, from both Chinese and Korean Chinese restaurants. Laksa’s from southeast Asian restaurants feeds a deep need in me.

One of my two most favorites are the Taiwanese beef and noodle soup, with rich, beefy and five spice infused broth, coupled with stewed and tender chunks of beef, and Chinese noodles; the second is the preserved cabbage and pork noodle soup, not spicy but rich in flavor; as well as the juxtaposition of  the crispy texture of bamboo shoots and preserved cabbage with the soft pork.

This is just a short summary of the Chinese foods that makes me happy and a summary of what does not make me happy.