2000s Archive

Kitchen Warriors

Originally Published October 2003
At first, these San Gabriel chefs struggled to please American palates. Then they decided to cook from the heart.

It was when my husband and I hosted a dinner party at Juon Yuan Restaurant, just east of Los Angeles, that I realized we’d found one of the world’s hot spots for fine Chinese cuisine. Yes, we had negotiated our menu in advance, encouraging the chef to give us what he thought were his greatest dishes. Yes, we knew that the area—the San Gabriel Valley—was home to some 200,000 food-loving Chinese. But still the meal soared beyond our expectations. One of our friends, who regularly eats in three-star restaurants, remarked that the dishes ranked with the best French and Italian food he’d eaten anywhere, at any price. And yet this 11-course banquet, exclusive of alcohol, cost only $20 per person.

Out came clam and winter melon soup, an enchantingly simple marriage of delicate flavors; spareribs gently seasoned, wrapped in aromatic lotus leaves, and steamed to fall-apart tenderness; and pillowy steamed sea bass dumplings spiked with powerfully earthy jiu cai, yellow chives. With each collective gasp of admiration, my curiosity grew. Who were these consummate artists, laboring behind closed kitchen doors? What lives had they left behind to come here and cook in Southern California strip malls? And—most vexing of all—what was it exactly that made their food so totally different from most Chinese food in America, so stunningly subtle, so like the best to be had in China itself?

I soon found myself knocking on that particular kitchen door. Over the next few months I went back again and again to talk with Henry Chang, chef-owner of the multiregional jewel Juon Yuan. I also spent time with Wang Haibo, chef-owner of the equally wondrous Shanghainese restaurant Green Village.

The two men could not be more dissimilar. Henry Chang, the product of a traditional apprenticeship in Taiwan, built his exceptional skills through long instruction and experience. Wang Haibo, on the other hand, is a man haunted by a childhood of semistarvation. He became obsessed with food early in life—first with simply getting enough of it to quiet his constant hunger, and later with exploring its highest artistic expression through the glory of Shanghainese cuisine. Unlike most Chinese chefs, he is self-taught and appears to draw from a well of native genius.

Yet when it comes to what makes their food so distinctive, Chang and Wang—along with other chefs and restaurateurs I interviewed in the San Gabriel Valley—are in emphatic agreement. They say “American style,” which comprises the vast majority of Chinese restaurant food served in the U.S., has evolved into a separate cuisine. It relies on a small range of premixed sauces, effectively keeping most dishes within a narrow range of composite flavors. “A little sweet, a little sour, a little crispy,” explains Chang. “Not salty, but a big, heavy taste.”

As they see it, restaurants mix up ready-made sauces so they can produce menu items that taste the same every time, even without top talent in the kitchen. “Three to four basic sauces,” says Wang. “White, red, yellow-brown, lemon…this way everybody can cook. If you can stir, you can cook. A restaurant catering to Chinese diners would never do that. Here it is one dish, one flavor.”

So this was the difference I had long sensed in 25 years of travel to China: dishes conceived and prepared individually, each matching mastery and imagination with fine, fresh ingredients. To serve such food, restaurateurs say they must have a critical mass of Chinese diners to support them. Here in the San Gabriel Valley, a sprawling patchwork of towns ten miles east of downtown L.A., they have found it.

Monterey Park today is predominantly Chinese, with towns like Alhambra, Rosemead, and San Gabriel following close behind. Given the culture’s reverence for food, and the Chinese habit of using restaurants as gathering places, it is no surprise that eating establishments jam every major street and fill one mini-mall after another. Yes, the Chinese-language signs lining the sidewalks also announce banks, doctors, dry cleaners, and real-estate agents—but it is food that rules.

All the regional styles are on offer: northern, Muslim Shanghai, Shandong, Sichuan, Yunnan, Hunan. There are noodle places, hot-pot emporia, and boba teahouses, with or without Internet access; Taiwanese delis and pastry shops and one-counter takeout joints into which you can duck for a bowl of soup dumplings or some fast rou bing, flat griddle cakes stuffed with spiced meat. There are cacophonous Cantonese palaces (each one seemingly the size of the Queen Mary), at their best in the daytime hours, when steel carts circulate with dim sum almost of the quality you’d find in Guangzhou or Hong Kong.

The original flashpoint for this demographic and culinary explosion was Monterey Park, a city formerly best known to the food world as the home of the Laura Scudder potato chip. In the late 1970s, a time when U.S.-China relations were thawing and many in Taiwan and Hong Kong were plagued by insecurity about their future prospects, Monterey Park was populated mostly by Anglos and Latinos. Then, in 1977, a young real-­estate agent named Frederic Hsieh announced to the Chamber of Commerce that the city was about to become a modern-day mecca for the next wave of incoming Chinese. Buying up all the property he could, Hsieh dubbed it the “Chinese Beverly Hills” and staged a PR blitz in Taipei and Hong Kong.

Hsieh’s insight was that these were affluent, educated immigrants who would not be drawn to some down-at-the-heels Chinatown. The stampede he sparked has turned a modest suburb into the most economically influential concentration of Chinese in the country. The San Gabriel Valley today is a hub of international business and a principal portal through which overseas Chinese investment flows into the U.S. Where these conditions prevail, great Chinese food must follow.

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