Enter the restaurateurs, who quickly found locating and recruiting top chefs to be their toughest challenge. And as Asian economies grow, and privatization of the restaurant industry in China continues, competition only intensifies for those few who can really cook. San Gabriel restaurateurs scour Asia, searching out gifted chefs who can produce wonderful food—the “taste of home”—at competitive prices.
To hire them, they vie with restaurants in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou/Shenzhen, Taipei, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Yet San Gabriel Valley restaurants have an edge. U.S. wage scales for chefs are as high as any on the Pacific Rim, and no West Coast city offers a dining audience comparable in size and discernment to the San Gabriel Valley’s.
So serious chefs come, to produce authentic, high-end Chinese cuisine. Some of the dishes may have familiar names, but the approach is different. Menus display a dazzling variety of ingredients, flavors, textures, aromas, and visual—sometimes sculptural—presentations. Cooking for an all-Chinese clientele, these chefs have been able to abandon any effort to please the Western palate by preparing the food they call Meiguorende kouwei, “American taste.” Instead, they cook Zhongguorende kouwei, “Chinese taste”—the taste of home.
Henry Chang is a veteran of both styles. A short, sweet-faced man with a strong build, he spent 11 years in Chinese restaurants on L.A.’s west side. There he was mystified by the ironclad habits of his customers. “Westerners, they like to sit at the same table, order the same dishes,” Chang says in Chinese. “The waiter tries to recommend dishes, but they don’t want to try them.” He reflects a moment. “Maybe I am the same! Whenever I go to Norm’s, no matter if it’s ten times or twenty, I always have the same thing—T-bone, eggs, and hash browns.”
Nevertheless, Chang grew tired of serving the same presauced dishes to his patrons. “Beef with broccoli,” he sighs. “Kung pao. They always say they want to ‘try’ your kung pao. What does that mean? Try yours to see if it is better than average?” Finally, in 1993, he gave up on the Anglo diner and came to the San Gabriel Valley, where, he says, everything is “Chinese taste.” First as the head chef of the esteemed Islamic-style Dong Lai Shun, and later at his own place, Juon Yuan, he was able once again to showcase the impressive range of skills he’d gained during his long and rigorous apprenticeship.
A well-chosen meal at Juon Yuan enchants the senses and articulates the meaning of “Chinese taste.” “Turnip with tilapia soup” is not turnip at all, but delicately julienned daikon, which softens to translucent simplicity in a rich, milky broth. The sweet, briny essence of the fish goes into the broth, and the whole tilapia itself is removed and offered on the side—plain, still steaming, almost redundant.
“Snow cabbage with peas and bean sheet” is a surprisingly irresistible sauté of lightly preserved mustard greens and fresh soybeans tossed with ribbon-cut bean-curd sheets—a by-product of the tofu-making process—which evoke the consistency of al dente pasta. And then there is his most famous dish, “ice fish in soya bean sauce.” A sea bass fillet comes out sizzling, encrusted with a layer of crunchy, golden preserved soybeans, which give the silky fish a meaty, misolike counterbalance.
Chang uses store-bought preserves, but he does salt and pickle his own vegetables and ferment his own rice-wine sediment. His proficiency at such obscure cooking tasks is a legacy of his training, as is his separate-but-equal fluency in various provincial styles.
Born poor in Taipei, one of 13 children, the young Chang was sent out to work in a restaurant because there, at least, he would eat. He began by washing dishes, and then, over a two- to three-year period, progressed through a series of stations, each strictly confined to the skill at hand: vegetable prep, dough prep, dim sum, carving vegetables into flowers, birds, and animals. Moving through several well-known establishments, including Taipei’s Grand Hotel, he graduated to cold dishes and then to actual cooking, preparing food in each provincial style. “At the end,” he says, “you can do it all.”
Shanghai and Sichuan are his specialties, but Juon Yuan serves dishes from many regions. Each group is listed separately on the signboards outside, and on the tabletop promotional cards. This is no accident. It is a fascinating feature of Chinese cuisine that provincial styles are always cultivated and offered apart from one another, never combined for a “fusion” approach. In this respect, the art of cuisine stands squarely in the center of Chinese aesthetic tradition, which has long valued perfection over innovation, mastery over genius. Indeed, the histories of many Chinese art forms are journeys of progressive refinement and elevation—unlike the Western arts, which prize originality and have evolved through a succession of aesthetic revolts.
Nowhere is this distinction clearer than in Henry Chang’s memory of his Taiwan boyhood. Then, the great chefs of Taipei were those who had fled the mainland in 1949 as personal cooks to the Nationalist generals. Thrown into exile, they brought each of their regional cuisines to life, side by side. Yet even here there was no fusion. Each chef sought the summit of a provincial style rather than the possibilities of combination. Today, at Juon Yuan, Chang does the same.
In his restaurant Green Village, the remarkable Wang Haibo works in only one style—Shanghainese. Really the cuisine of the Yangtze Delta—the provinces Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the cities Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, and especially Yangzhou—the food of Shanghai may be China’s most sophisticated. Certainly the city today stands for money, global urbanity, and gourmet tastes.
Pinterest
