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.
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.
But the Shanghai of Wang Haibo’s childhood was a starkly different world. He remembers only poverty and hunger. During the Cultural Revolution, his father (a university graduate and school-board official, the sort of person particularly persecuted) was sent away to labor in Manchuria and the family slapped with the shameful label fan geming, “counterrevolutionary.” Wang’s mother was demoted to the lowest possible job in an outdoor vegetable market, where she earned the U.S. equivalent of $6 a month. With two children and two grandparents to support, and the grandfather sick with cancer, she could not feed the family. “There was never enough,” he remembers now. “After dinner, I was always hungry. By the time I woke up in the morning, I was starving again.”
Wang recalls the day he realized food was to be his lifelong preoccupation. “I was in fourth grade,” he says. “The Red Guards had taken away everything, even our umbrellas. My sister and I had to walk a long way home from school in a hard rain. We were so cold and so hungry. When we got home there was nothing to eat. No money to get anything. From that moment, I knew.”
Memories of humiliation still gnaw at him. “School was a place where anyone could do anything to you. Several boys beat me once. I was so enraged! But I couldn’t take them all. So I chose the head boy, and chased him until he fell down and broke his knee. The next day, the school broadcast the story and ordered me to make a cash restitution and give him nutritious foods—meat, fish, eggs!” Even now, the memory of having to give away such precious, treasured food brings tears of deprivation to Wang’s eyes.
When the Cultural Revolution ended, in 1976, Wang went to work in the Shanghai city government. With this job came one of the time-honored privileges of the Chinese bureaucrat, something which was to utterly change his life—group trips to restaurants.
It was as if a curtain had lifted. Real cuisine was a revelation. “Right away I saw it was more than flavor. It was art, color, and shape. It had to appeal to the eyes. When I tasted it I said, ‘I deserve good food. I deserve to eat well.’”
So he set out to learn, devouring books and magazines and eating out at every conceivable opportunity. “In time, I came to realize I could taste food better than my colleagues. I knew how something was going to taste as soon as it arrived at the table—by how it looked, by the aroma. Just as today I know the ingredients of a marinade by the color, by the smell, without tasting it.”
At 34, Wang Haibo faced a choice: stay in China, or leave. He felt America had the best opportunities, even though his “nonexistent” English was a problem. Still, at this point, he had not cooked, except for a few meals (“attempts,” he calls them) prepared in the kitchens of Shanghai friends. Nevertheless, when he arrived in the U.S. in 1996 he found there was one job for which no English was required—low man in a Chinese kitchen.
Life was hard. The restaurant was far from his rented room, and he walked to and from work. Though the largely Chinese world of the San Gabriel Valley enabled him to get by without English, as a new arrival he felt looked down upon by the earlier immigrants. He did the work they no longer wanted: cutting chicken, onions, and pork; peeling shrimp; cleaning the oven and the wok.
While he worked, he watched. After 18 months he decided he wanted his own restaurant, whatever the risk. This was the American dream. “I was very conscious that the average restaurant fails after a few months. But I had made a promise to my parents. I told them, ‘I will not let you down.’ I had only one purpose when I stepped onto the ground in America, to succeed.”
So he opened a tiny place. Still, he did not cook—not yet. “I got a chef to work for me. I only made some of the soups. But I watched the chef very closely. Finally, I thought, ‘I can do this.’” He stepped behind the wok, and things went well. Revenues climbed. Soon he was making enough to open a second restaurant, and then a third—Green Village, which has brought him both success and reputation.
His secret? Aside from his clearly exceptional sense of taste, he subjects everything on his menu to constant inspection and review. “Now I look back on those chefs I used to work for. They were good. But what is different between us is this: They learned the dish and they stuck to that way of doing it. Not me. I am always looking to improve. Very important to my success is putting my whole mind to it. Every time a dish leaves the kitchen, I am thinking, ‘The taste, the aroma, the appearance, how can I make it better?’”
Twitchy, hyperkinetic, and painfully thin, Wang is as driven a man as I have met. His large, restless eyes roam his restaurant incessantly. He rarely sits still. I’m not sure if he sleeps. (He once called a mutual friend at 12:45 a.m. to discuss the challenges of getting water weeds from Hangzhou for a certain soup.) He has long, light hands, philosopher’s hands, but these too give away his life’s obsession, for they are mottled with the multiple spatter burns of the fanatical Chinese cook.
For my family and friends, Wang made an elaborate 15-course meal that demonstrated how even the food of one region, the Yangtze Delta, includes all the diversity and complexity of “Chinese taste.”
Take his braised meats. Shanghainese cooking is known for these long-cooked meats in dense, gravylike sauces. Wang’s most famous dish in this hallowed genre is the unattractively translated “wrinkled skin pork knuckle,” which is actually a fresh, uncured ham steamed and fried and braised for hours in a profound pool of soy, spices, and rock sugar, until it is cut open and the hanks of meat fall away at a touch. Wuxi-style spareribs—Wuxi being the city that claims to have invented this dish—are braised in their own mahogany sauce, in this case accented with star anise and cinnamon. In one of Green Village’s top sellers, “chicken with chestnuts,” Wang’s gravy marries the sturdy flavor of chestnuts with caramelized garlic and ginger, plus a touch of oyster sauce. Succulent “braised fish tail” (actually the lower third of a carp, a cut rarely singled out for special treatment in Western cuisine) gets a spike from pounded ginger, green onion, and Shaoxing wine.
A dish listed in the casserole section as “clam with steamed egg” is one I wish I could have every morning. A savory layer of hot egg custard conceals a small treasure of clams in intensely flavored chicken broth at the bottom. And everyone loves the Zhejiang dish called “yellow croaker in liver moss”: Finger-size fish fillets are deep-fried in batter laced with water weeds that lend a mottled green color and a musky, maritime taste—yet the crisp coating is so eggshell-thin, the fish seems almost oil-free. A dunk in pepper salt sends it over the top. But that name! Did he mean to say river moss? “Oh, right,” says Wang. “River. Not liver.”
Awkward though these translations are, they are probably not responsible for keeping such artistic cuisine from a wider audience. So what is? This is a question imbued with poignant longing for Wang Haibo and Henry Chang; they speak often of the struggle to connect with the Western palate. Maybe, as Chang suggests, Westerners just don’t like to experiment. For his part, Wang thinks they have been misled by recent culinary history. “The problem,” he says, “is that Americans were catered to by the early chefs who developed the American style. So people think this is the food, this is the culture. The first few generations of immigrants didn’t have the courage to introduce the real food to the public.”
Yet things are changing, however slowly. More than two decades into the current immigration boom, authentic Chinese food can now be found in our largest cities—by those who seek it out. And in an enclave like the San Gabriel Valley—where food is art, standards are sky-high, and “Chinese taste” is king—a whole world of it has been born. It is the American dream at work, and it enriches us all.
Juon Yuan
140 West Valley Boulevard, No. 210
San Gabriel; 626-288-9955.
Green Village
140 West Valley Boulevard, No. 206-207
San Gabriel; 626-288-5918.
Lovers of authentic, ultraspicy Sichuan food should also try Chung King (206 South Garfield Avenue, Monterey Park; 626-280-7430), where standout dishes include “boiled fish slices in hot sauce” (or any of the dishes on the shui zhu section of the menu, headed “Boiled Dishes in Hot Sauce”), “quick-fried beef with green onion,” fu qi fei pian (translated as “beef and lung slices with special hot sauce,” though it contains no lungs), and “fried peanuts with small fish,” an addictive Sichuanese snack.
(note: The restaurants above all have English menus, but in none of them will you find much English spoken.)
Planning Your Own Chinese Banquet
Arranging your dream dinner party at a restaurant where very little English is spoken can seem daunting, but all it takes is a bit of effort. Special-occasion Chinese meals are set up in advance. If you don’t live too far away, your best option is to visit in person; this makes menu-oriented communication easier and also demonstrates your dedication to planning a superior meal. If a visit is impossible, then call and ask for a staffer who speaks some English. (Most establishments have at least one such person—be patient, you may have to call back to catch their shift.) Ask them to fax you a menu.
Make it clear that you want “Chinese taste,” not “American taste.” Then ask the restaurant to suggest its best, most popular dishes, including any that might not be listed on the menu. If there is a particular ingredient you don’t want (I, for example, have never met a sea cucumber I liked), this is the time to say so. It might take several calls to agree on all dishes, since they will check your queries with the chef. Finally, the total food price will be fixed (beverages are ordered at the table).
Most importantly, try to leave your preconceptions behind. Be open! As Henry Chang says, “To get a good meal, be willing to try something new.” —N.M.