Respect for Culture

I used to wonder why it is that restaurants had to be bound by one type of cuisine. Was it focus? Was your food simply going to be all over the place without the framework of one solid cuisine? Was it that the pantry was most economically efficient when kept within one canon of ingredients? Did it have to fit the ambiance of the restaurant, or did the ambiance have to fit the food?

Why does a restaurant have to be just French, or just Thai, or just Italian?

I was confused because I had already drawn two conclusions.

1) A successful restaurant needs a chef who is passionate about and can focus on a certain philosophy of food and its consequent preparation. That's how you create something memorable. If you have a driven and talented cook back there making the kind of food he himself/herself loves to eat, then the rest of the pieces seem to fall in to place. That's how you find those mom-and-pop ____ restaurants (insert Mexican, Korean, Spanish, Southern, BBQ, etc.) that just seem so damned good. There's heart in that. There's someone behind the stove who would like nothing more than to be surrounded by the food they grew up eating, love to eat and gain comfort from eating.

2) But the execution and all the details were indeed very important. Once you figured out what kind of food you were in love with, you did have to figure out how you were going to cook it. Are you planning on setting your customers up for a grand tour, 17-course tasting menu? Are you in to that kind of cooking? True, it garners the most respect (when executed properly), but it requires the best-staffed kitchen and the utmost discipline. Are you going to do clockwork (protein at 6 o'clock, veg at 10, starch at 2) a la carte plates spitfired out of your kitchen instead? Not that that should require any less craftsmanship or skill, but it is more flexible in timing and is better on the bottom-line. Tasting menus really allow you to exploit variety, and offer the full scope of your skills, whereas a la carte risks hit-or-missing far more. One is not better than the other, but they express one's "culinary soul" if you will, very differently.

But a conundrum emerges in that I like a lot of different kinds of cuisines, and even when eating within one kind, I like variety on the table, and then on the plate as well. Traditional restaurant theory didn't seem to match the way I liked to eat, and I felt it important that I cooked the food I loved to eat.

So I had beef with this somewhat unspoken rule that you had to stay within one cuisine. Fusion was a risk-laden venture at best, something I wanted to desperately avoid being called at least. But it just seemed unfairly confining to be required to have just a French kitchen, or a Chinese kitchen, or an Italian kitchen, etc.

As I mentioned before and I will die by the belief; I think a chef needs to cook the kind of food he himself likes to eat. Chef Jeff would always say, "I cook big, fat food because I'm a big, fat guy." And indeed, for such a high-ticket price, white-tablecloth restaurant, the portions were very generous. Our Mustard-Marinated, Roasted Amish Chicken entree was a full half chicken, two roasted plum tomato halves, a triangle of Parmigiano potato gratin, and a nice bunch of baby asparagus spears. Not to mention a healthy, 3-oz. ladle of brown shallot sauce. And although things didn't work out for him there, I like to think he made some good food in that place, and that people really appreciated his cooking, and could sense his heart in it.

So I've had to examine rather closely, how exactly do I like to eat?

Well, my number one thing is variety. Maybe my taste buds are fucked from smoking, or maybe my palate has the attention span of some upper class, soccer mom over-diagnosing ADD white kid, but I like to experience as many different flavors, textures and sights at dinner as possible. That's why I like to share entrees with my dining companions, and alternate bites of sausages at Hot Doug's, and I don't drown my rice with sauce when I eat Chinese food.

It's all about counterpoint. Thomas Keller said it best, he wants to capture the purest essence of a flavor for 2-3 bites. That way it's almost overpowering; it's so flavorful, but of a modest portion, so when you're done... all you can think is "Oooh, I just want one more bite of that," and then the next course comes and changes the whole game again. It's like bringing someone to the brink of orgasm over and over again; the anticipation, the tease makes the end result far more powerful, even if a bit painful at times.

I think the rice argument when eating Chinese sums that up pretty neatly. Our entrees at Pearl East, in true Chinese-American fashion, are dishes of chopstick-friendly proteins and vegetables sauteed in a flavorful, corn starch thickened sauce. A bowl of rice is served alongside and we humbly request that you enjoy. I would never be so pretentious as to "educate" a customer as to how to eat something, you should eat something however you damn well please. But it bothers me when I see the large majority of our customers dumping the bowl of rice in the entree, maybe even throwing in a few crunchy noodles, and then mixing the whole thing up. Every bite tastes the damn same then! Not to mention you destroy the fluffy nature of well-cooked rice. Rice lacks any significant flavor, but that's the point! You take a bite of the dish, it's very flavorful, then you take a bite of rice. Your palate is balanced and cleaned, and renewed to enjoy the next flavorful bite. It's why you sprinkle salt on watermelon, contrast heightens the experience. If you mix it all up, every bite is of the same flavor and textural note, and to me .. that is boring, and no way to eat. (Do me a favor and try it my way next time you order take-out, just dab a little sauce on the rice ... unless you're eating a curry. In that case, ladle on, Garth.)

So I take a lot of importance in variety. A menu should be designed to have many diverse aspects, and a dish should be designed to have contrasting yet complementary textures and flavors. Yet in spite of all this, I have come to realize that staying within a cuisine is rather important.

It would be strange to be munching on Southern fried chicken on one plate, and enjoying a a plate of bucatini alla amatriciana on the other. It might taste good regardless, but something just seems wrong about it. They don't belong together. They aren't Jasmine and Aladdin, finding love through adversity, and finding similarities in their differences. They actually don't belong together, and I forbid them to get married (the chicken and pasta, not Jasmine and Aladdin. I'm still hoping I meet a princess with a pet tiger, and to make exotic Mudbloods with her).

But I had to go further. Was it ignorance and narrowmindedness that prevented me from understanding this combination? Was I essentially being a culinary Republican, failing to see past my insecurities and fears to understand the bigger picture? The conclusion I came to was, no.

It came down to the word, "culture." A word even a child would throw around, but even an adult may not fully comprehend the scope of. I had to answer the question, what exactly was culture and why was it so important to food?

What was of great assistance was The Omnivore's Dilemma. Michael Pollan gets more scientific about it, talking about how a sizable chunk of our brain power is dedicated to figuring out what is safe and nutritious to eat and what is not, much like the rat, another successful omnivore. This is what has allowed both our species to dominate all corners of the planet, instead of being confined to a particular region and type of food (much like my maligned Spirit Animal, the panda, who has somehow turned "cuteness" in to a viable evolutionary strategy). But the key difference between us and rats was "culture," an ability to store and pass on information to subsequent generations. Rats still have to trial-and-error their food. They will learn fairly quickly that rat poison isn't good nom-noms, but they will still lose quite a few intrepid rodents. The information has to be earned the hard way. Humans will have figured out what is and isn't poison far quicker, and stored that information eternally. There is no better example of this than our complicated relationship with fungi, which are overwhelmingly inedible, but humans have figured out a select few, delicious species (and some hallucinogenic).

So this made me realize that a cuisine is not just a geographical phenomenon. It's a history of tried-and-true flavor combinations, a result of thousands of years of humans figuring out what can and can not be eaten, and humans figuring out how to eat what Mother Nature has offered us. There was a time when humans were forced to eat seasonally. There was a time when you couldn't have tomatoes whenever you wanted in Italy. Italians had to wait until the summer, winter offered a whole new range of ingredients and dishes. There was a time when we had to figure this all out for ourselves.

Which is why American food seems to lack so much focus and direction. There really isn't such a thing as "American" food because of such a heterogeneous ethnic make up and rapid expansion across the continent, there hasn't been a significant period of geographic and racial isolation to force people to figure out what the land offered them (unless we're talking about authentic Native American food... yeah white people, you messed that one up, you better hope you're not around for that karmic backlash).

So that's why you shouldn't mash together hamburgers and sushi, or pizza with traditional tacos. They don't belong together, and you irresponsibly making them hate fuck each other is a disrespect and a snub of the nose to thousands of years of culture and human endeavoring.

But that isn't to say that food and particular cuisines should not be explored and taken to new heights.

Curiosity is essential to human nature, after all. We would be nothing without our insatiable desire to create and discover. I'm just saying, you have to do it with some respect.

Bourdain said it best, it's not right for Guy Fieri to be making barbecue pork sushi rolls on his show. There are guys who are practicing the craft of barbecue and pit smoking as their life's work, in acknowledgment of what came before them. There are guys slaving over the proper ratio of short-grain rice to rice wine vinegar every morning, just so one day they earn the right to combine that rice with raw fish. It's goddamn disrespectful and irresponsible. He's creating a monster, an abomination, that may have a chance at being tasty, but not a chance at being tasteful.

But because I am American, I am not so easy to classify, and it's hard for me to identify with a certain kind of cuisine.

You read a chef's bio and nine times out of ten there's some mention of this chef, as a youth, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his mother or grandmother, cooking good old Italian food, or good old Korean food.

Not only did I never really pick up a kitchen knife until I was well in to my teenage years, but it's difficult for to me to stick my childhood food in to one category. We ate all sorts of different things, it was usually a combination of my grandmother's old school cooking and something from the restaurant. Yes, I guess you could throw it under the blanket of "Chinese food," but it just doesn't deserve to be pigeon holed in my opinion.

Which is why Chinese-American food actually makes the most sense.

Though I am Chinese, I am, for better or worse, thoroughly American. Loud, at times obnoxious, big and preened, I reek of an upbringing in the Land of Plenty. I was exposed to a lifetime of ethnic and economic diversity, and that has forever changed my worldview where thankfully war and suffering has not. I grew up wanting for nothing, food was always on the table and in great portions, and it was old school Taiwanese food inflected with American newness. My grandmother actually has a lot of Japanese influence in her cooking, seeing as Taiwan was essentially a Japanese colony when she was growing up, and my favorite dish of hers was panko-breaded pork chops. But she knew that I loved ketchup, and she would lovingly marinate her pork in soy, garlic, rice wine and ketchup, and then pan-fry and drizzle some more ketchup on top. With a bowl of white rice, and stir-fried cabbage .. it is .. the best.

So things can certainly be taken in new directions, to great and dizzying heights. It just needs love, attention and respect to what has come before you.

Chinese-American food is in a bit of a rut. I won't give you the full treatise from Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese-American Food by Andrew Coe, but know the basic storyline; Chinese people came over to build your railroads. They opened restaurants to feed the workers. White people also worked the railroads, and dabbled in these first Chinese restaurants. Nineteenth-century people were frighteningly close-minded. Chinese restaurateurs realized they could make business off the "round-eyes" by offering them food with flavors more familiar and comforting to them. Chinese-American food slowly evolved in to what it is today. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to authentic Chinese food, they are completely different entities, developed in completely different circumstances. But yet, all Chinese people cringe when Americans talk about how their favorite Chinese dish is "General Tso's Chicken" and that Panda Express is the best Chinese restaurant.

So do I believe it my mission to redeem Chinese-American food? Not really, but I see it as a niche for me to conveniently fill. There aren't too many Chinese boys out there, aspiring to be chefs and have deep, entrenching roots connected to Chinese-American cuisine. As much as I bash it, I do love that kind of food, and admit no shame in enjoying a severely Americanized dish of Sesame Chicken. But as is the overarching theme of this post, taking Chinese-American food to new heights must be done with respect and tact, even if, like a middle-aged stripper, the ole' girl has no respect for herself anymore.

I've only scratched the surface on this. I'm in no position to be creating my own dishes, or dreaming of designing my own menu. I am at the the most elementary levels of novicehood, and I'm sure my opinions and thoughts will change greatly as time goes on. But I know this much...

Yes, kitchens need to have a focus. For so many reasons, but if nothing else than out of respect for the culture of food, and the passion inspired by it.

And yes, we can simultaneously pay homage to thousands of years of humans feeding themselves while developing dishes for the new age.

But no, we can not rush it.

I will summarize with my number one enemy in the Chinese kitchen; corn starch. I hate corn starch. Corn starch thickened sauces don't emulsify well, they need ample oil as lubrication, which is why poorly-done Chinese food is often so greasy, they coagulate at room temperature and become completely unpalatable well before then, and it's a bullshit shortcut. I like that French cooks go the long route with carefully made stock, and patient reduction and clarification. The end result is unmistakably superior. The mouth feel of a properly made French sauce, and a quickly junked up Chinese sauce is night and day, a child could tell the difference.

I do love thickening a sauce with a beurre manie or blond roux though. Yes, dairy has no place in traditional Chinese food, we are a billion strong nation of lac-tards. But I believe there is a way to put them together.

And I also do love a pan-tossed pasta dish; freshly plated, sprinkled with Parmigiano-Reggiano, barely melted by the ambient heat of the fresh cooked noodles, accented with herbage and salty pancetta crisps.

So I will share with you the one creative endeavor I have attempted this year. A culmination of my culinary education thus far. And yes, I made it in our kitchen after we closed one night, because I was too embarrassed to let anyone see, in case it failed miserably.

Chow Fun with Andouille Sausage, Pea Pods, Bean Sprouts in a Sha-cha Sauce

The basic idea was this:

I love chow fun noodles, they're the thick-cut rice noodles. When fresh, they have a wonderfully pleasant chewiness, and a strong ability to carry sauce without being drowned or becoming too oily.

Sha-cha sauce is a traditional condiment used with huo guo, or hot pot. Most Chinese will mix the paste (made of dried shrimp, garlic, shallots and other goodies) with a raw egg, soy sauce, chili-garlic paste and some rice wine vinegar. It is a powerful and delicious sauce to complement the mild and passive flavors of hot pot ingredients.

The raw egg got me thinking; pasta carbonara, properly made, is fresh cooked pasta tossed with raw egg, bacon and cheese. The raw egg is just barely, barely cooked by the ambient heat, and the result is a creamy, heady dish of noodles punctuated by the bacon's saltiness.

So what if we combine chow fun noodles with the sha-cha sauce, but finished it in the style of a pasta carbonara? And to the lab we went...

I don't really know the inspiration behind the addition of andouille. It's such a garlicky sausage I figured it would pair nicely with the dominating garlic flavor of the sha-cha sauce, while offering the saltiness that pancetta normally would. Pea pods are pleasantly green and crunchy, as are bean sprouts. There needed to be some textural curiosities. Made sense to me...

So you bring the chow fun noodles to heat in light chicken stock, you blanch your peas and sprouts, you grill your sausage, rest and slice, and then you ready your sauce. Traditional chow fun noodles would be tossed in an oiled wok, on the heat so that the sauce was heated and absorbed thoroughly. I specifically wanted to avoid this because the intense heat of a wok ring burner would scramble my eggs.

And then we make the sauce; sha cha paste (I like a lot, like heaping tablespoons), soy, chili-garlic paste, rice wine vinegar and two raw eggs beaten together at the last moment. Quick taste test, add a pinch of scallion greens and here we go...

Season your wok with oil, drop in your hot noodles and vegetables, drop in your sliced andouille, kill the heat... moment of no return... kill the heat, drizzle in your raw egg, sha-cha mixture and start tossing immediately, you want the egg to heat evenly...

Barely runny, slightly eggy and creamy, put it on a hot plate... enjoy.

Well, there I was in an abandoned kitchen, messing around by myself. No witnesses to my mad scientist machinations but me. I was sheltered from any judging eyes. Break a pair of bamboo chopsticks, shave off the splinters and... take a cautionary bite.

I will use no adjectives, and simply say ... I allowed myself a small smile.

I found it harder to describe how my brain would work in the process of blending and developing cuisines, and instead found it easier to just show you how my brain worked. Like I said, there's a long, long way to go. There are a lot of things to consider, and a lot of pitfalls to avoid, but I will continue on the path with this quote as my torch...

"A sign of greatness is when everything that comes before you is obsolete, and everything that comes after you bears your mark." -Dave Chappelle

I make no claims that I am destined for greatness, but you can take comfort in knowing that I am always striving for it.

EP6

The Return

Chicago was something of a last hurrah. A sorely needed vacation before shit gets serious. A chance for me to return once more to the game of college ultimate. A game you would bleed and sweat for in the gym, a game you would endure cold and deluge for on a weekend you desperately needed to catch up on … life.

Ultimate has that unique ability to own your life without you really owing any obligation to the game. Sure, you would be letting down your teammates if you quit, but there isn’t exactly a scholarship for them to pull. Nobody's begging you to throw frisbees. Life would assuredly go on.

But yet I was there. Plugging away at a sport with barely any athletic promise to call my own, smoke-blackened lungs and a sports resume that consisted of lazy pick-up basketball and the very occasional "jog" (soft "j").

There’s a quote by Steve Martin to describe that kind of oblivious perseverance,

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity; naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

I just played the game. I didn’t worry about my 40-yard dash, and forehand hucks (not yet anyway). I just played because I enjoyed it. Every time corpulence and smoking made me want to collapse on the Patten floor gym, the next day I would rise on the field stronger and faster. Athletic improvements come quickly and significantly when you start from zero. I was hooked, I had found love. What would I ever do without this game, for surely there could be no life worth living once this was over. I would cherish it, I would continue to strive, and every strong defensive play and goal thrown only further confirmed in my heart that me and ultimate were in it 'til the end; 'til death do us part.

But as is the case with young love, it is often foolish and unseeing. Things change, and events develop that you could never foresee coming. There would be a time where we were required to grow up, and make decisions in attempts to secure an abstract future. In short, I needed to find a career.

I never expected to find the restaurant business. I blamed it for costing me any semblance of a real family, and the freedom with which I ran about as a teenager nearly cost me any hope of a bright future. It was luck and luck alone that got me to where I am today, and I thank my personal gods of fortune every day.

I don’t think my mother would be as thankful for that. The most curious thing about her, being such a pragmatic woman, was that she was a believer. She believed that I was destined to be on a stage playing the cello. She believed in it so strongly that she spent nearly all of her adult life to give me a first-rate education in music, and a exquisite masterpiece of a cello I did not deserve. I squandered it. An acceptance letter in to Northwestern is the only thing I have to show for everything I put in to music. That would be the most important thing that ever happened to my life, but in the narrow spectrum of music … it was a failure.

I refuse to make the same mistake. Whereas I had little passion for the cello, the kitchen sings to me. While I felt suffocated in an orchestra (from the last seat, mind you) and desperately strained to let my individual sound be heard, I find some kind of strange enjoyment from being a very replaceable soldier in the kitchen. Obediently following orders and dicing carrots for the vision of the chef, slinging hot cast-iron pans to line his pockets and bolster his name makes sense to me.

I’ve taken a curious and winding road to the restaurant industry. Probably as confusing and convoluted as the preceding few paragraphs. I am reminded of this every time one of my mom’s customers asks me how I got into the family business. It cannot possibly be abbreviated if you want a coherent story. I have to talk about how I got from Juilliard to Northwestern, from cello to fooling around with ultimate, to selecting an East Asian History concentration and using that to land my first paid kitchen job. It doesn’t make much sense to me either. But I learned a lot of lessons on the road.

Frisbee taught me what it was like to love. To revel in the splendor of a thing and yet feel its occasional and fierce backlashes was crucial to my growth. It taught me how to endure pain, both physical and mental, and to resist temptation. Running suicides after smoking for seven years straight out sucks. Picking up smoking is and always will be my greatest regret. Not only will it pull the plug on my life quite prematurely, but it prevented me from ever achieving much of any greatness while I played the game. And for those of you who preach “just quit,” well I don’t want to hear it. You know nothing of resisting temptation until you have felt the alarm of nicotine deprivation, or until you’ve battled yourself from obesity to relative health.

And so these lessons have reappeared in the kitchen. No matter how much you like physical exercise, it’s never fun to be sprinting in a decaying gymnasium where the air is something like 100,000 PPM worth of dust and grime. And no matter how much you love cooking; skewering, steaming, shocking, cleaning, and shelling 100 lobster tails when you have five other dishes to get started, on a double shift as the chef begins his tirade and lecture is also … never that fun. Work will always be work. But when you’ve earned your first lay-out D because your engine is simply running on pure, unleaded determination, all of the pain tastes sweet. It was worth it. Likewise, when you’re rocking on eleven during a Saturday night service, motions smooth and plates clean, and you hit the window with your dishes three seconds early, steam wafting up in wispy clouds, and the chef gives you a nod with no eye-contact instead of his usual “Where the fuck are you!?” … all of it seemed worth it. Some kind of sadistic, self-administered pain seems to be my counterpoint to love. I cannot enjoy one without the other, and at peak business time I find myself thinking “I could dance all day to this tune.” You can endure anything as long as you can see how it will play in to your future, and as long as you find some kind of sick enjoyment in struggling at a craft.

But the music lessons reappear also. And I’m not referring to the hours spent listening to some pompous professor drone on about dictation and the tenets of harmony. I’m talking about the practical, school of hard knocks bullshit you learn from being in the world of classical music. There are a lot of talented people who are fighting for a very finite number of spots on top of the hill. There is very much a wrong way to do something. There is such a thing as a stiff price for failure. I had some strange talent that allowed me to remain at Juilliard when I most assuredly did not belong. That won’t be the case for cooking. It is far too competitive now for me to hope to coast on talent alone, talent which I sorely lack, by the way. I won’t let shortsightedness and laziness cost me what I deem to be my calling at the top of the mountain. I will climb, though I have started much farther behind than my peers.

And it all begins now. I admit, I missed writing. At times I felt that no one needed to hear me rant on and on about something for (now running on 3 pages, single spaced) such lengths of absurdity. But it helps me focus my thoughts, and what I’ve learned in the past few months has been unshared and chaotic without an audience for me to preach to. So I will return as best I can, and only hope that you are there to read.

Culinary school will start October 25, 2011. Fall will once again mean school, as opposed to a call to arms, all hands on deck approach to the holiday season. It will mean acclimating my brain to information reception in a classroom, instead of rapid-fire reactionary cooking. It will mean … fucking culinary school, something I have talked about for over four years but is finally becoming a reality.

There are a lot of things to get done until then. I can no longer be content to sit in the shadow of my mother and be nudged along like a seal pup in the water. It is time to be thrown from the nest, once again, to see if I can fly.

No doubt, I have learned a lot being buoyed along at Pearl East. This is an education few people my age could get elsewhere, knowing how and what it is like to be at the helm of the ship-of-a-million-parts that is a restaurant. I have a much better idea now of what it will take to do it myself. These will be the first drafts, a brief treatise on the philosophy of running a restaurant. Something for me to look back on so that I have tangible proof of how my brain worked in the infancy of my career. These will be rough drafts.

So next time, the theory of the kitchen. What it takes to get to the bottom line, that being … getting people to pay hard-earned money to eat your food, and making food worth eating.

Don’t call it a comeback.

EP6