At Grace Choy’s Table in Tokyo, a Tantalizing Portal to Cantonese Cuisine

Owen Ziegler wrote . . . . . . . . .

Grace Choy’s kitchen is very small — about the size you’d expect in a studio apartment.

There’s enough room for Choy to walk the two or three steps from fridge to stovetop, but not much else. A humble array of premium Le Creuset cookware and high quality ovens accent the cooking area and dining room, but this is no industrial kitchen built to house a cadre of line cooks.

The layperson strolling through the backstreets of the Aobadai neighborhood of Meguro Ward might take a look through ChoyChoy Kitchen’s floor-to-ceiling window and consider it all yet another serviceable entry among Tokyo’s innumerable eateries. That would be a grave mistake — not only for the meal you’re robbing yourself of but also for the story you’re missing out on.

Choy has made sure everything here in this dining room tucked away almost as if it’s a carefully crafted secret has just enough for only one chef: herself.

Until early 2020, she was splitting her time between her native Hong Kong and Tokyo, where she served as the driving culinary force behind a Nishiazabu restaurant backed by a Tokyo-based restaurateur and event planning consortium. When her annual contract she’d signed the year before was up for renewal, Choy found herself faced with a difficult decision: continue working as a cog in a successful, larger culinary operation or reclaim everything for herself.

Choy opted to go back to basics. In March 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic closed Japan’s borders for the next several years, she relocated here and opened up her private kitchen in Nakameguro — one she supplies, staffs and serves on her own all by hers.

“I wanted to cook like I did in Hong Kong,” says Choy, who designed the modest space and lodges on the second floor when she’s in Tokyo (she also owns a home in Shizuoka Prefecture). “At that moment, I wanted to focus on cooking instead of business — even now.”

Despite the magnitude of the decision, Choy was no amateur embarking out on her own. It had been years since she had left her previous career as an office worker behind to focus on cooking, and she already had much to show for it. Choy’s 2018 cookbook, “Grace’s 60 Recipes,” earned the Best Woman Chef Book designation by the Gourmand Awards the following year, and CNN once described her private kitchen back in Hong Kong as one of that city’s best kept hidden gems. She also partners with several premium culinary brands — an explanation for all her Le Creuset cookware she puts to great use.

Now, Choy continues on in Nakameguro, but beyond serving up succulent meals, what exactly is her goal? To hear her tell it, it’s a simple yet challenging one: Use the freshest ingredients available in Japan to bring authentic Cantonese cuisine to many who’ve likely never had it before.

A Cantonese journey

For too many Americans like myself, a critical step in appreciating your first authentic Cantonese meal is dissuading yourself of any of the notions picked up over years of consuming “Chinese” foods like orange chicken, crab rangoons and spare ribs. Only the willfully ignorant can convince themselves that these dishes represent anything in the same neighborhood as traditional Cantonese cuisine, yet that awareness only leaves you with an empty box, an unfurnished room you know exists yet can’t quite imagine what fills it.

In Japan, assumptions about Chinese cuisine are different, though — in Choy’s eyes — no less inaccurate. She often hears Japanese diners quip that Chinese chefs are capable of little variety and that dishes are oily and salty beyond reason. As in the United States, a belief persists among some in Japan that Cantonese and wider Chinese cuisine exists on the unrefined end of the culinary spectrum.

Choy considers it something of a mission of hers to dispel these mischaracterizations, and a few bites of her cooking not only helps you divorce yourself from such regionally adapted idiosyncrasies — it ushers you toward a new definition entirely.

Over an afternoon together, she puts together several dishes for me, chatting and cooking as if it was nothing. First comes a Hong Kong-style char siu pork made from Kagoshima-bred kurobuta pig (the Japanese version of the famous Berkshire), a delicate welcome of fresh flavors laid over a bed of fresh vegetables. Next, Choy chills jidori chicken from Tokushima Prefecture and drizzles over it a mixture of oyster sauce, mature vinegar and Sichuan pepper — not once did this topple over into overspicyness, a sterling example of balance.

From there, two heartier dishes follow: a Hong Kong-style soup with Shizuoka chicken, dried yam from China’s Henan Province, wolfberries and fish maw, all double boiled for four hours and finished in an earthen-brown tea pot; and grouper in a supremely moreish Hokkaido-grown, Shizuoka-fermented black bean and Aomori garlic sauce — it’s difficult to understate how truly inviting the next bite is.

Finally, dessert: a homemade apricot pudding served with almond slices and fresh strawberries. It’s a left turn in terms of flavors, to be sure, but it’s a welcome rerouting and almost a reminder that I’ve just been along for the ride, one Choy’s been navigating the whole time.

It’s a microcosm of a full-fledged dining experience at ChoyChoy Kitchen, which usually runs about ¥30,000 per person before tax for six or seven courses. There are, however, two wrinkles. One is negligible: Choy allows diners to bring their own wines and other preferred beverages with no corkage charge. The other — actually making a reservation — cuts to the heart of Choy’s entire cooking philosophy.

“I don’t accept same-day reservations,” she says. “If you emailed me today, I think it might take a few months before I could have you in for dinner.”

It’s not a matter of bandwidth, Choy explains, but of quality. It’d be no issue for her to walk into a Nakameguro supermarket and stock up on what ingredients they happen to have, but that would necessitate compromising dishes to a level she’s not comfortable with. The jidori chicken and kurobuta pork she sources are not just feathers in her cap — the quality these ingredients represent is a cornerstone of her menu.

Hastily made bookings, therefore, would likely leave both diner and chef alike wanting more. Moreover, a combination of a packed schedule and a lingering arm injury has forced Choy to close future bookings to close friends and acquaintances only.

“Normally, I would work Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Choy says of her limited availability for the foreseeable future. “This year, though, I’ll be focusing more on research and development — searching for new ingredients around Japan and testing new Chinese dishes in my kitchen.”

With more and more guest chef spots popping up on Choy’s calendar, including earlier this year at the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, and The Ritz-Carlton in Macau, seats at ChoyChoy Kitchen have become all but impossible to obtain. However, the chef remains committed to reaching as many would-be diners as possible — critically, through an upcoming series of contributions to The Japan Times.

“I want to write because I want more people — especially the people of Japan — to spread (authentic Cantonese) cooking style.”

Source: Japan Times

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See selected recipes of Grace Choy . . . . .

 

 

 

 

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‘Chinese Chorizo’, the Mexican Sausage Grocers from China Sold that Forged Links Between the Two Communities in Tuscon, Arizona

If not for the coronavirus pandemic, Feng-Feng Yeh might never have learned about a lesser known chapter of Chinese-American history in her hometown of Tucson, in the US state of Arizona.

Yeh was an executive chef in New York when the shutdown took away her job and career plans. She pulled up stakes and moved back home, turning to her passion for public art.

Looking for inspiration, Yeh delved into the local history of Chinese immigrants, which she’d heard only bits and pieces of. On the Tucson Chinese Cultural Centre website, she learned that Chinese-owned family-run grocery stores were a thriving industry in Tucson from the 1900s on.

More than businesses, they were lifelines for Mexican-American communities. The stores even started preparing Mexican chorizo – the spicy, ground-pork breakfast staple. It earned the nickname “Chinese chorizo”.

“I was very moved by the story of friendship between Mexican and Chinese Americans at a time when all these pivotal immigration policies were being enacted that were quite racist,” Yeh says.

“I thought that was something that you don’t learn in school, especially in Arizona. I thought it was something that should be recognised and shared.”

In those days, Chinese immigrants settling in Arizona did so in the shadow of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the US government’s first race-based immigration policy. Chinese and Mexican immigrants both faced racism despite being instrumental to the workforce.

It’s a history that older Tucson Chinese residents have spent years trying to make more visible.

Yeh proposed erecting an 11-foot (3.4 metre) tall sculpture of two chorizo sausages, and recently won a grant through the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

To promote the endeavour, she organised the inaugural Tucson Chinese Chorizo Festival.

For the festival, Chinese-made chorizo is being celebrated with inventive dishes fusing Chinese and Mexican cultures. At Mexican restaurant Boca, for instance, chef and James Beard Award semi-finalist Maria Mazon made vegan and regular chorizo egg rolls with a carrot and papaya slaw topped with a fried egg.

Breakfast/brunch hotspot 5 Points came up with Tamal Niangao – charred, sticky masa cakes with chorizo, spring onion, Napa cabbage and chillies in a soy Maggi glaze. Jicama, cilantro and two poached eggs are then piled on.

The 500-plus pounds of meat- and plant-based chorizo given to restaurants for the festival was made at a local butcher, Forbes Meat Company. Yeh devised the vegan recipe. She invited Jackie Tran, a Tucson food writer and owner of Tran’s Fats food truck, to work on the pork one.

“It was definitely something that fascinated” him, says Tran, who is of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. He added dashes of Sichuan pepper, coriander seed and Chinese five-spice powder.

For the sculpture, Yeh is partnering with Carlos Valenzuela, a Mexican and indigenous artist born in Tucson.

Valenzuela will make the red mosaic tiles for the piece. His grandfather had a running account with a local Chinese grocery store. It didn’t occur to him at first that his involvement was a full-circle development.

Tamal Niangao served at 5 Points Market & Restaurant in Barrio Viejo, Tucson, Arizona, as part of the Tucson Chinese

“I just went into it thinking, ‘Wow, this is a really unique project, really an opportunity to talk about that history that hardly ever gets talked about,’” Valenzuela says.

If the idea of a balloon-animal-like chorizo sculpture elicits a laugh, that’s the way Yeh wants it.

“I think it’s eye-catching for tourists to come and recognise that this town is a town that was heavily influenced by Chinese culture, which I don’t think a lot of people know,” says Yeh, who still needs more funds for the sculpture.

Source: SCMP

 

 

 

 

A Cantonese Chef Is Remixing the Flavours of His Heritage for New Yorkers – Think Fusion Cocktails, Char Siu McRibs

Venus Wong wrote . . . . . . . . .

In many ways, Bonnie’s is just like any typical New York eatery having its moment in the spotlight: a trendy location in Brooklyn, reservations virtually impossible to get and a well-curated drinks list featuring espresso martinis – everyone’s current cocktail of choice.

But there are few things that will stand out to anyone from Hong Kong upon closer examination: retro green tiles that would not look out of place at a cha chaan teng; the phrase “have you eaten yet?” – a common greeting in Southern China – on the branding of the in-house beer.

Cantonese kitchen staples such as canned dace fish and fermented bean curd make appearances on the menu, and yuen yeung – a coffee and milk tea drink popular in Hong Kong – is the star ingredient of the aforementioned espresso martinis.
The restaurant is the brainchild of 28-year-old Calvin Eng, a Cantonese-American chef determined to introduce food from his culture to Western palates.

Eng cut his teeth working in the kitchens of Nom Wah Nolita and Win Son, both trendy Manhattan establishments with a uniquely American take on East Asian food.

The success of Bonnie’s has turned Eng into a culinary media darling, with accolades from the likes of US food magazine Bon Appétit and The New York Times.

He is one of very few Cantonese chefs to garner this level of attention in the United States – in September, Eng was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s best new chefs for 2022.

It is not hard to see why.

Eng’s food remixes flavours of his heritage – based on cooking by his mother, an immigrant from Hong Kong who the restaurant was named after – and updates them with an American approach to experimentation and presentation.

The result is an iconoclastic version of Cantonese-American food that is utterly exciting and bears zero resemblance to traditional dim sum or Americanised Chinese takeaway.

Take the char siu McRibs, one of his signature dishes, as an example: Eng pays homage to the classic McDonald’s sandwich but adds a filling of slow-cooked Cantonese roast pork marinated in a char siu glaze, maltose and fermented red tofu.

The bun is sourced from an old-school Chinatown bakery, a favourite haunt of Eng’s mother. The whole thing is served with a knife through the middle, to indicate it is meant to be consumed family-style.

One might be surprised, given his masterful interpretation of Cantonese ingredients, to find out that Eng has only learned to appreciate the cuisine of his heritage in recent years.

He grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a historically Italian-American neighbourhood where he was one of the very few Chinese children in school. Weekends were spent at his grandparents’ flat in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

“Growing up, I always tried to be as white as possible,” he says. “My friends didn’t look like me, they didn’t eat the food that I ate, or had to go to Chinatown every weekend – I just wanted to be like them.”

This all changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. After witnessing countless Chinatown businesses shuttering thanks to lockdowns and a rise in anti-Asian sentiment, Eng felt like he had to do something.

“There weren’t many people like myself, who were trained professionally to cook but also were Cantonese-American,” he says. “I felt like it was my responsibility to dive deeper into the food of my culture that I didn’t care for when I was growing up.”
Bringing Cantonese ingredients that are more of an acquired taste to a wider population became Eng’s mission when building out Bonnie’s menu in 2021.

“It was important for me to find ways to utilise them in approachable applications that weren’t too overwhelming,” he says. “It’s kind of like [Cantonese food] on training wheels.”

You can see that approach in his rendition of cacio e pepe, a classic cheese-and-pepper pasta dish from Rome. Eng tosses the pasta with a compound butter made from garlic and fuyu (fermented bean curd), an Asian condiment renowned for its pungent smell.

It results in a taste that makes you marvel at his imagination: the umami from the fermented tofu harmonises with the black pepper and brings out another dimension of richness, with no acidity.

The same salty butter forms the bedrock of the dau gok (Chinese long beans), another fan-favourite dish. Additional texture is brought on by bits of yau zha gwai, a deep-fried cruller typically served with congee.

MSG, or monosodium glutamate, a seasoning associated with Chinese takeaway food, has pride of place in Eng’s version of a martini, and is used as a garnish in place of salt.

The condiment has long been stigmatised thanks to unsubstantiated claims it causes symptoms like headaches, sweating and palpitations. Eng refuses to shy away from it.

“I didn’t use MSG to prove a point. I use it because I love it,” he says. “I put it in desserts, drinks and savoury dishes – because it makes the food taste good.” He even has the word tattooed on his arm.

It is exactly that spirit of irreverence – and his unique point of view from not having trained in traditional Chinese cooking – that has so many coming back for more.

“I try to make a hard distinction between Cantonese-American and American-Cantonese,” he says.

He references the Westernised Chinese dishes, such as chop suey – created for American palates when the first wave of railroad workers came from Canton to America more than a century ago. The type of Cantonese food he is creating now feels markedly different.

“Here, the flavours, ideas and the philosophy behind everything will always be like Cantonese first.”

Looking to the future, the chef plans to launch a weekend brunch menu, put his own stamp on the classic Chinese fried rice and bring back his mother’s favourite egg custard recipe for the winter.

What does his mother think of his unconventional journey to bring the tastes of Hong Kong to the mainstream? Surely she must be very proud?

“She’s been here a couple of times, and she thinks the food is super interesting,” Eng says with a mischievous laugh. “But at the end of the day, she’s still a Chinese parent – they are not proud.”

Source: SCMP

 

 

 

 

‘Chinese Chorizo’ Honors Fusion of Two Cultures in Arizona

Terry Tang wrote . . . . . . . . .

If not for the coronavirus pandemic, Feng-Feng Yeh might never have learned about a lesser-known chapter of Chinese American history in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona.

Yeh was an executive chef in New York City when the shutdown took away her job and career plans. She pulled up stakes and moved back home, turning instead to her passion for public art.

Looking for inspiration, Yeh delved into the local history of Chinese immigrants, which she’d heard only bits and pieces of all her life. On the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center website, she learned that Chinese-owned mom-and-pop grocery stores were a thriving industry in Tucson from the 1900s on.

More than businesses, they were lifelines for Mexican American communities. The stores even started preparing Mexican chorizo — the spicy, ground-pork breakfast staple. It earned the nickname “Chinese chorizo.”

“I was very moved by the story of allyship between Mexican and Chinese Americans at a time when all these pivotal immigration policies were being enacted that were quite racist,” Yeh said. “I thought that was something that you don’t learn in school, especially in Arizona. I thought it was something that should be recognized and shared.”

Chinese immigrants settling in Arizona were doing so in the shadow of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S. government’s first race-based immigration policy. Both Chinese and Mexican immigrants faced racism despite being instrumental to the workforce.

It’s a history that older Tucson Chinese residents say they have spent years trying to make more visible.

Yeh proposed erecting an 11-foot (3.4 meters) tall sculpture of two chorizo sausage links, and recently won a grant through the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation. To promote the endeavor, she organized the inaugural Tucson Chinese Chorizo Festival. For the month of October, several local restaurants and food trucks have been serving weekend specials with meat and vegan chorizo.

Even many locals are unaware of Tucson’s significant Chinese presence.

The 15,000-square-foot Tucson Chinese Cultural Center is a bustling hub that’s part community center and part museum, and serves at least 5,000. Established in 2005, it has a multipurpose room, commercial kitchen, classrooms, and a lounge with tables for mahjong. On the walls are display boards with mini-profiles of long-gone Chinese grocery stores. The center also has a YouTube channel that includes a 2014 video on Chinese chorizo.

“A lot of people don’t know we exist after 17 years. So, we’ve been trying to get the word out,” said Susan Chan, the center’s executive director.

Starting in 1900, Chinese-owned grocery stores prospered and became an economic force in Tucson. By the 1940s, there were 130 families running a little over 100 grocery stores in the city. The number of stores dwindled in the ’70s and ’80s due to an influx of supermarket chains, convenience stores, and a younger generation of Chinese Americans uninterested in the family business.

Allen Lew’s father, Joe Wee Lew, opened his first of three stores, Joe’s Super Market, in 1955. Lew began working in the market as a fourth grader. He still helped out until the last store closed after three decades in business.

He and his four siblings grew up serving Mexican and Native American customers. Everyone felt like they “were all a big neighborhood family.” In a pre-food stamp era, many Chinese grocers would let struggling customers pay whenever.

“A lot of them get paid like once a month, every two weeks, and they ran out of money,” Lew recalled. “They’ll tell my Dad or the other Chinese (grocers), ’Can you give me credit?… We give them credit — no charge, no interest, no nothing.”

Lew, 74 and a longtime board member of the center, remembers watching his father or the Hispanic butcher he employed making chorizo. They used the end pieces of “big rolls of bologna” or salami, boiled ham or other cold cuts.

“The butcher would cut off the fats and things that were part of the meat that were kind of bad. He would take that out and then you threw organ meats and all that and you make it just like hotdogs,” Lew said.

For the festival, Chinese-made chorizo is being celebrated with inventive dishes trying to fuse Chinese and Mexican cultures. At Mexican restaurant BOCA, for instance, chef and James Beard Award semi-finalist Maria Mazon made vegan and regular chorizo eggrolls with a carrot and papaya slaw topped with a fried egg.

Breakfast/brunch hot spot 5 Points came up with Tamal Niangao — charred, sticky masa cakes with chorizo, green onion, Napa cabbage and chilies in a soy maggi glaze. Jicama, cilantro and two poached eggs are then piled on.

The 500-plus pounds of meat and plant-based chorizo given to restaurants for the festival was made at a local butcher, Forbes Meat Company. Yeh devised the vegan recipe. She invited Jackie Tran, a Tucson food writer and owner of Tran’s Fats food truck, to work on the pork one.

“It was definitely something that fascinated” him, said Tran, who is of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. But he definitely didn’t throw in odds and ends. And he added dashes of spices like Sichuan pepper, coriander seed and Chinese five-spice powder.

For the sculpture, Yeh is partnering with Carlos Valenzuela, a Mexican and indigenous artist born in Tucson. Valenzuela will make the red mosaic tiles for the piece. His grandfather had a running account with a local Chinese grocery store. It didn’t occur to him at first that his involvement was a nice full-circle development.

“I just went into it thinking, ‘Wow, this is a really unique project, really an opportunity to talk about that history that hardly ever gets talked about,’” Valenzuela said.

If the idea of a balloon-animal-esque chorizo sculpture elicits a laugh, that’s the way Yeh wants it.

“I think it’s eye-catching for tourists to come and recognize that this town is a town that was heavily influenced by Chinese culture, which I don’t think a lot of people know,” said Yeh, who still needs more funds for the sculpture.

What does Lew, the son of a Chinese grocer, think about a chorizo sculpture?

“That’s great,” Lew said. “I was surprised because I think when you grow up and you’ve done something all your life here, you don’t think it’s a big thing. So, you don’t promote it. But someone outside thinks, ‘This is different. This is neat.’”

Source: AP