ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Bun Appétit!

by Ken Wells

So if I were on death row and asked to pick my last meal, my first choice would be a bowl of my momma’s seafood gumbo, my second her divine oyster spaghetti with her otherworldly spicy tomato sauce. Alas, my mom passed away many years ago. My backup choice might surprise you: the spicy harvest pork from Brandy Ho’s Hunan Food restaurant on the apron of San Francisco’s historic Chinatown. Cajun and Creole will always be my chief comfort foods and New Orleans my favorite foodie city. But I’m an Asian food hound. The nine eventful years I lived in San Francisco between 1982 and 1990 did that to me. The 22 years I lived in and around New York City from 1993 to 2015 (the last six in Manhattan itself) sealed the deal. (The interim years I spent in London.) As a bonus, in 2001 I was thrilled to snag a three-week trip to Hong Kong and Singapore to teach a feature-writing course to new hires on the Asian Wall Street Journal . There, with in-the-know locals as my food shepherds, I ate joyously from one end of those food-mad cities to the other. One interpretation of Hong Kong food is an upscale, gourmet take on traditional Cantonese. As for Singapore cuisine, that’s a story in itself. Singapore cooking, owing to its variegated immigrant population, takes its influences from China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia, and much of the best food is found in the stalls of street hawkers who dish out beloved gems like chili crab and Hainanese chicken rice. But back to America. Both San Francisco and New York are blessed with the two oldest and most established Chinatowns in all of the U.S., and in my time in those cities I worked in walking proximity to each. They are populated by Chinese and other Asian immigrants who came with no intention of leaving their tasty traditional food behind. And given the relative sophistication of the dining scenes there, restaurants — even, maybe especially, casual Asian eateries — that aren’t at the top of their game don’t last long. Thus, both of these Chinatowns are Asian food paradises. Of course, I had dined on Asian food — well, Chinese food — long before I arrived in San Francisco. Most of it, in retrospect, was not great (and some of it awful). Surely some of my Louisiana friends recall their parents — as mine did — opening cans of watery La Choy Chop Suey, heating it up and dumping it over white rice for supper on those days Mom didn’t feel like cooking. Pass the soy sauce, please, and lots of it. I know one or two Chinese restaurants (Cantonese, most certainly) operated in Houma by the time I left for graduate school at the University of Missouri in 1975. It was a novelty then, and I recall being thrilled to dine on something as exotic as egg foo young (not realizing that the dish is actually an American pancake-omelet fusion creation with roots in Shanghai but with a Cantonese name.) Until I arrived in San Francisco, however, all the Chinese food I’d ever had was of the ubiquitous Cantonese variety, a style of cooking that encompasses everything from egg foo young, pork fried rice and chicken chow mein to barbecue pork buns, beef chow fun and soup dumplings. Cantonese restaurants dedicated to dim sum, the popular steamed buns and dumplings typically filled with vegeta- bles or pork, form a tasty subset of the Cantonese spectrum.

...as you cruise through a fabled Chinatown like New York's... Look in the restaurant window; if it's full of locals, try to get a seat and ask the waiter what everyone is eating.

By some estimates, there are more than 41,000 Chinese restau- rants in the U.S., and the Cantonese style heavily dominates. There are two reasons for that. First, most early Chinese immigrants to America came from what was known as Canton Province (Guangdong in modern China), which borders the South China Sea just above Hong Kong. Second, the style of cooking, while savory, isn’t particularly spicy, therefore suiting the average American palate. Cantonese cooks typically employ ingredients such as soy sauce, rice wine, ginger, vinegar, sesame oil and garlic but use few herbs and go light on the chili peppers. But like many people who grew up in the Gumbo Belt, I’m a hot sauce guy, and I gravitate toward spicy foods. I love my sauce piquante, some extra cayenne in my jambalaya and an extra dash of Tabasco in my gumbo. So I was thrilled, when I arrived in San Francisco, to find its legendary Chinatown packed with Asian restaurants that could accommodate my envie for peppery dishes. My initial introduction was to Hunan food, which takes its name from the sprawling, agriculturally rich province in central China. Hunan cooking has a reputation for being “dry and spicy,” an effect achieved by its liberal use of chili peppers, chili oil, shallots, herbs and garlic. More than 80 Asian restaurants crowd San Francisco’s compact Chinatown which, at a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, is roughly the size of New Orleans’ French Quarter. While most of these restaurants cook some style of Chinese cuisine, you can find Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Indian food there as well. I was a roving correspondent in The Wall Street Journal ’s San Francisco bureau, and our downtown office building was an easy

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JULY•AUGUST 2019