Steal the Menu (12 page)

For a larger version of this menu, click
here
.

Forty years after I wrote about Paul Bocuse for the
New York Times
, a picture of the same sea bass (
loup
) baked inside a fish-shaped pastry crust he served me adorns his restaurant’s “classic” menu. (
illustration credit 3.1
)

Guérard’s
ris de veau Club des Cent
presented a sweetbread in one imposing lobe chastely topped with matchstick truffle slices and a clear, light brown sauce.

Some days chicken, some days duck came in a highly reduced sauce made from chicken stock, veal stock and wine vinegar. The light but intense sauces, the minimalist plating, the hyperdramatic focus on a single ingredient, the ironic refurbishing of cliché classics (fricassee, green bean salad)—all the elements of the new cuisine were there at Le Pot au Feu, the future ready to roll out and roar.

Back in New York, my food-alert readers barely stirred at this momentous news. Paris was far away. They would latch onto the nouvelle cuisine only when it came to their doorstep. But that wouldn’t happen for several years. In 1972, in New York, the big news in food wasn’t French; it was Chinese, because a revolution in Chinese food was happening right in New York City.

All of a sudden, it seemed, restaurants serving non-Cantonese food—the food of Sichuan, Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai—were popping up all over Manhattan. Word would spread among the food-alert and lines would form outside the newest hit address. Then the chef would decamp, quality would fall and we’d head for the next voguish installment of exotic dishes we’d never seen in Chinatown. It was almost as if some mad Chinese genius were making up one regional cuisine after another.

I can remember Julia Child puzzling over all the unfamiliar spicy Chinese food she was seeing. “We never had anything like it when we were over there during the war,” she said to me.

She must have been too isolated in the U.S. intelligence community to experience the full range of local food. And like almost every other American after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, she couldn’t travel in mainland China. To her and most other Americans who experienced it, the sudden explosion of “exotic”
Chinese eating places in our midst came as a surprise, a mystery, an ethnographic puzzle.

But there was a perfectly good explanation for it: a pivotal change in U.S. immigration law. That was the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known, when it was known at all to the general public, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law revoked a forty-one-year-old immigration law that had strictly limited immigration by quotas that gave preference to applicants from the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the Hart-Celler Act abolished what was known as the principle of “Oriental exclusion,” which had made it virtually impossible for Chinese to obtain U.S. immigrant status.

In the first ten years after Hart-Celler, the number of new immigrants doubled by comparison to the previous decade. Large numbers of them came from Asia and Latin America. And among this new wave of greenhorns were ambitious Chinese who invigorated the restaurant world of New York with regional specialties that made their fortune.

Of course, Hart-Celler did much more than improve the Manhattan restaurant scene. It literally changed the face of America. Arguably, along with Medicare, it was one of the two most important pieces of legislation of the postwar era. Yet few people are aware of it even now. In 1972, in the community of epicures, it hardly ever came up as a factor in the abruptly improved state of our gustatory happiness. We just wanted to know who the latest hot chef from China was.

In the days when a Chinese meal was nothing more than chop suey, chow mein, one from Column A and one from Column B, probably nobody in America ever stopped to think about who the chef behind the food was. But after more or less authentic Chinese food from several regions, notably Beijing and Sichuan, gained a serious following, Chinese chefs emerged as figures of the same
importance as French chefs—but the Chinese chefs were much more elusive.

They were the subject of constant speculation by Chinese restaurant buffs. Few of them spoke English, the best had done their training on the Chinese mainland, and they hopped from restaurant to restaurant, leading their fans on a merry chase.

Take Wang Yun Ching of the Peking Restaurant on upper Broadway, who arrived in Manhattan after cooking at the Empress Restaurant in Washington, D.C., and used to give cooking demonstrations on local television. Suddenly, the ambitious new Szechuan Restaurant at Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street plucked him away from the capital and set him up on the Upper West Side.

Word got around. But just when lines began forming at the Szechuan as if it were showing first-run movies, Wang moved a block downtown to its new sister restaurant, the Peking. After a certain lag, the lines moved too, and made his lamb with scallions a word-of-mouth best seller.

With bushy eyebrows and a face that somewhat resembled Chou En-lai’s, Mr. Wang had been a man in motion for most of his career. Born in a small town in Hunan Province, he began his nine-year apprenticeship in nearby Zhengzhou and moved through several other jobs until he reached the summit of his mainland career in the late 1940s at the Shao Yu Tien in Hankow. The restaurant specialized in wedding banquets and birthday or longevity parties.

Lou Hoy Yuen, the chef at Szechuan East (1540 Second Avenue at Eightieth Street), started work even earlier than Wang. He began his apprenticeship at the age of eight. An orphan, he never finished primary school, but practiced his trade at a succession of restaurants in Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai, Taiwan and Hong Kong. On a trip to Japan after the war, he met the Chinese painter Ta Chien, a gourmet who hired him as his personal chef and took
him to Brazil. In Brazil, he met the shipping magnate C. Y. Tung, who invited him to work at the Four Seas on Maiden Lane in New York.

The Four Seas, now defunct, was, as I’ve already said, one of the earliest New York Chinese restaurants, if not the first, to serve the spicy dishes of Mr. Lou’s native Sichuan Province. It was a haven for celebrities during the sixties—the architect I. M. Pei brought Jacqueline Kennedy; Danny Kaye ate there—and Uncle Lou, as he was known, was in the kitchen from 1963 to 1968. Then, just as Sichuan food began really coming into its own here, Uncle Lou left for Tokyo to escape friction with the staff at the Four Seas.

Meanwhile, David Keh, a waiter at the Four Seas, opened Szechuan Taste near Chatham Square, against the advice of many people who thought New York was not ready for an exclusively Sichuanese restaurant. Keh not only proved them wrong but subsequently had a hand (and a piece of the action) in many of the other Sichuan restaurants that sprang up around Manhattan after 1968, including the Szechuan on upper Broadway, where Wang had once worked. Keh floated uptown, and finally across town to Second Avenue for his biggest gamble of all, a Sichuanese restaurant on the East Side. He opened Szechuan East in 1972 on the site of a French restaurant, from which he inherited several hundred bottles of wine he couldn’t use. And from Japan he brought back his old friend Uncle Lou, to be his chef.

Lou had a room over the restaurant where he napped between three and five in the afternoon, but the rest of the day he was in the kitchen, where he would make hot spicy shrimp or Sichuan beef in a few seconds of final cooking at his large wok. He would purposely temper the amount of oil and hot seasoning in his dishes “for Americans.” But Uncle Lou’s food struck most people as hot. He told me once that complete authenticity in Chinese cooking
wasn’t attainable outside China. Among other things, he had in mind one of the canonical eight great dishes of Chinese cuisine: camel hump.

In an ideal world, I would have been able to check that claim, not to mention various other details in the piece I wrote about mobile Chinese chefs. But I was mostly operating in the dark about Chinese gastronomy. The available books were a confusing mixture of intrinsically unreliable émigré recipes and memoirs. There was no Julia Child for the whole range of Chinese food. And even if there had been, the gap in cultural information between the United States of the 1970s and China in the area of food and food customs, not to mention history, was immensely greater than what Julia had needed to bridge a decade before.

My best sources were John and Ellen Schrecker, who themselves were primarily relying on the Sichuanese cook they had brought back from Taipei. By 1976, Ellen and John had published
Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
with her.

In 1971, I had the advantage of having eaten Mrs. Chiang’s Sichuanese home cooking at the Schreckers’, which gave me some basis for pontificating about the food at the new crop of restaurants. But with all those other dishes allegedly based on the traditions of Beijing, Shanghai and Fujian, I could rely only on a Westerner’s palate and my experience with Cantonese food in the United States and London. This may not have been an entirely bad basis on which to judge unfamiliar dishes for an audience of newspaper readers with even less of a Chinese background than mine. Call it the blind leading the blind, if you wish, but for a first approximation, my reviews were openhearted descriptions that made sense to many readers. The way a dish at the pioneering Fujian restaurant Foo Joy, at the edge of Chinatown, struck me was likely to be similar to how it would affect readers operating with the same taste criteria and dining background I was deploying.

Anyway, I did what I could, riding a wave of public enthusiasm for this cascade of diverse new Chinese restaurants. I was no longer having to fill my review space on Friday with dutiful inspections of dreary new addresses and old favorites. The Hart-Celler Act had brought me a story. Then Washington played the China card again. In February 1972, President Nixon went to Beijing (it was still Peking in the
Times
), met with Mao and set in motion the open relations our two countries have today.

It was of special interest to me, of course, that Nixon ate at two Chinese banquets while he was in Beijing. The
Times
correspondent along for the historic trip, Max Frankel, won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches (and later became executive editor of the
Times
), but he found time to talk to me on the phone from China about the food at those meals, and I tried my best to put dishes I hadn’t seen or tasted (or even heard of, in some cases) into some kind of context.

In the article I cobbled together from that phone call (a thrill in itself at the time), I quoted Max Frankel extensively. Up until I spoke to him, the banquets had been getting a bad press, those reports based mainly on the terse handout menus. But Max had eaten both meals and was emphatic that the dishes were spectacular—and that they were not what you’d see on typical American restaurant menus, because they were classic banquet dishes, made with exotica like sea slug, which was prized for its texture and rarity, or built around elegant conceits: a trio of recipes linked by a common ingredient—in one case, egg white.

Perhaps the most important point Max made should have been obvious: that Chinese cooks in China were aces at preparing the most elaborate and high-toned dishes from their millennial cuisine. At the level of a state banquet, at any rate, imperial gastronomy had survived twenty-five years of Marxism. And Max’s description of the unfamiliar dishes made the implicit point that there was
much more to Chinese food than what was on offer at traditional American Chinese restaurants.

This just added to the excitement among American gastronomes for the new wave of Chinese restaurants that were introducing whole cuisines hitherto unknown in our country.

This literal feeding frenzy reached its zenith just three months after Nixon’s China trip, when Hunam opened in midtown Manhattan. Featuring the food of Hunan Province, among other things the birthplace of Mao, Hunam was a truly remarkable place, and not just because it offered New Yorkers a chance to taste a Chinese provincial cuisine never before served in their city. Hunam was also a superb restaurant with a very high standard of execution. There had never been anything quite like it. I was bowled over.

In a four-star review, I did my best to describe Hunam’s remarkable dishes, which seemed to me like grander siblings of similar dishes I knew from the Sichuan repertory. For a first course, I recommended the hot-and-sour fish broth, which reminded me of ordinary hot-and-sour soup but, like so many of the Hunanese dishes, added an extra layer of elegance, in this case from fish stock and fish. The high point of a fine cold platter was raw shrimp in a subtle hot sauce that combined the tastes of Sichuan peppercorns and fresh coriander.

For a main course, one could choose honey ham, which consisted of two kinds of excellent Chinese ham with lotus nuts in a mildly sweet honey sauce. This very subdued and artful combination could be paired with a fiery lamb-and-scallion dish, a cousin of the Beijing dish with the same ingredients and the addition of a sauce as hot as any Sichuanese sauce, but taken one step further by additional seasonings.

Small, amazingly smooth and tender pieces of sea bass came in a hot sauce made with shrimp roe. Preserved duck was steamed
on a bed of pork patties. Hot beef strips in yet another kind of hot sauce were served with dark green sprigs of cooked watercress.

If ever a phone actually did ring off the hook, it did so at Hunam on March 26, 1972, and every day thereafter, until the overwhelmed restaurant changed its number. No one had ever seen such a craze for a restaurant—any restaurant, not just a Chinese restaurant featuring food from a place almost none of the customers beating on its door had ever heard of before my review. Not until the Internet made it possible for millions of epicures all over the world to compete for seats at the world’s finest restaurants was the Hunam madness substantially surpassed.

At first, I was delighted with my ability to mobilize crowds of gourmets and to reward a restaurant I truly admired. But I began to have second thoughts. Over the summer, angry letters complained about rude, rushed service, noise, crowding. Some of them also disagreed with me about the quality of the food. Others accused me of taking a bribe from Hunam’s owners.