The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (29 page)

affluence

and

demand

for

great

Chinese

restaurants. This

boiled down to

Japan,

Korea,

and Singapore.

3) Other great

culinary nations:

Italy and France.

What happened

to

Chinese

cuisine when it

had to compete

with the great

cuisines of the

world on their

own territory?

4) Places in the

world

where

there was just a

lot of money

sloshing around:

Dubai.

5)

Assorted

developing

countries picked

for

their

distinctive

cuisine,

prominent

Chinese

population,

or

both:

Peru,

India,

Brazil,

Mauritius,

and

Jamaica.

I counted: fifteen countries, six continents, twelve months, one writer.

My method was not perfect, but it cast a pretty effective net. When I mentioned my quest to people, I would often get responses along these lines:

“Wel , what if it’s a hole-in-the-wal in Africa?”

“It’s not going to be.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

Or: “Ohmigod! I went to this fantastic Chinese restaurant in Montreal. I don’t remember its name, but I can ask my friend who took me there. You have to go down this al ey and then down this dingy staircase. There are, like, only four tables under these horrible fluorescent lights, but the food is absolutely incredible.”

What was it about Chinese restaurants that made people share these stories of dives? If I announced I was searching for the greatest French restaurant in the world, would people say, “What if it’s a hole-in-the-wal in Samoa that has these ratty plastic tables?”

Another mystery the quest would solve: Do Chinese restaurants around the world give out fortune cookies? If not, what do they serve for dessert?

LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES

San Francisco and New York may have been the original breeding grounds for Chinese restaurants in the United States, but Los Angeles has shot up there in the last half century. I cal ed a knowledgeable Chinese-American friend in Los Angeles to ask for recommendations.

“Wel , what kind of Chinese food are you looking for?” he asked.

“You mean like Cantonese or Sichuan?” I replied.

No. No. No. “There are three types of Chinese restaurants,” he asserted. “There is Chinese food for Chinese people, Chinese food for other people, and what I cal ‘postmodern Chinese.’”

Can’t a Chinese restaurant be for both Chinese people and others? I opened up a Los Angeles
Zagat
and rattled off the top-ranked Chinese restaurants.

Chinese people don’t go to those, he said dismissively. You can’t have a great Chinese restaurant unless Chinese people go.

So I headed out to where Chinese people went to eat: the San Gabriel Val ey, ful of gargantuan strip mal s with neon lights and noodle shops and bubble tea and long lines. In towns like Alhambra, San Gabriel, and Monterey Park, we found authentic restaurants that could have been in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or China: teeming with Chinese people and (sometimes) a couple of non-Chinese adventurous diners. The restaurants had great food: seafood at New Concept, dim sum at Triumphal Palace, soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung. By the end of my visit, I’d figured out patterns to help me define what “Chinese restaurants for Chinese people” meant.

The

minimum

criteria:

• Chopsticks at the table

• Menus with Chinese writing

• Waiters who understand and

speak Chinese

Bonus

points

for:

• Specialties listed on the wal in

Chinese

• Fish tanks with live creatures that might end up on your plate

before the end of your meal

Minus points for:

• Chinese zodiac place mats

• Chinese zodiac place mats

• Chop suey listed anywhere on the menu

• Charging for rice or tea

Would the greatest Chinese restaurant be a Chinese restaurant for Chinese people? Or it would be for “others”? Could it possibly be for both?

LIMA, PERU

What do Chinese restaurants have to do with slavery?

A lot, in the New World, it turns out.

In many countries—Cuba, Jamaica, Peru—

Chinese contract workers arrived in the nineteenth century to fil the gaping demand for agricultural labor left by the abolition of slavery. Eventual y, many of them transitioned to opening up Chinese restaurants, perhaps with no greater fervency than in Peru, home to the largest population of Chinese and the largest number of Chinese restaurants in Latin America today. With that in mind, I headed to Lima.

Almost everywhere in the world, Chinese restaurants are cal ed “Chinese restaurants” in the local language. In Peru, Chinese restaurants are so common they have their own vocabulary word—

chifas,
which is derived from the Chinese
chifan,
meaning “to eat food.” In Lima,
chifas
have the density of Starbucks cafés in American business districts. Chinese food has become so pervasive in the Peruvian diet that even ordinary restaurants serve
sopa wantan
(wonton soup) and
arroz chaufa
(fried rice).

Most
chifas
in Peru are low-end mom-and-pop shops, casual places where someone can grab a quick lunch. But the
chifa
of al
chifas
in Peru is Restaurant Royale. You can rub shoulders with Peru’s television personalities and politicians (before some are charged with corruption). The entrance is grand (curved stone stairs, waterfal , and stone lions). The menu is grand (abalone, pigeon, and shark’s fins).

The imperial-style menu can hold its own against the high-end restaurants of Hong Kong, where the owners and chef hail from. The spiral-bound menu has photographs and descriptions in both English and Spanish to guide diners through the dizzying array of selections, and, like any high-end Cantonese restaurant, Restaurant Royale showcases its seafood dishes. The seafood and fancy ingredients appealed to the Chinese clientele, but looking over at the other tables, I saw that most people had ordered the Peruvian standards: fried rice, sweet-and-sour pork, and wontons—just extremely high-priced versions of those common dishes.

Yet after finishing dessert—
tres leches
and a creamy cake topped with yel ow gooseberry—I felt as if something was missing. Royale was clearly the fanciest, most famous Chinese restaurant in Peru (and perhaps al of Latin America). It was a special experience for the Peruvians because there was nothing else like it in the country. But it didn’t resonate with me because it was spectacular in the way that many restaurants around the world are spectacular: good food, obsequious service, opulent atmosphere.

Across the board, I wasn’t sure what made any of these fancy, special restaurants different from one another.

The greatest Chinese restaurant in the world, I felt, had to offer some kind of twist that would hold up on the global stage. Maybe greatness wasn’t only about the dining experience itself. Perhaps there were intangible psychological factors.

PARIS, FRANCE

The most fashionable place to eat in Paris is located on a side street around the corner from the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Limousines regularly clog the narrow block, spewing out A-list celebrities in painful y stylish outfits. The shaded windows and a velvet curtain give way to the red, chintzy splendor of a Chinese restaurant that could be in any European country, but is actual y like none other in the world.

Davé Cheung’s eponymous restaurant, Davé, boasts a clientele list that would launch the career of any aspiring publicist. Leonardo DiCaprio and his buddy Tobey Maguire have been coming here for years; so too have the fashion establishment: Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, and Marc Jacobs are al regulars. Where people sit in Davé’s restaurant can take on the portentous symbolism of a fashion show

—or a high school cafeteria.

Given that the trendy haunts in New York and Los Angeles rise and fal like Nielsen ratings, the enduring popularity of this modest Chinese restaurant over two decades is something of an enigma. People certainly don’t come to Davé because of the food, which is predictable at best, or the decor, which is neither tasteful enough to be classy nor modern enough to be hip. Then again, models aren’t the most discerning foodies: they want tofu and bok choy. Paris may be a capital of both fashion and cuisine, but the culinary center of the fashion world is not particularly known for its fine cooking.

Nonetheless,

the

nicotine-yel owed

Polaroids on the restaurant wal s prove to be a compel ing archive of late-twentieth-century celebrity and the power of Davé’s appeal. There is Madonna, with bleached hair and heavy black eyeliner, when she went through her military-bustier
Vogue
phase.

There is the cast of
Sex and the City.
There is Janet Jackson before the infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. There is John Malkovich before
Being
John Malkovich.
There is John Malkovich after
Being
John Malkovich.
The photographs span the years.

Hairstyles inflate and deflate. Neckties narrow and widen. But what al of the pictures have in common is the presence of a single, thick-eyebrowed face: the restaurant owner, Davé Cheung. In some of the pictures he has shoulder-length dark hair and smooth white skin. In others, his hair has turned salt-and-pepper gray and his jawline has softened. Davé is the kind of restaurant owner who doesn’t give out menus.

Instead, he always takes the orders himself, asking his clients a standard set of questions: “How hungry are you?” and “Is there anything you don’t eat?” Then he decides what he wil serve his regular and celebrity clients. The bil s, averaging 40 euros per person, arrive tasteful y at the end.

Davé and I fel into a conversation partly in English and partly in Mandarin, with his occasional use of a French exclamation. Davé’s family is original y from the northern port city of Tianjin, near Beijing. They moved to Paris in 1967 because his mother had a friend here. Chinese immigrants have two paths, he told me wryly. Either they labor or they study. His parents belonged to the first group.

Davé’s story of success started at his parents’ restaurant when a British
Vogue
art director named Barney Wan brought his col eague Grace Coddington, a creative director, to lunch there. Fast-forward to 1982, when Davé opened up his own restaurant only five minutes from the Jardin des Tuileries, where Fashion Week events were being held. The restaurant was appealing because it was geographical y convenient, because it was accessible Chinese fare, and because Davé spoke English; the American and British fashion crowd was weary of slogging through Parisian French. Separately, the Hol ywood set found its way to Davé. The music industry

inevitably

fol owed,

mostly

because

celebrityness is al about “crossing over,” Davé told me.

Davé has known many of his customers for years, before they were bold-faced names. He pointed to a picture of a very young, very wispy Leonardo DiCaprio at a birthday party. It was after he made
Romeo and Juliet,
but before
Titanic,
Davé told me. He added that Sofia Coppola had been coming there since she was only thirteen years old.

There was also a picture of Kate Moss when she was just starting out. “Nobody wanted her then. She was too short,” he commented.

Davé is a workaholic, always at his restaurant. During the midafternoon lul he sits at a restaurant table and plays solitaire, waiting for the phone to ring with reservation requests. He is always the one to pick up the phone and coo. His clients like the consistency of his presence, he confided. For these customers, Davé is the same. His food is the same. The cloisonné table lamps, white plates, and silverware are the same as when he first opened in 1982. For his customers, there is something reassuring about a restaurant that stays constant.

“They don’t want change,” he said. “I don’t know. I think sometimes society is moving so fast. Maybe it’s good to have something not change.”

Davé is like the neighborhood Chinese joint you went to when you were a kid. He remembers you.

He knows what you like. He dotes on you. Only his neighborhood happens to be defined as the world of celebrity, with a geographical range that spans the globe.

SINGAPORE

Singaporeans are obsessed with eating. The island is smal , and vices are banned, so food has become entertainment. As one Singaporean food blogger explained to me over dinner, “It’s the most fun we can have without getting fined.”

“Or arrested,” her friend added.

Two centuries ago, the 250-square mile island of Singapore was inhabited by fewer than a thousand natives; then the British arrived and, noting its useful location between India and China, declared it a colonial port. Their demand for labor coincided with a deluge in Southeast Asia of impoverished Chinese immigrants fleeing famine and war. The Chinese settled chiefly in Singapore, where today three out of four of the 4.5 mil ion residents are ethnical y Chinese. As Samantha, another food blogger, explained to me, Singapore is “the only majority Chinese country that is not, by someone’s interpretation, part of China.” So Singapore is a country ful of people who identify with various facets of Chinese culture, but not the nation-state of China.