The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (30 page)

As my cabdriver put it, “Chinese is a culture.

Singaporean is an identity.”

As a result, Singapore, with its affluent, food-obsessed population, has become a center of gravity for modern Chinese cuisine. The city-state has long been famed for its street food—so much so that its local food guide,
Makansutra,
focuses on hawkers’

stands instead of high-end restaurants. Less acknowledged is how Singapore has become a thriving hot spot for high-end, creative Chinese restaurants. There was Xiyan, a “private kitchen” in the Hong Kong tradition where reservations had to be made in groups; Majestic, which paired a trendy, casual

decor

with

a

menu

of

impressive

sophistication; Club Chinois and My Humble House, both of which featured original food and elaborate presentation. These were much better than the Chinese restaurants in America. These were even better than the Chinese restaurants in China.

One of Singapore’s visionaries of modern Chinese cuisine is Andrew Tijoe, who has made it his mission to update Chinese cuisine on the global stage through his company, the Tung Lok group.

Andrew is ethnical y Chinese but was raised in Indonesia, where his father was a banker, until his family fled to Singapore because of rising anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia. We met over lunch at one of his newest restaurants, My Humble House, where he explained that he’d launched his restaurants because Chinese cuisine needed an overhaul, much as French and Italian cuisine had experienced decades earlier. “Chinese always, always say that Chinese food is the best. Just because you can find Chinese restaurants in any place in the world, that doesn’t make you the best,” he told me. “Traditional Chinese cuisine, while it tastes good, it does not look good,” he said. “I was trying to change people’s perceptions—particularly the Westerners or those non-Chinese—of Chinese cuisine. Chinese cuisine can also be trendy.”

My Humble House had the most beautiful menu I had ever seen anywhere—a long booklet that mixed elegant, artistic cal igraphy and exotic, poetic names for unfamiliar Chinese dishes. Those dishes were less unfamiliar than the names would suggest, he told me: “The so-cal ed modern Chinese cuisine actual y draws its influence from traditional Chinese

[recipes]. We have selected many, many signature Chinese dishes which have been around the past fifty or one hundred years and then modified it, making the taste more global or giving it [a] global look.” But combining Chinese cuisine with other international influences was often done wrong, he said. “If it is not merged perfectly, it’s confusion, not fusion.”

Change was happening faster outside of China than inside, where the argument that dishes had endured unchanged for so long was used as proof of their perfection. In contrast, he noted,

“Singaporeans and Malaysians are more open-minded when it comes to re-creating Chinese cuisine because they have no burden, no cultural burden.”

They were the ones reimagining the cuisine in top Chinese restaurants al over the world—from Dubai to London.

LONDON, ENGLAND

I hadn’t expected that the top-ranked Chinese restaurant in the world, inclusive of China, was in London—but that is where
Restaurant
magazine puts it: Hakkasan, run by Alan Yau and Singapore chef Tong Chee Hwee.

London has emerged as a global restaurant hot spot in recent years, despite the country’s unfortunate history of bangers and mash and spotted dick—a reputation it has yet to ful y shed. In 2004, French president Jacques Chirac, bitter because London had won the right to host the 2012 Olympics, snidely lashed out at Britain’s cuisine. “The only thing they’ve ever done for European agriculture is mad cow,” he said. “We can’t trust people who have such bad food. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

One of the legacies of the age of empire was the extensive culinary exchange that rode on the backs of military conquest. Like water, cuisine moves from higher levels to lesser ones. So the cuisine of the colonies trickled back to the European powers. Indian flavors merged with British preferences, fusing into the red saucy chicken tikka masala, which the foreign secretary famously declared Great Britain’s “national dish.” Indonesian cuisine flowed to the Netherlands.

France, notably, could hold its own in a two-way exchange. It absorbed influences from Vietnam while in turn giving back rich coffees and baguette sandwiches.

Despite the withering sneers of the neighboring French, London, with its influx of international immigrants and influences, has become home to a number of the world’s most recognized restaurants. Hong Kong–born Alan Yau threw Chinese food into the upscale London restaurant mix when he opened Hakkasan in 2001 to fawning reviews and a coveted Michelin star. Three years later, Yau fol owed up with Yauatcha, a nouvel e dim sum parlor.

Alan Yau made it possible to once again say

“sexy” and “Chinese restaurant” in the same sentence without snorting. Once upon a time, Chinese food in England could stil be considered exotic and chic.

Men impressed their dates with their sophistication by taking them out to Chinese restaurants. Upper-class housewives threw afternoon mah-jongg parties and pored over outlandish recipes cal ing for black sauce made with beans and sesame oil. But this image slowly eroded as Chinese restaurants became a victim of their own success. Immigrants flooded the dining scene with casual restaurants, sel ing British-Chinese dishes like crispy shredded beef (which has a whole lot of crisp, a lot of shred, and not a whole lot of beef). Chinese food became commonplace, chintzy, and cheap.

Hakkasan rejected that. Its sprawling underground lair surrounded us with sleekness and beauty. The restaurant’s decor was dramatic. The hostesses were striking. Our waiter, a black man born in Paris, could have been a model. Instead of red lanterns and golden dragons, Hakkasan was packed with London yuppies looking glamorous in the dim lighting. I saw few Chinese faces. My friend whispered, “Chinese people wouldn’t pay this much for Chinese food.” It was true.

The Hakkasan and Yauatcha menus, written in both Chinese and English, listed classic Chinese dishes cast with some surprising twists (ostrich dumplings, stir-fried venison, Chilean sea bass dumplings, mango spring rol s). While the food was indeed impeccable and wel executed, what gave Hakkasan its fame was the scene. Anyone could feel hip there, just through osmosis. Even I felt transformed. You are where you eat.

Generations ago, Chinese restaurants sold sophistication along with their food. Today, Hakkasan has reinvigorated that transaction, trading a night of its enchantment for the price of appetizer, entrée, dessert, and drinks.

TOKYO, JAPAN

The Japanese revere good food. They obsess over it.

Their primetime television schedule is ful of food-related shows. The hunt for the best bowl of soba noodles.

Celebrities

eating

dumplings

and

commenting on them. It is as though
American Idol,
Survivor, The Amazing Race,
and al our other popular reality shows were replaced by programs from the Food Network. After al , this is the country that gave us the cult hit
Iron Chef,
where contestants faced off with famous Japanese chefs trained in French, Chinese, and Italian cuisine.

In Tokyo, the Chinese Iron Chef, Chen Kenichi, bounded into the room to meet me.

Animated and expressive, with round cheeks and a white chef’s hat, he was like a cartoon character with a slapstick sense of humor.

Japan is the only country in which the top Chinese chefs are not necessarily themselves Chinese, he told me. Chen said he is considered an anomaly because he’s a famous Chinese chef who is in fact part Chinese. After World War I , many Chinese immigrants came to Japan to work, including his father, who is famous for introducing
mapodofu
—

spicy bean curd with ground pork—to the Japanese public in 1953. Every country has a Chinese dish that grabs its attention. In Japan,
mapodofu
(known as ma po tofu in the United States) became wildly popular; housewives stil make it for their families today.

In America, Chinese cuisine and culture are considered exotic, he told me, but they’re not exotic from a Japanese perspective. Because Chinese cuisine is respected there, it is easier for Japanese chefs to push the boundaries of Chinese cuisine yet stil find a receptive audience. Among the top Chinese chefs was Yuji Wakiya, whose French influence makes him the nouvel e rebel of Chinese cuisine. His eponymous restaurant in Tokyo, Wakiya, is unobtrusively tucked into a quiet al ey in Akasaka, an upscale neighborhood known for its
ryotei,
discreet high-end restaurants favored by Japanese power brokers for their private negotiations.

Japan was a host to a panoply of top-caliber Chinese restaurants—including a number in the port city of Yokohama, which showed me it was possible for a Chinatown to be both clean and expensive. But one place in Tokyo caught my eye: Reikasai, a three-table restaurant in Tokyo with set menus that ranged up to $400 per person. It was pricey and exclusive, characteristics often valued for their own sakes. It also had a long history: the original Li Family restaurant had been opened in Beijing by a family whose ancestor, Li Zijia, had served as the minister of household affairs for the powerful empress dowager Cixi, the Queen Victoria of nineteenth-century China.

After the empress died and the Qing Dynasty was overthrown, Li kept the recipes from the kitchen and passed them down as part of his family home cooking. They would have probably faded away into the past, like so much of China’s historical legacy, if not for a national cooking competition during the thirty-fifth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1984. Li Zijia’s great-granddaughter Li Li won the competition, and reporters descended on her, asking whether she would open a restaurant.

The family thought about it, knocked down a wal in their home, and put a single ten-person table in one room. Over time, the restaurant grew larger but stayed within the Beijing al eys. In Tokyo, al of this had been transformed. The recipes were the same.

The chef was stil a family member, Li Ai Ying, who had been a doctor in China. But the dining experience had been repackaged: private rooms, jade chopstick holders, dishes presented one at a time with a flourish. The unusual appetizers included a napa cabbage heart marinated in a mustard-and-white-wine sauce, which I had never seen before anywhere.

There was also a foie gras–like dish made with green beans and pork. The rice, which came from Niigata, was velvety in the mouth.

The dishes themselves were very good, but what had catapulted them onto the world stage was the story behind them. Without the exclusive decor, the food we ate could have been real y good home cooking with some very expensive ingredients—

abalone, shark’s fins, and bird’s nests imported from Thailand.

Nevertheless, we enjoyed the show.

Restaurants have always profited from a combination of food and theater. Reikasai placed its bets on theater.

AUSTRALIA

To the average American, the phrase “Australian cuisine” might bring to mind images of Outback Steakhouse; this is unfortunate. Because of the influx of immigrants, bringing influences from around the globe, Australia has developed a sophisticated culinary scene and is home to two of the top Chinese restaurants in the world. The first is Bil y Kwong, a home-style restaurant with a rare distinction: it is one of ten restaurants around the world that
New York
Times
gourmand R. W. Apple considered worth getting on a plane for. The other is Flower Drum, in Melbourne, which had been one of
Restaurant
magazine’s top fifty restaurants in the world for four years in a row.

Located

in

a

slightly

bohemian

neighborhood in Sydney, Bil y Kwong is an establishment of modest size with an outsized reputation. Kylie Kwong, a fourth-generation Chinese-Australian, opened the restaurant in 2000 with her partner, Bil Granger (the merger of their names produced Bil y Kwong; there is no Mr. Bil y Kwong).

While the Chinese language was not maintained through the generations of Kylie’s Australian family, the cuisine was. She has also developed an ecofriendly, holistic approach to food, in part from a newly discovered Buddhist outlook on life.

Kylie’s mission is to attack the reputation that Chinese food has gained throughout much of the West for being oily and unhealthy. Her menus and cookbooks are sprinkled with terms like “fair trade,”

“free-range,” and “sustainable,” and ingredients like line-caught fish and biodynamic eggs.

The dishes I tried were recognizably Chinese food, but with a fresh, inspiring sheen cast over them. The sweet corn soup was made with fresh corn kernels instead of creamed corn. Her sweet-and-sour sauce uses fresh tomatoes instead of bottled ketchup. She prefers the French technique of reducing to the Chinese technique of adding thickeners such as corn starch. She uses no MSG.