The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (31 page)

“I started to realize how important we could be, how we could make a difference to people’s perception of Chinese food,” she said. Through the combined platform of the restaurant, her television show, and her cookbooks, her message has rippled throughout

Australia.

She

is

greeted

with

exclamations of “I’ve never had Chinese food like this!” and “I thought Chinese food was MSG” and “I felt so healthy when I got out of here.”

The term “modern Chinese” is often bandied about by reviewers when describing her food. But Kylie’s “modern Chinese” is not “modern” in terms of fusion. The evolution occurred not through recipes but through the underlying ingredients. “A lot of young chefs do their thing wrong. They get hung on reinventing the wheel, creating al these amazing dishes without context and structure,” she said. Kylie emphasizes another approach: “Forget about that.

Let’s try to focus on the classics as wel , and do them better than everyone.” Kylie spoke wisely. Perhaps the gourmand’s desire for novelty and stimulation was a Sisyphean quest. Anything that was new eventual y would become passé. Instead we may better find fulfil ment by returning to the tried-and-true.

In an era of celebrity chefs and multimil ion-dol ar designers, Flower Drum has achieved international status without the aid of any brand names. It is located in a city, Melbourne, that is (relatively speaking) off the gustatory path. It does not have a chef with his own television show or cookbook line. Its interior design, while elegant, is not particularly dramatic. It has never relied on an innovative gimmick or a media-savvy spin—like $350 chef’s choice menus or an imperial historical pedigree. What Flower Drum does offer: superb service and classic Chinese dishes made with high-quality ingredients. The elegant simplicity of the dishes lets the lush ingredients shine through, like a beautiful woman who knows she looks her best in a white summer dress. Each bite—gigantic scal ops, Wagyu beef—is to be savored and remembered.

But was that it? Flower Drum’s fame, give its global latitude, was puzzling. I asked its founder, Gilbert Lau, point-blank: “Why is Flower Drum famous?”

It took more than twenty years to build the restaurant’s reputation, he explained. Flower Drum opened in 1975. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that it received international recognition. Since then it has appeared on
Restaurant
magazine’s list of the top fifty restaurants in the world four times. Ultimately what lifted Flower Drum was the power of word of mouth.

“People like to talk about restaurants,” Gilbert said.

“It’s one of the most popular conversation topics.” At a certain point, the word of mouth and the ensuing accolades build: people are attracted to the reputation itself. Customers would come in clutching the
Restaurant
magazine list, or a guidebook, or the 2003
New York Times
travel article by R. W. Apple proclaiming that Flower Drum might be one of the best Chinese restaurants anywhere. “People like restaurants they have heard a lot about,” he said wryly. “The harder it is to get in, the more they want to go.”

His observations have a certain astuteness.

People like to talk about their experiences: travel, concerts, books, films. Of those, restaurants provide something that everyone can relate to, that can be enjoyed over and over, and that is relatively affordable. Restaurant dining, however, is an ephemeral experience. Once you have eaten the meal, it is gone. Al you have left is the memory. But memories become stories, and stories, in turn, derive value from being shared. So perhaps what we seek in great restaurants is not only the immediate succession of sensations at the dinner table but also the tale that can be told afterward.

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES

In the San Francisco area, there are multiple Chinatowns, multiple generations of Chinese history, and a myriad of assessments about what the best Chinese restaurants are. The lists went on and on—

from friends, online reviews on Yelp.com, restaurant critics’ top ten lists. I was urged to try Tommy Toy’s, the haute Chinese cuisine with a French flair; R&G

Lounge, a family favorite in Chinatown; and Yank Sing, the classic upscale dim sum restaurant in the Financial

District.

There

were

also

popular

restaurants in Cupertino, Mil brae, and Daly City.

At Shanghai 1930, a combined jazz club and Chinese restaurant located in San Francisco’s Financial District, I waited patiently behind an older, sturdy-looking woman with blunt-cut gray hair.

“Good evening, madam, how are you today?” the hostess asked pleasantly.

“Terrible!” she barked in a nasal voice.

The hostess and I looked up in surprise.

“I asked my hotel to recommend a Chinese restaurant where
Chinese
people eat.” She pointed to the dimly lit dining area, which was ful of yuppies, very few of whom looked Chinese. “Where are the
Chinese
people?”

The hostess stammered and the maître d’, who looked European, swept into the conversation.

“What seems to be the problem, madam?”

“ W h y
would
my hotel recommend this restaurant?” she demanded.

“Wel , because it’s the best Chinese restaurant in the city,” he said with a forced upbeat laugh. (To its credit, Shanghai 1930 certainly was regarded as one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city; indeed, the food was very good, though on the pricier side.)

But there was no dissuading the woman.

“What do
you
know? You’re French!”

She had one further comment: “I’l be needing a taxi.” With that, she swept out.

Another highly regarded restaurant on the list was Jai Yun, reportedly where Chinatown chefs preferred to dine. When I cal ed to make a reservation for me and my friend Bernard Chang, I was told, “We only do a seven o’clock seating.”

The menu at the cramped Chinatown establishment was bizarrely simple: there were no dishes listed. On one side was a list of prices: set menus for $45, $65, and so on, up to $120. Cash only. The chef simply decided what he would cook.

The other side of the menu contained an apology from the chef for not speaking English but asked for feedback nonetheless.

“This is a hole-in-the-wal with non-hole-in-the-wal prices,” Bernie said, looking at the menu. He had researched Jai Yun on the Internet and had found it drawing passionate opinions on both sides. “This is either going to be bril iant or it’s one of the most successful hoaxes I’ve ever witnessed.”

I shushed him. You have to have faith, I told him.

The waitress began the parade of dishes: tiny plates fil ed with various textures and colors.

Pickled. Shredded. Chil ed. Reds. Beiges. Various degrees of translucence. Lotus root. Jel yfish. Tofu.

The dishes were good, but nothing we hadn’t seen before in the United States or China. Bernie rol ed his eyes. “I could take you down the street to a Shanghainese place and buy you similar dishes for twenty dol ars a person,” he said. But we were both impressed with a selection made of thin slices of abalone cushioned on a delicate, fluffy cloud of warm egg whites. “You know what this is,” he said, gesturing at the tiny restaurant where most of the crowd was not Chinese. “It’s for people who were always afraid of ordering the Chinese specials on the wal . Or don’t have someone who is Chinese who can order it for them.” This way, he said, they don’t have to deal with odd-sounding ingredients like bamboo pith or lotus root or jel yfish. The dishes just arrive at the table. Jai Yun’s diners have outsourced the decision making.

They don’t have to know what something is before they eat it.

The Chinese food was very Chinese, even if the crowd was not. “They like it here because they feel like they are keeping it real,” Bernie observed. The Chinese dining experience is al about the dive, he said. From the very early days of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and New York, young bohemians would go “slumming” in Chinatown as an adventure.

(In the days before airplanes, it was the equivalent of backpacking through Southeast Asia.)

Perhaps he’s right. In my experience, people talking about Chinese restaurants are more likely to brag

about

the

dive

than

about

opulent

establishments like Restaurant Royale in Peru. It’s part of the authentic Chinese experience.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Dubai is like Las Vegas, only with scant overt sin: a glittering manufactured metropolis instal ed amid placid desert hil s. Instead of gambling, skin, and alcohol-infused festivities to drive the local economy, Dubai has made an epic embrace of free trade, turning its modest oil revenues into a world-class infrastructure in less than a half century.

What nature doesn’t give Dubai, the government creates. The city-state’s attempts to defy climate and geography are legendary. In 1976, the sheikh decided to construct the largest man-made harbor in the world, Jebel Ali. In another project, man-made islands are being strung together in archipelago configurations of palm trees and a map of the world. Dubai even has its own ski slope: a winter wonderland inside the Mal of the Emirates, complete with ski lifts, frosted pine trees, and plastic penguins. With its ambition and money, Dubai can wil an alternate reality into existence.

Middle Eastern historians may scoff at Dubai because the tiny, family-ruled kingdom is short on the tumultuous legacy that infuses much of the region. But from a culinary perspective, Dubai is fascinating precisely because it is short on history.

With a population of over 1 mil ion that is over 85

percent foreign, some of the most difficult cuisine to find is whatever would be considered “local emirate food.” It is a city of European McKinsey consultants, American investors, Filipina waitresses, Pakistani laborers, Somalian hotel clerks, and Korean flight attendants. Cuisines from al over the world converge helter-skelter in great street food, and in high-end restaurants with chefs drawn from every corner of the globe.

The Chinese in Dubai are businessmen, manufacturers, and traders. They do not work in restaurants. There is no Chinatown in Dubai. Instead, there is a sprawling dragon-shaped building cal ed Dragon Mart, a col aboration between the Chinese and Dubai governments. In this wholesale market for Chinese goods, the “spine” of the dragon approaches a mile in length, and Chinese companies sel anything and everything there: fishing rods, generators, toilets, lanterns, ice-cream machines, LCD displays, bras, dancing battery-powered giraffes, fish tanks. Buyers from around the region converge at Dragon Mart and have their goods shipped to other locations in the Middle East.

Many of the Chinese workers I met at Dragon Mart had been in Dubai for only two or three years. I asked one vendor if he liked it there. He looked at me. “Does anyone like leaving home?” he asked with arched eyebrows. “We’re here to make money.”

Without a steady supply of cheap Chinese labor, Chinese restaurants in Dubai were forced to substitute Filipinos. But there was one glaring exception: Zheng He, a nouvel e Chinese restaurant whose chef had previously worked for the Singaporean Tung Lok group.

Zheng He was, disconcertingly, ful of Chinese faces. A Chinese hostess greeted us in genteel English. A Chinese waiter from Yangzhou asked us for our drinks. A Chinese waitress patiently explained every single dish to us.

The executive chef, Leong Chee Yeng, said they had imported the Chinese waitstaff from China because they felt it was critical for the Chinese dining experience. “If you walk in and there is a Filipina hostess,” he told me, “it doesn’t give you a sense of authenticity.”

But the food is the same, I pressed. And in either case, the chefs in the back are Chinese.

He pointed out that the experience would not be the same. “It’s subconscious,” he said. Others agreed. “Everywhere else, no matter food you are eating, it’s always the same Filipino person. The server, whether you’re at a five-star restaurant or an average one, is more or less the same,” said Noor, one of my dining companions. But Zheng He was different, she said. “It doesn’t even feel like you are in Dubai.”

Her last comment startled me. The same thing could be said of the Ski Dubai indoor ski slope: they substitute an alternate reality.

SEOUL, KOREA

The best Chinese restaurant in Seoul is widely regarded as Palsun, in the historic Shil a Hotel, which is located against the backdrop of Nam Mountain. As one friend put it, “It’s a place where future in-laws go to meet each other.”

At Palsun, I met Dean Kim, a Korean-American who runs a popular chain of American-style Chinese restaurants in Seoul cal ed Ho Lee Chow.

The restaurant has a number of brightly lit, hip locations throughout the city, fil ed with young professionals and middle-class families. (They even serve General Tso’s chicken.) To emphasize its Americanness, Ho Lee Chow manufactures its own American-style trapezoidal takeout boxes—in red, with a panda icon—instead of using the Styrofoam containers popular throughout Korea.