The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (33 page)

MAURITIUS

A tiny speck in the Indian Ocean barely over half the size of Rhode Island and located almost five hundred miles east of Madagascar, Mauritius may be best known as the original home of the dodo bird. When sailors found the uninhabited island at the turn of the seventeenth century, they encountered a three-foot-high flightless bird with a hooked beak and a naive fearlessness toward its human predators.

The dodo is now extinct, but what drew me to Mauritius were the legends of its fusion—culinary and otherwise, from its succession of Dutch, French, and British colonizers, and its Indian, Chinese, and African workers. You can indulge in octopus curry served on French bread, European cheese samosas, or chicken shawarma with coleslaw and pineapple. I had great hopes for Chinese food in Mauritius.

Perhaps its fusion with other great cuisines would make for a great dining experience?

Nope.

The Chinese food itself—tiger prawns stir-fried in garlic and butter, sweet-and-sour lobster—

was interesting but not spectacular. The global influence may have even made it a little worse for the wear. Nonetheless, the Mauritians loved it. Chinese restaurants are the most common type in the smal island country—despite the fact that some 65 percent of the island is of Indian descent. Most of the Indian eateries were relatively casual places, and there were few “Mauritian” restaurants (those that did exist tended to cater to tourists looking for “authentic local food”). Chinese restaurants, on the other hand, spanned the entire island—from Port Louis’s Chinatown to highway rest stops—though Chinese people make up only 3 percent of the population.

The best Mauritian Chinese restaurant was widely considered to be King Dragon in Quatre Bornes, owned by a third-generation Mauritian-Chinese man who had never set foot in China. When I met Ahsee Leung-Pah-Hang, the owner, I was charmed by his French accent. His grandfather had moved to Mauritius from Meixian, a town in Guangdong Province where most of the Chinese immigrants to Mauritius had come from. Ahsee himself spoke only a few phrases of Chinese. Of his six chefs, only one had been to China.

I asked him about the popularity of Chinese restaurants on the island. Why weren’t there any nice Mauritian-cuisine restaurants?

“The poor people don’t eat in restaurants,”

he said. “If you like Indian food, better to eat it at home. You can’t make Chinese food.” Perhaps that is the appeal ethnic restaurants offer to many people around the world: something they can’t get at home.

MUMBAI, INDIA

I arrived in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) to meet friends for dinner at the most famous Chinese restaurant in al of India, China Garden. As one Mumbai resident put it to me: “It’s not a restaurant, it’s an institution.”

For a quarter century, China Garden has been a favorite of Bol ywood celebrities, Mumbai bil ionaires, and prime ministers. Yet it is stil affordable for middle-class Indian families. If there is a godfather for Indian-Chinese cuisine, it is the owner of China Garden: Nelson Wang, a third-generation Chinese-Indian man who was born in Calcutta and given up for adoption three days later, after his father died. As one customer described him in my presence: “Chinese blood, Indian brain.”

Chinese food is a great equalizer in India. It is a national obsession. When Indians are not eating Indian food, they are most likely eating Chinese food.

It has been elevated to a position in one of India’s fundamental food dichotomies: vegetarian versus nonvegetarian, northern versus southern, Chinese versus Indian. It is sold from hawkers’ carts, in hole-in-the-wal s, on the room service menu of five-star resorts, and in the finest “Indian” restaurants.

McDonald’s may have made inroads into India with its McAloo Tikki sandwich and Chicken Maharaja Mac, but it is swept off the table by Chinese cuisine.

Nelson is credited with having introduced Mumbai and, in fact, al of India to the Indian-Chinese fusion fare its people love: vegetarian Manchurian dishes (he wanted a very Chinese name), fried creamy corn (he hated to waste the leftover congealed corn in the fridge), fried chicken lol ipops (he wished to find a way to use up chicken wings), and date pancakes (he sought a new dessert that would satisfy the Indian sweet tooth).

Starting in 1974 with only twenty-seven rupees in his pocket, Nelson worked his way up through a series of jobs in restaurants until, in 1984, he was ready to open a Chinese fine-dining establishment. China Garden became an immediate sensation.

People would wait two hours or more for a table. In an effort to turn over tables more quickly, the restaurant stopped giving out fortune cookies. (Made by a local company, they were flavored with butter instead of vanil a to cater to the Indian palate.) “They take too much time at my table,” Nelson grumbled. “I give them fortune cookies, then the customers are like ha ha ha. It takes another fifteen minutes.” Instead, for dessert, his restaurant offers date pancakes and honey noodles with ice cream—both Indian-Chinese classics. The honey noodles are like the deep-fried, flat chow mein noodles served in American Chinese restaurants, but coated with a sweet layer of honey and sprinkled with sesames. Without Nelson’s support, fortune cookies real y never took off.

As I was sitting there, interviewing Nelson, I suddenly realized that given (1) India’s population, (2) the Indian passion for Chinese food, and (3) Nelson’s role in Indian-Chinese cuisine, I was probably looking at the man who had influenced the Chinese dining experience for more people on the planet than any other single person.

JAMAICA

Jamaica’s national motto is “Out of many, one people,” a reference to how several cultures came together to produce the nation: African, Chinese, Indian, British, Spanish. The heavy Indian presence has made its way into Jamaican cuisine in the form of curries and rotis.

The Jamaican-Chinese piece of the puzzle slipped into place in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese immigrants arrived to work as shopkeepers and restaurant owners. Over generations they have transitioned: some have expanded their shops to retail chains; others have moved into Jamaica’s most notable export, reggae music. (Bob Marley’s first producer was a Chinese-Jamaican man, Leslie Kong.)

Over time, there haven’t been enough Chinese cooks in Jamaica to fil the nation’s demand for Chinese food. As a result, Jamaica is one of the few places where you can consistently see black men working woks.

China Express, an upscale establishment in Kingston, was one of the rare restaurants whose chef was not only Chinese but trained in China—though, like other Jamaican Chinese restaurants, it served cheesecake for dessert. I asked the manager, Bruce Chang, why Chinese food was so popular in Jamaica.

“Jamaican food is not much variety,” he said. “With Chinese food, you can do pork or chicken a hundred ways.” That variety has al owed it to migrate around the world.

ROME, ITALY

The only good ethnic cuisine you can get consistently in Rome is Italian. This is not a tautology. After al , there is Roman cuisine, Sicilian cuisine, Neapolitan cuisine, Tuscan cuisine, Venetian cuisine. The local attitude is “Italian food is perfect—why would you want to eat anything else?”

Italians tend to forget this, but the ingredient at the heart of their cooking was, until recently, completely foreign. Not until the 1830s did Italian cooks take the tomato, which had made its way from the New World to Europe as a botanical curiosity, and run with it as a sauce. Since then, Italians’

receptiveness to other culinary influences has been decidedly more limited. Despite a history as the seat of an ancient empire that stretched from London to Constantinople, Rome has only recently experienced the phenomenon of modern immigration. (The British and French wil snidely point out that it is because Italy never successful y colonized any place significant.

Italians wil sniff that the Britain and France are loosening their standards only to attract soccer players.) Up until the 1980s, Italy was a net exporter of labor.

The Chinese restaurants that do exist in Rome are mostly takeouts or subsist by attracting Chinese tour groups; they al serve fried gelato for dessert.

If the Chinese immigrants to Italy weren’t opening restaurants, then what were they doing?

Prato, an old Italian city some fourteen miles outside Florence where almost 15 percent of the population is Chinese, held much of the answer. In Prato, locals have dubbed one of the Chinese neighborhoods San Pechino, which translates to “St. Beijing,” and the Chinese have adopted names like Luigi and Marco.

Walk inside some of Prato’s factories and you might think you’re in Zhejiang, the province of China where most of the immigrants are from. The workers are Chinese. The owners are Chinese. The managers are Chinese. The pop music in the background is Chinese. But the things they are making? They are labeled with “Made in Italy.”

There are two notable Chinese restaurants in Rome. A sleek establishment cal ed Green T is unusual for ethnic restaurants in Italy because it is hip, good, and expensive. (Italians are disinclined to eat ethnic food to begin with, much less pay a lot of money for it.) The other, Hangzhou, lies at the opposite end of the dining spectrum: smal , crowded, and noisy, with kitschy Mao-era decor. Nonetheless, the wait for a table can last over an hour, the crowds spil ing out onto the narrow stone streets. One friend explained the appeal to me as we stood on line outside: “Being in a dive is part of the experience.”

Hangzhou tops off its meals with fortune cookies; they are written in Italian, but made in Germany. It was an unexpected sighting. Sonia, the owner, was dressed that night in a bright red outfit that resembled a Chinese folk dancer’s costume. She told me, in Chinese, why she imports them. “Everyone likes them. There is no one who doesn’t like fortune cookies. But they are particularly, particularly American.”

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

I arrived back in my hometown hoping to discover that the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant would be no more than a subway ride from my house. New York City is both a world culinary capital and a nexus for fine Chinese dining in the West. Manhattan is where Westerners discovered Sichuan and Hunan cuisine in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And New York, after al , was the birthplace of the recipe of General Tso’s chicken. “The revolution was so successful that it was its own worst enemy,” said Ed Schoenfeld, a Brooklyn-based

Chinese-restaurant

consultant.

“Everyone embraced Chinese food, and the market expanded greatly. Recent immigrants could make a great deal of money. So people who did that had less training. There was a general dumbing down.” Truth be told, while New York has its share of authentic Chinese dives, there are real y no standout fine Chinese restaurants in New York anymore. As
Zagat
pointed out in its 2005 list of top American restaurants, “Fine Chinese dining, once the leading Asian cuisine in the U.S., seems to have stal ed, with not even one Chinese restaurant reaching the Top Food Rankings.”

There seemed to be hope when Ian Schrager decided he needed a Chinese response to London’s Hakkasan in his upscale Gramercy Park Hotel. And what better way to answer Hakkasan than to hire its creator, Alan Yau himself? But the efforts to open Park Chinois stal ed for over a year, and then, in 2007, were abandoned. Why?

One reason that many cite is also the primary cause for the stagnant state of Chinese cuisine in New York in general: Alan Yau was unable to get a visa for the chef. It is nearly impossible to get top Chinese chefs into the United States since the visa system favors superstars (like world-class geniuses and models) and skil ed migrants (who need four years of col ege or the equivalent). Potential top chefs do not fal neatly into either category.

So Schrager turned to Yuji Wakiya, the French-influenced Japanese-Chinese chef from Tokyo. I had been impressed with his food when I’d visited that city: a combination of the delicacy of Japanese cuisine, the presentation of French cuisine, and the rich flavors of Chinese cuisine. But would he deliver the same to New Yorkers?

Diners, critics, and myself were oddly perplexed by the high-end menu at the New York Wakiya. It was not what I had experienced in Japan. I was trying to put my finger on what seemed off about the menu when a stray piece of broccoli caught my eye. Broccoli, which original y hails from Italy, is not a commonly used Chinese vegetable. The Chinese have their own version of broccoli—cal ed Chinese broccoli, similar to broccoli rabe. China, in fact, imports broccoli from the United States, where the agricultural industry has genetical y engineered stalkless broccoli (like muffin tops).

Looking at the piece of broccoli, I realized what I found disconcerting: this was a Japanese chef’s perception of American Chinese food. Among more authentic Chinese dishes were stereotypes of American Chinese food gone horribly awry on fancy leaf-shaped white plates. There was broccoli, sweet-and-sour, random cauliflower, deep-fried stuff, fried rice, fried noodles, egg rol s.

Had American Chinese food suffered so much that even a haute cuisine interpretation simply made it seem comic?