Michael Tong - The Shun Lee Cookbook: Recipes From a Chinese Restaurant Dynasty

The
Shun Lee

COOKBOOK

RECIPES FROM A
CHINESE RESTAURANT
DYNASTY

Michael Tong
AND ELAINE LOUIE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROGRIO VOLTAN

AS I WALK THROUGH THE DINING ROOMS of my restaurants, Shun Lee Palace and Shun Lee West, I am often stopped by customers who regale me with stories of how the restaurants changed the way they enjoy Chinese food. They tell me about the first time they had Mu Shu Pork, or how, as children, they loved hearing the gong that accompanied the arrival of Beijing Duck, or that they learned to use chopsticks at our tables. I am delighted and proud to be a part of their lives.

My personal story is also the story of how the real cooking of the most important regional Chinese cuisines came to America. Over the decades, the New York City restaurants I worked in, and then owned, introduced American diners to authentic Chinese dishes that are now classics, found on Asian restaurant menus all over this country. Crispy Orange Beef, Lake Tung Ting Prawns, Crispy Sea Bass they all originated at Shun Lee. In addition to creating these dishes, we also exposed the collective palate of New York diners to the complex Chinese seasonings that are now part of the American culinary landscape.

When I first came to the United States more than forty years ago, it wasnt difficult to find Chinese food, as long as you were satisfied with the elegant but restrained cooking of the province of Canton. Menus in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago were strictly limited to fare that restaurateurs believed would appeal to their American clientele. For example, shrimp with lobster saucewith no lobster in sightwas on every menu. A number of dishes that seemed Chinese (to Americans) but were never served in my homeland were also offered up, including egg foo yung, chow mein, and barbecued spareribs. In China we barbecued entire pigs, not just the ribs!

If the first Chinese chefs in America came from Canton, the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949 changed all that. Cooks on Chinese merchant vessels, unwilling to return to the changed political landscape, jumped ship in Manhattan and received political asylum. These cooks, who came from all over China, opened storefront restaurants, the first Chinese restaurants to offer non-Cantonese fare. These operations were far uptown near Harlem, where the rent was cheap. The decor may have been basic, with fake wood paneling and linoleum floors, but the food was something else again. A Chinese culinary revolution was taking place in uptown Manhattanbut the only people experiencing it were Columbia University students looking for great, cheap food and Chinese immigrants longing for an authentic taste of home.

I was one of those Chinese, starved for the kind of cooking I loved. I grew up in Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, three entirely different cities with radically dissimilar cuisines. My palate was similar to that of the American who loves to eat fried chicken in Atlanta, grilled salmon in Seattle, and pastrami in New York. I came to the United States as an engineering student, first at the University of Southern California, and then at Oklahoma State University. During the summer breaks, I worked as a waiter. In 1964 I ended up in New York, where I had family.

My uncle invited me to eat at a restaurant called Shun Lee, way uptown on Broadway at 91st Street. Here were the dishes that my mother and grandmother cookedrecipes from all corners of China, but especially Shanghai and Sichuan. Shanghai was represented by dishes like the famous Lions Head (pork and cabbage meatballs) and Sichuan by Slippery Chicken. There were also specialties of Beijing, like Bejing Duck. The food was spectacular. The chef was Tsung Ting Wang, who had been the chef for no less a personage than Harrison Tung, Chiang Kai-sheks ambassador to the United States. There was also a Shun Lee on Lexington Avenue at 23rd Street, an address as unfashionable as the uptown one.

I came to know Chef Wang quite well. One year later, he confided that he was about to open his own restaurant, which he planned to call Shun Lee Dynasty, in Manhattans Midtown East, which would be quite a radical change from the neighborhoods of his employers Shun Lee restaurants. He asked me to join him in the venture. It took me a while to make the decision to leave engineering and go into the restaurant business, but eventually I became the matre d at Shun Lee Dynasty.

Chef Wangs mission was to share the delightfully seasoned food of Shanghai and Sichuan with New Yorkers, and Shun Lee Dynasty was probably the first upscale Chinese restaurant to offer these cuisines, so far removed from Cantonese cooking. Tough cuts of meat were red-cookedsimmered in a mahogany-red, spiced soy sauce braise until they fell off the bone. More tender bits of meat, poultry, and seafood werent just stir-fried, but first passed through oil, a technique where the food is first gently fried to give it a silky texture. New Yorkers were entranced by dishes that were enlivened by the exciting, aromatic flavor of Sichuan peppercorns and whole chili peppers.

At that time Grace Chu, the grande dame of Chinese cooking teachers, was ensconced at the China Institute in Manhattan, where her classes influenced an entire generation of cooks, both American and Asian. One day she brought in a friend of hers, a polite Southern gentleman who had an exotic appetite. He returned many times alone, and I served him such adventuresome fare for the time as mu shu pork, frog legs, and tripe, which he enjoyed heartily. I had no idea who he was until he handed me his credit card: Mr. Craig Claiborne. Mr. Claiborne, as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, was one of the most powerful men in the food business. When his New York Times Restaurant Guide came out, Shun Lee Dynasty received four stars, the highest rating. This endorsement legitimized Chinese cooking for New Yorkers, putting our restaurant at the same level as the bastions of French cuisine in town.

With our success, Chef Wang and I became partners. Soon we opened Shun Lee Palace on East 55th Street, followed by Hunam on Second Avenue. The latter restaurant brought yet another important Chinese cuisine to New York: the fiery food of the Hunan province. Like the Sichuan and Shanghai fare at the Shun Lee restaurants, the Hunanese food caused a sensation. Imagine being served shrimp with cilantro for the first time: shrimp in a piquant sauce of garlic, scallions, vinegar, hot bean sauce, and chili oil, showered with fresh cilantro. We then received our second New York Times four-star review, this time from Raymond Sokolov. These two four-star reviews put not only Shun Lee on the map, but also the foods of Sichuan and Hunan.

People returned for specialties such as Slippery Chicken (shredded chicken on a bed of spinach with a spicy sauce) and Lake Tung Ting Shrimp (shrimp and vegetables cloaked in a delicate sauce, covered with a lace netting of fried egg whites). When the clientele began demanding these dishes at other Chinese restaurants, our competitors (or colleagues, depending on your outlook) strove to meet our standards, and our recipes became part of the collective culinary consciousness. Over the years, Id say that weve served around 10 million meals; my two restaurants serve 900 meals daily, plus about 400 take-out orders. And now, in The Shun Lee Cookbook, I am happy to share these distinctive recipes with you.

CHINESE COOKING AT HOME is different than cooking in a restaurant, where our ranges have extremely hot burners, our woks are seasoned from constant use, and our deep-fryers are at the ready. No matter. These recipes have been tested in home kitchens with generic equipment (a 24-inch Hotpoint electric stove) with the home cook in mind. You will learn the secrets to re-creating these dishes: high-quality ingredients, professional techniques such as passing through, and the unique combinations of seasonings that make authentic Chinese cooking an extraordinary culinary event.