Cantonese food for many American diners has long been associated with easy, comforting flavors: sesame chicken piled in a ring of steamed broccoli, creamy crab Rangoon dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce and moo shoo pork rolled into pancakes with tangy hoisin. But at New York’s recently opened Cha Cha Tang restaurant, the menu is more adventurous. The pork chops are fried katsu style and come from pampered Kurobata pigs; afterward, guests can enjoy French toast stuffed with violet ube cream. In Toronto, at Yan Dining Room, Cantonese noodles are dressed with a clam- and baijiu-infused beurre blanc. Jatak, in Copenhagen, offers grilled Danish lobster tails, plated in a pool of golden long pepper sauce, with youtiou, a fluffy fried dough strip, on the side for dipping.
These dishes are a far cry from the typical, westernized Cantonese staples that were invented by immigrants from southern China’s Guangdong province, who primarily settled in California in the 1800s. As many moved eastward across the United States in the subsequent decades, they adapted their cuisine to the ingredients — and tastes — of their surroundings, incorporating more sugar and meat than would be used in Guangdong. This fare would become the foundation of what we now call Chinese American food and has defined the cuisine internationally, too. Over the past few years, however, several new restaurants in the U.S. and abroad have begun offering refined Cantonese-inspired dishes with unexpected twists. Unlike their predecessors, these restaurants are unrestricted by geography or American culinary norms; instead, their recipes draw from their chefs’ cultural and personal histories, expanding casual, comfort meals into altogether more surprising experiences.
In China, Cantonese cuisine is known for its restraint, relying on aromatics like garlic and white pepper. Its flavors are subtle, especially compared with the regional fare that has dominated Chinatowns worldwide for the past decade: fiery, mouth-numbing Sichuanese dishes like dan dan noodles and mapo tofu; and the brash, chili-laced dishes of Northwestern China, like cinnamon- and anise-scented big tray chicken and biang biang noodles with cumin lamb. “There’s a particular emphasis on freshness [and] using very fine ingredients and subtle seasonings to bring out the character of the ingredients,” says Fuchsia Dunlop, a London-based food writer. “If you steam a fish, you’re just using a little bit of ginger, spring onion [and] soy sauce to frame the beauty of your ingredients.” She notes that the approach has a lot in common with the California cooking movement spearheaded in the 1970s by the chef Alice Waters, which drew from international techniques and flavors and inspired what is often, imprecisely, called New American cuisine: upscale dishes created with local meat and seasonal produce.
The global popularity of these ingredient-obsessed New American restaurants has perhaps paved the way for other cooking styles that emphasize the same ideas. And the subtlety of Cantonese flavors gives them broad appeal. “Cantonese cuisine can really mesh with ingredients and techniques across different cuisines,” says the chef Kenny Leung, 55, of YAO Modern Cantonese Cuisine in downtown Manhattan. His menu includes a song shu-style fried whole fish drenched in a balsamic vinegar sauce and fusilli braised with oyster sauce, fresh Chinese salted fish and bone marrow. At Bonnie’s, in Brooklyn, Calvin Eng, 30, similarly embraces a fusion approach, offering cacio e pepe made with fermented bean curd. “I’ve realized how similar Cantonese and Italian food can be,” he says, noting how the use of anchovies, Parmesan and cured meats in the latter parallel the “punchy, flavorful umami-forward ingredients like fu yu bean curd or ham yue salted fish or fermented black soybeans that really shine in a [Cantonese] dish.”
An outlier to the trend of cross-cultural contemporary Cantonese fare is the Chairman in Hong Kong, helmed by chef Danny Yip, 61. Like Leung’s and Eng’s, Yip’s restaurant, which opened in 2009, centers on traditional ingredients and techniques, but Yip’s original recipes riff mostly off Cantonese culinary history, rather than dipping into other regions’ and cultures’ cuisines. To develop them, Yip references his extensive collection of cookbooks and rare Cantonese ingredients, then experiments with his team for months; the restaurant only debuts a handful of new recipes every year. “We believe that cooking, like winemaking, should reflect the terroir of the region and showcase flavors unique to that area,” Yip says. As a result, his inventions feel fresh, but don’t stray from the age-old tenets of Cantonese minimalism: Flower crabs, hand selected each day from the fish markets of the South China Sea, are appraised for salinity and sweetness, then steamed with chicken fat and wine to balance their saltwater flavor. Yip marinates a goose in poultry stock, steams it, smokes it over camphor wood, and lashes it with hot oil in a laborious four-day-process in which the only other ingredient is salt. The bird emerges crackling and mahogany-colored and is presented simply, on bamboo leaves, in a woven bamboo basket. Its flavors reinvent the past as something entirely new.
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