Cleaning Up the Image of Chinese Cuisine
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Zhou knows how to prepare dishes to please China’s elite. Indeed, that was what he did for almost two years in the mid-1980s, as an apprentice in the kitchen of a Shanghai guest house where Communist Party leaders and foreign dignitaries stayed. “Some of the finest chefs worked there,” he recalls, “and since there was a lot of downtime between VIP visits we sampled food and drank a lot of beer. The masters taught kids like me how to cook, how to experiment with new dishes. And I wrote the recipes down in my notebook.” He had joined the staff after studying hotel management and psychology in a municipal college. Though he can’t quite pinpoint the moment when he decided to forsake medicine–the profession of his parents–for business, he says that he’s always felt in control making financial deals and that his memory “is not good enough to keep track of all those chemistry terms.” It’s sharp enough, however, to remember the dishes cooked by his grandmother and mother. “I owe a lot of my knowledge about hongsao [the traditional Shanghai method of slow roasting meat in soy sauce, sugar, wine, and ginger] to them,” he says. “And the way they made the seafood dishes with delicious heavy sauce.”
Zhou toyed with the idea of working his way up the ladder in one of Shanghai’s Western hotels–his vocational degree and prestigious apprenticeship would have given him immediate entry. But America intrigued him. His father, a renowned heart surgeon, had been a researcher at the University of Chicago between 1983 and ’86, and his tales of life in Chicago impressed Zhou, who had stayed behind. In 1987 he left China for his father’s favorite city.
Zhou isn’t sure that Chicagoans will go for the core of Shanghai cooking, so he plans to introduce new dishes through daily specials like soft-shell crab in black bean sauce and jumbo unpeeled shrimp coated in garlic paste. He also plans to add veal and lobster prepared Shanghai style and the hongsao foie gras that he thinks could be the next fusion hit. “It’s not easy to persuade even my regulars to eat something different,” he says with a shrug. “But it’s my mission to make Chens a hospitable restaurant for the enjoyment of fine Chinese food.”
