In the late 60s and early 70s, I would often go to New York City on vacation from my midwestern college, and my uncles Shaw and Hsiah would take me to Sunday lunch. Those were some of the best Chinese meals I’ve ever had. Call it the warped judgment of a starved kid homesick for the Far East, but Uncle Hsiah did say that the cook was formerly the personal chef to the UN ambassador from China.
This system of culinary suppression is less the result of a shadowy practice of segregation than of intersecting forces of marketing and cultural assimilation. This is, after all, the land that reinvented pizza, then homogenized and exported it all over the world.
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Hsu handpicked four malleable young chefs. “During the conversations [with older chefs] I found they were so original that the food would not be that acceptable for the American palate,” he says. “We asked [the younger chefs] to watch and to learn our tastes before creating their own.”
Short of going “with a Chinese,” the key that opens doors in a Chinese restaurant is communication. Anyone can extract the best effort out of the cook. “Chinese style, eaten by Chinese” is rarely hollered into kitchens anymore. Most restaurants employ a good English speaker, and often the most primitive communications, such as watching what others are eating and pointing to it, go a long way.
