You’ve got to hand it to the Chinese. In addition to inventing fireworks and the compass, they may have introduced Americans to the concept of regional ethnic cuisine, too. After all, who didn’t grow up visiting their local Great Wall Mandarin or Jade Garden Sichuan/Hunan restaurant when the taste for something “exotic” struck?
Yet such foods only hinted at a complexity in Chinese cuisine that mainstream Americans are only beginning to explore. “It always starts out with the generic brand of Chinese cuisine,” says Philip Chiang, co-founder, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Scottsdale, AZ, “but now, especially in the major cities on the coasts, restaurants are serving many more specific kinds of dishes—like places that serve just northern-style noodles.” Practitioners of Chinese cuisine can raise their art to this next level because not only has immigration formed regional expat communities with a taste for home, but those expats have brought the ingredients and know-how to make recreating those tastes possible.
“What I’ve seen more of these days are people venturing into these communities of immigrants for the great food,” says Robin Stotter, culinary R&D chef, P.F. Chang’s. “Americans today have an appetite for experiencing and understanding different styles of Chinese cooking. Chefs in America have a great interest in the regionalization and differentiation of the cuisines of China. And you also have Chinese-American chefs and chefs from China itself doing some unbelievable food.”
For manageability’s sake, it makes sense to view China’s culinary traditions through the points of the compass: Canton in the south, Shanghai in the East, Beijing in the north, and Sichuan in the west.
Southern comfort
Guangzhou (the province formerly known as Canton) is the region whose cuisine first arrived in America with immigrant laborers. A strain of simplicity runs through their cuisine. As Chiang says: “You have to remember that the first Chinese were farmers and peasants. They weren’t the high-class aristocrats from Canton, and so they ate more rustic, ‘poor-people’ food.”
But what was “poor” then would strike today’s disciple of fresh-seasonal-local as a triumph of enlightened gastronomy. Cantonese cuisine could pass for California cuisine’s Eastern cousin, a market-driven approach that eschews elaborate prep, seasonings and cooking methods for flavors and presentations that let ingredients speak for themselves.
The emphasis on minimal seasoning runs mainly to salt, white pepper, fresh ginger, garlic and green onion, and on uncompromising freshness. The Cantonese traditionally “don’t use chiles or heavy spices,” Chiang says, nor do they use heavy prep methods. “The style of cooking is steaming, braising, roasting. You won’t see the fiery woks that they use in the North.”
Baby pea shoots tugged from the earth and stir-fried with a touch of garlic and fermented black bean epitomize the Cantonese knack for sublimity through simplicity. Other illustrative dishes include chicken with black mushrooms and snow peas, and steamed catfish with fresh ginger, a splash of sesame oil and garlic chives.
