Chinese-American Chefs Start a Culinary Conversation With the Past

One was working as an accredited C.P.A. Another had just completed the requirements for a pre-med degree at the University of Chicago. Yet another, a junior employee at Morgan Stanley, walked down 75 flights in the World Trade Center’s South Tower and back into the family food business on Sept. 11, 2001.

These New Yorkers — Thomas Chen, Jonathan Wu and Wilson Tang — are among a few dozen Chinese-Americans who have recently surfaced as influential chefs, determined to begin a new culinary conversation with the food of their ancestors. Independently, they arrived at the same goal: to invent a kind of Chinese-American food that is modern, creative and delicious instead of sweet, sticky and bland.

But they took similar routes to get there. Despite their advanced academic degrees, these chefs started over as culinary students — usually against their families’ wishes.
“No Chinese parent sends their child off to college hoping they’ll work in a kitchen,” said Mr. Chen, 31, whose parents owned a restaurant in Mount Vernon, N.Y., while he was growing up. “That’s what you go to college to escape from.”
They worked their way up in high-end global kitchens like Noma, Guy Savoy, Eleven Madison Park and Jean-Georges. And then, having defied their parents, they defied their culinary training as well. They left the luxurious places where they had mastered foie gras and morels to open storefront restaurants where they can mess around with pork belly and pomelo, steamed eggs and sawtooth herb.

In addition to exploring a vast pantry of new ingredients (osmanthus, pandan, celtuce and wood ginger), they are facing a daunting new arsenal of Chinese cooking techniques, entirely different from the skills they’ve been schooled in.

“It’s not just recipes that are different,” Mr. Chen said. “It’s basics like how to hold a knife, how to trim an onion, how to boil vegetables.”

The phenomenon is certainly not confined to New York City, although several of its exemplary restaurants are clustered in Lower Manhattan: Mr. Wu’s Fung Tu, Mr. Chen’s Tuome, and Yunnan BBQ from Doron Wong, 39, and Erika Chou, 31.

It is also not new. Pioneers like Susanna Foo and Ming Tsai long ago opened ambitious, creative Chinese restaurants that paved the way. More recently Anita Lo, of Annisa in the West Village, has been the spirit guide for many young chefs; her stubborn conviction that Chinese food can flow seamlessly into Western fine dining smoothed the path for this next generation.