How chefs are reinventing Chinese-Canadian cuisine

Share

For most of us who grew up in Canada, our first taste of Chinese food almost certainly had nothing to do with Chinese food. That's true of my own experience – my earliest exposures inevitably came from restaurants promising "Chinese and Canadian Specialties," with menus that ran the gamut from moo goo gai pan, heavy on the baby corn, to exotically greasy sweet-and-sour chicken balls.

Many of us have been exposed to the myriad variations of true, regional Chinese cooking: the fiery tingle of Szechwan, the subtle complexity of Cantonese and the offal goodness of Lu cuisine. We know that those gloopy hybrid dishes we grew up with have as much in common with traditional Chinese cooking as a tin of Beefaroni has with the cuisine of Liguria.

And yet, if we're being totally honest, we probably still crave and maybe even indulge in the occasional dirty egg roll, sweaty chop suey or full-on Deluxe Dinner Combo A. Good news, Chinese-Canadian-food fans, we're not alone. Some of the country's best chefs are taking inspiration from this unlikely source and giving those old imposters a new lease on life.

The legitimization of ersatz Chinese began with Danny Bowien, owner of the wildly popular Mission Chinese Food restaurants in San Francisco and New York, who has been celebrated across the United States for dishes like his kung pao pastrami, General Tso's veal rib and Tiki pork belly – a cocktail-umbrella-garnished creation that makes excellent use of canned mandarin segments. "You won't get authentic food at Mission Chinese," Bowien is fond of claiming, "but you'll have an authentic experience."

Canadian chefs are interpreting this trend in what is perhaps a very Canadian fashion – in deeply personal ways that also honour the dishes' historical significance. At Boralia, the Toronto restaurant specializing in Canadiana, co-owner Evelyn Wu draws on her own roots and looks much further back for her devilled tea eggs and chop-suey croquettes. "We have some guests who don't initially understand why these two items are on the menu," Wu admits. "But that's my opportunity to explain that the Chinese immigrants came and played an extremely vital role in building Canada. And then when they take a bite out of the croquette or egg, they taste all the umami that comes with the use of traditional Chinese ingredients like soy and sesame oil and Shaoxing wine, and the history doesn't matter any more, it just tastes good."

Boralia's version, in the grand chop-suey tradition, uses up restaurant leftovers, although in this case it's usually leftover elk meat, shiitake mushrooms, Chinese sausage and duck gizzards rather than scraps and trimmings. Everything gets mixed together with sticky rice before being breaded and deep-fried. At the last minute an aromatic fluid gel is injected, giving the crisp little nuggets a syrupy interior, something like a savoury, crunchy Cherry Blossom.

Chop suey also plays an important part in the history of Vancouver's new Sai Woo restaurant. Nearly 100 years ago this same building housed the legendary Sai Woo Chop Suey, a de facto community centre for generations of locals. Today, chef Douglas Chang pays homage to that past in a couple of dishes, sweet-and-sour sweetbreads in a tamarind glaze and pork belly with fermented red tofu, although his own upbringing featured a much more traditional Chinese diet.

"I'll be honest, my first encounter with a sweet-and-sour chicken ball was probably in university after we'd gone out for a drink," he says. "I couldn't associate it with Chinese food because I was used to eating that food at home. I thought it was delicious, though, and I didn't care that it wasn't really Chinese."

For Lily Cho, author of Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, the significance of the Chinese-Canadian restaurant goes beyond just food. "These were the places where Canadian cuisine was first named as Canadian on a physical menu. They were crucial sites for community interaction. They were more than just restaurants – they were gathering places," she says. "Part of the way we understand what Canadian culture is, Canadian cuisine in particular, comes out of its place in opposition to certain kinds of Chinese-ness as they circulated through these small-town menus."

Nick Liu, from Toronto's DaiLo restaurant, was raised on the kind of Chinese food actual Chinese people eat, but he was professionally trained in a classic Western style of cooking and that contrast strongly informs the style of food he serves now. "I have my sweet-and-sour pork hock that was 100 per cent purely taken from Chinese-Canadian sensibilities," he says. His version, however, is done in a much more traditional way without the aid of radioactive-looking bottled sauces. "We braise off the meat, press it, deep-fry it and then, taking that braising sauce, adding some vinegar and caramelized sugar and make the sauce out of that," he says, "not using red sauce or sweet chili sauce, but taking the basics of those sauces and making them yourself."

Similarly, Dustin Gallagher, chef at People's Eatery in Toronto, has manipulated a "traditional" recipe for General Tso chicken so that it isn't just sugary-sweet and sticky, but has some chili and depth. He's also done away with the chicken entirely. "I didn't want to do a protein so I thought tofu," he explains. "I like that you got the silkiness of the tofu, but you still had the texture – I like to call it the CSR, the crunch to squish ratio – but still have that spice heat and a little umaminess to it."

At Toronto's Patois, chef Craig Wong adds yet another dimension to his take on Chinese and Canadian cooking. His family immigrated from Jamaica and incorporated that cooking into their own earlier Chinese traditions. Consequently, he offers things like jerk-chicken chow mein – a Chinese-Canadian-Jamaican hybrid that beautifully captures the spirit of this food as interpreted here. Far from dreaming the dish up in the kitchen, Wong says that it was directly inspired by the food he ate as a kid. "We'd have these big Jamaican-Chinese family dinners where someone would bring jerk chicken and someone else would bring chow mein and I'd combine them on my plate at the same time," says. "That dish is literally my upbringing on a plate."

The tale of ginger beef

This country's greatest contribution to the Chinese culinary canon, as anyone in the Prairies can tell you, is ginger beef. Marinated beef, dredged in a corn-starch-heavy batter, deep-fried and served in a sweet-and-sour sauce may sound more like something you'd eat off a stick at a local fair, but make no mistake, it is one of the greatest things ever cooked. Simultaneously crisp and yielding, spicy and sweet with the chili heat accentuated by a slight ginger burn, the dish is now ubiquitous in Western Canada and has even spawned a chain of restaurants in Calgary named Ginger Beef.

Naturally, with something so delicious, there is some debate about who first invented it. While the combination of beef with ginger is common in China and around the world, it wasn't until one George Wong, chef at Calgary's Silver Inn Restaurant in the late 1970s, brought batter and a deep fryer into the equation that the dish we now recognize as ginger beef was born. Wong's Chinese heritage and experience cooking in British pubs – where the emphasis on battering and deep-frying inspired ginger beef – may make him the world's first fusion chef.