CHRIS YING ON THE PROBLEM OF THE HIGH-END CANTONESE RESTAURANT.
Extraordinary Chinese fine dining is not a myth. The first restaurant to get it right in San Francisco will not be inventing anything new. Unfortunately, at the moment, in order to experience a distinctly Chinese style of hospitality and cuisine being executed at the highest levels, you need to travel.
Forgive me while I daydream for a minute about being upstairs at the legendary Flower Drum in Melbourne, Australia. Walking across the plush, ruby-red carpet of the restaurant’s sprawling main hull, we reach the back of the building, where a private room awaits. A mahogany credenza stands against the far wall, with a tall, blue-andwhite qinghua vase resting on top. We gather around a large circular table that’s dressed in white, with a lazy Susan in the center that’s already set with ramekins of XO sauce and ornate cruets filled with red vinegar.
Every dish we order is a marvel of technique. Pearl meat — the abductor muscle of an uncommonly large species of oyster — is sliced thin and stir-fried with asparagus and chives. It’s served in its iridescent shell and has the texture of well-cooked abalone. A huge, gauzy dumpling stuffed with crab, scallop and wood ear mushrooms floats like a jellyfish in a bowl of clear chicken broth. The showstopper is an intact shelled crab claw plated table side with a thick spindle of egg noodles and more hand-picked crab meat in a velvety, umami-rich sauce.
This style of dining — luxurious meals, often served in a private room — descended from a Cantonese tradition. It’s big in affluent Asian cities like Shanghai, Taipei, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, where the restaurant Lung King Heen in the Four Seasons Hotel holds three Michelin stars for its soigné Cantonese cooking. A few modernist Chinese restaurants, such as Yu’s Family Kitchen in Chengdu and Longjing Manor in Hangzhou, take the private-dining model to the extreme, eschewing main dining rooms completely in favor of a series of private parlors.
A version of this kind of dining certainly exists in the United States, although it has yet to reach the same giddy heights as the original. If you’ve ever eaten at Koi Palace (three locations in the Bay Area) or R&G Lounge in San Francisco, or one of the similarly palatial Cantonese restaurants in the South Bay, Vancouver or Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, you’ve gotten a taste of it.
Private rooms are available at R&G and Koi Palace — constructed with removable walls hung from gliders in the ceiling — but they’re a somewhat crude approximation of the Cantonese tradition. Still, I vastly prefer their charm to that of a nouveau-Canto place like Hakkasan in the Financial District. Hakkasan is part of a massively successful chain, started in England and built on a cynical model. It’s high-end Chinese dining that has been whitewashed and covered in marble and black lacquer. The sleek darkness of the space always gives me the impression that the restaurant is trying to have sex with me.
The Kowloon-meets-Ibiza model is duplicated and intensified at Crystal Jade Jiang Nan in the Embarcadero Center. When the Singapore-based restaurant chain opened a San Francisco location in 2014, the headlines revolved around how much money had been sunk into this multimillion-dollar boondoggle. The product of all that money was another overly horny space, with abrupt turnoffs like exposed wooden tables that noisily scrape against the bottoms of plates when servers deliver dishes.
I visited Crystal Jade for the first time recently, and it felt like the wheels were threatening to come off. A plate of roast pork belly was perhaps the ugliest version of this classic Chinese barbecue dish I’ve ever had: a square mosaic comprising comically large chunks of chewy meat attached to stale, burnt skin. On a dish of gloppy, overly sweet chili prawns, strands of microgreens were strewn on top like so many stray hairs on the floor of the Jolly Green Giant’s bathtub. The dish also pointed to other core problems with the meal at Crystal Jade. The shrimp arrived well ahead of a small dish of their accompanying mantou (steamed-then-fried bread rolls meant for dipping in sauce), which the server dropped unceremoniously on the table, muttering, “This is for that,” before scurrying off.
Decor and an overall level of thoughtfulness get a significant upgrade at the Bay Area’s latest attempt at Chinese fine dining. Eight Tables occupies a spectacularly beautiful room on a hidden block between North Beach and Chinatown. I would live there. Wouldn’t change a thing, either — I’d sleep right on the banquettes.
Beyond the design, however, everything falls short. On my visit, the service was overbearing without being particularly sympathetic; the food familiar yet strangely discordant.
Take, for example, the well-Instagrammed opening salvo of nine small courses representing different flavors of Chinese cuisine. An assortment of cold plates is a common beginning to a Chinese banquet meal, but at Eight Tables, only one or two of the dishes piqued my interest. As the meal progressed, some of the most eye-popping dishes — a caviar-and-uni-topped “four seas” dumpling and a foie-filled potsticker — were disappointing once I actually put them in my mouth. The low point was a serving of dong po pork belly, with a sauce that was so thoroughly congealed by the time it reached the table that I was able to peel it off the plate in one wiggly sheet.
I get no joy from criticizing these places. I wish they were better. Purely for selfish reasons, I want Eight Tables to rise to the caliber of a restaurant like Flower Drum or Lung King Heen. But more importantly, with each successive stumbling effort to bring Cantonesestyle fine dining to the States, I feel certain stereotypes about Chinese food solidifying: Namely, that it belongs in a lower echelon than other cuisines in America. Whenever an expensive Chinese restaurant like Crystal Jade fails to deliver, it seems to refute the very notion of a “nice” Chinese restaurant.
But if you ask me, the main obstacle to these restaurants is that they — and their patrons — look too often to Western standards. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that George Chen has been to most, if not all, of the restaurants I’ve mentioned. He knows what a great Chinese restaurant is, but he doesn’t seem to trust us enough to enjoy one. The lazy Susans at Eight Tables have been permanently deactivated. Caviar and Wagyu beef show up in unnecessary places. A gaudy Champagne cart trundles around the room. To my eye, these are gestures that cater to an audience that sees the price tag and immediately looks for familiar signs of luxury — fish eggs, Japanese beef, truffles, goose liver, ornate cocktails, staff who used to work at Benu or Saison or Meadowood.
It’s too bad, because, done properly, high-end Chinese restaurants are some of the most exceptional dining experiences on earth: places where cooks of unbelievable skill are appreciated by diners who recognize something wholly different and special in what they’re eating.
Return with me, if you will, to that dinner at Flower Drum. After a progression of impressive seafood preparations, we finish with a modest bowl of fried rice with egg whites and dried scallop. The dish is nearly all white, save for a few specks of scallion. At first glance, it appears suspiciously not fancy, but beneath its simplicity is a great deal of skill and a deep understanding of how a meal should be crafted. A hot wok has rendered the rice fluffy and fragrant. Tiny shreds of scallop give a whisper of salty ocean flavor. The dish nourishes and comforts. No smoke and mirrors. No glitz or glamour. Only exactly what you want to be eating.