New era of China’s regional cuisines
Cloudland Rice Noodle in Newark offers one snapshot of Chinese food in the Bay Area today: Order the restaurant’s signature crossing-the-bridge noodles, and a waiter will tip a plate of fat noodles and thinly sliced meats into scalding chicken soup at your table, sometimes setting down a plate of fried Yunnanese cheese next to the bowl.
Jiangnan Cuisine in San Francisco’s Richmond District offers another: It sends out its braised duck leg sliced into precise stripes that have been glossed with an inky, vinegar sharpened glaze that resembles a classic French demiglace.
And this, too, is Chinese food in the Bay Area: At Jin Li Yuan in Sunnyvale, diners pluck cow’s throat tendons and cloud-ear fungus out of a steaming hot pot whose broth, capped with carmine-red chile oil, is so spicy that merely being in the same room produces an endorphin rush.
In 2002, Chronicle staff writer Olivia Wu wrote one of the country’s first features on a culinary phenomenon she was seeing: so-called Chinese cuisine in the Bay Area had become Chinese cuisines. I was a restaurant critic in the East Bay when Wu’s piece was published. Not only did I visit every restaurant she wrote about, her article inspired me to monitor the hundreds of new restaurants that have opened here since.
The diversification of Chinese cuisine has become one of the most significant culinary shifts the Bay Area has experienced this century. Molecular gastronomy, with its gels and liquid spheres, has come and gone. The low-carb craze hit bakeries like a gut punch, then disappeared. Paleo, Whole30, even the excesses of gluten-free, all may do the same. Meanwhile, diners all around the region are eating more Sichuan, Shang-
hainese, Dongbei, Hunan and Taiwanese food than ever before, and increasingly, the specialties of less-prominent regions like Shaanxi, Hubei and Yunnan.
It’s worth reminding anyone who has never been to China that the country is twice the size of the European Union. No English-language cookbook would dare lump Portuguese cuisine together with Polish. In addition, many American-born diners assume they’re eating the same lemon chicken and Mongolian beef as eaters in Beijing and Hangzhou, but these familiar dishes are more likely to represent the Chinese American cuisine that originated in San Francisco in the 1850s and are now found in almost every tiny town in the United States.
More than 160 years after the Gold Rush, when Cantonese and French restaurateurs first set up shop in San Francisco, Cantonese cuisine continues to reign in Bay Area commercial strips. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cecilia Chiang’s groundbreaking northern Chinese restaurant the Mandarin and Henry and Diana Chung’s Hunan Restaurant both remained curiosities at home despite the national attention they both attracted.
Everything changed in 1965, when the Immigration and Naturalization Act removed racist quotas that allowed no more than 105 Chinese to come to the U.S. each year. It took decades for these changes to be seen on menus.
As Erika Lee, author of “The Making of Asian America,” says, “The pattern with Chinese immigration has been one that is very much what demographers call ‘bifurcated’ — those situated economically at the very top, who are highly educated, and at the bottom.”
According to Lee, first to arrive in the late 1960s were students, as well as families from Guangdong reuniting with the Chinese Americans who had settled here generations before. Taiwanese professionals, seeking economic opportunities they couldn’t yet find at home, followed in the 1980s. Next were Hong Kongers rushing to North America before the British handed con- trol of the island colony back to the People’s Republic in 1999. Immigrants settled all over the Bay Area, not just in the historic urban Chinatowns.
Many of these wealthier immigrants sponsored lesseducated family members, who found work in restaurants before establishing their own. The 1990s, too, saw waves of working-class Fujianese immigrants arriving, many stowed away on boats.
This pattern has shifted again over the last decade. “China’s economy has grown dramatically, and so the population of Chinese immigrants has also changed,” Lee says. “Now it is largely made up of highly educated people or students seeking education in the United States, as well as their family members.”
As Olivia Wu now adds, “We can talk about the melting pot and diversity, but how good the food is really has to do with the kind of immigrants and refugees coming to the country, what level of education and economic level they’re at.”
To tell the story of regional Chinese food in Northern California is to follow immigration patterns as closely as a noontime shadow.
Edward Tan and Melanie Wong, longtime contributors to food discussion board Chowhound, have both witnessed every new culinary wave as it has broken upon Bay Area shores. First was the flush of Taiwanese restaurants that opened around Cupertino, center of the Bay Area’s Taiwanese community, in the 1980s. Soon to follow were posh Hong Kong seafood houses that awed diners in the 1990s. “We saw a dramatic improvement in dim sum with Hong Kong Flower Lounge and Harbor with more delicacy, like you’d get at a really fine restaurant versus the large takeout style that Chinatown is known for,” Wong says.
“The influx of the more mainland Chinese has happened gradually as years have gone by,” Tan adds.
Chowhounders gushed over a Cupertino Sichuan restaurant named House of YuDong 15 years ago, then watched Sichuan become the region’s secondmost prominent Chinese regional cuisine after Cantonese. Next came Hunan and Shanghai-style restaurants.
Since 2010, tiny northern Chinese dumpling-and-noodle shops have proliferated. In the East Bay and South Bay, Chinese supermarkets like Ranch 99 and Lion Mart have become anchors for strip-mall complexes where culinary diversity reigns.
As Clarissa Wei describes in her essay in this issue, the increasing wealth of new workers and students emigrating from China is attracting overseas investment in Southern California and Bay Area restaurants alike. The culinary borders between the two countries are at their most porous in this state.
Just as Chinese restaurants have diversified, the online discussion around food has fragmented. In English, Chowhound has been joined by another active food discussion board, Hungry Onion, not to mention Yelp, where new Chinese restaurants appear days after (or before) they open. The Chinese-language forum Chi Huo has captured the attention of expats with its mix of reader content and advertorial. Just as active are Chinese-language discussions on WeChat and Facebook.
These discussions aren’t limited to Elite Yelpers and Facebook obsessives. “We’re now looking for regional cuisines,” says author Lee. “I think that’s a reflection of our global society. At the same time we’re globalizing, we also want to continue to celebrate and honor the local.”