Diverse dumplings in DaiLo’s cultural mashup
In the kitchen at DaiLo, the guys are hotly debating Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones as they prep. I tune out and focus on making dumplings. Do I want to hear about why Lord Wigglebottom got turned into a Dracula? (My hands are too sticky for note-taking, so I may have gotten the character names wrong.)
When I got here, cook David Schwartz was the only one in the kitchen. He’d shown up early so he could scrub the hoods, the exhaust ducts over the hot line, which in this modern Chinese restaurant includes not just six gas elements, a grill and deep-fryer, but a wok range that blasts 160,000 BTUs of flame. You’ve got to stand on the stovetop to scrub the grease off of the hoods. So it’s easier at the start of the day when the ovens are cool.
Coming before your shift to get ahead in your work is asking for trouble.
If you’re the only one here, then anything and everything is your problem. Early veg delivery, leaking pipes — it’s all on you.
One of the freezers has broken overnight. So instead of cleaning, Schwartz is pulling apart clumps of Hakka brown wontons, which have begun to stick together as they defrost inside their Ziploc prisons.
David Haman, co-owner of adjacent restaurant Woodlot, strolls in through the back door of the kitchen like he’s Lumpy Rutherford, looking to borrow a cup of coriander seeds. Yes, neighbour chefs actually do this.
It’s moments like these, when cooks lounge for a spell, that you can be deceived into thinking there is all the time in the world.
But soon the kitchen fills with young cooks — Ryan Su (grill), Marvin Polomo (deep-fryer), Manny Castillo (cold apps) — rushing to get their stations ready for service. The bosses — sous chef Daniel McMahon, chef de cuisine Dennis Tay, chef Nick Liu — arrive in ascending order.
When Helen Fang gets in, we make dumplings.
Fang moves around the kitchen as if she is the only one here. The other cooks, mostly guys in their 20s, treat her with reverence. But other than the constant exchange of favours that is cooking work (pulling someone else’s roast cauliflower out of the oven because you’re closer when the timer goes off ), she moves swiftly around the room, ignoring their conversations.
Twice a week, Fang comes in to make “Big Mac bao,” steamed dumplings filled with beef, pickles and cheese. Everything, from pickles to secret sauce to processed cheese, is produced from scratch. But structurally, a dumpling is a dumpling. Filling it with ginger, pork and chives, or creasting a tribute to McDonald’s, requires the same skill set.
Liu wanted someone older who could focus on dumpling production, undistracted with everyone else’s laundry list of prep.
You wouldn’t know it from her speed, but this morning Fang returned on an overnight flight from Calgary, where she was visiting her grown son, who’s finishing his degree in neurology.
It’s a strange kitchen culture mashup, traditional dumpling production blended with Liu’s French-leaning culinary background (he trained at Scaramouche). We used to call this “fusion cooking,” before accepting that food can just be influenced by multiple cultures and because no one wants to say, “Let’s go out for fusion tonight.”
The menu has so many items fried in cornstarch coating that the murky deep-fryer oil needs to be replaced almost daily. The style of seasoning, balancing sugar and fish sauce in place of salt, presents a learning curve challenge for the cooks.
But they’re excited by the kitchen: Schwartz demonstrating how the full-throttle wok flames bring a cauldron to boil instantly; Polomo gutting and cleaning 45 trout, caught this morning, the fish still stiff with rigor mortis. There’s talk of tacos for the staff meal, though it ends up being fried rice, the default when they’re behind schedule. Around 4 p.m., it goes up on the pass, everyone grabbing a bowl and eating as they prep.
Before leaving for a charity event, Liu asks me if I know any cooks looking for work. What does it pay, I ask about the 12-hour shift with no breaks. $125 a day or $150 for more experienced cooks, he tells me. Do people care what cooks earn? Send me an email to let me know. Email mintz.corey@gmail.com and follow @coreymintz on Twitter and instagram.com/coreymintz
VIDEO
Watch Corey Mintz work a shift at DaiLo at thestar.com.