The spotlight shines on the ‘better cook’ of Chang family
BETHESDA, Maryland: It’s the day after Lunar New Year, and even though it’s early February, the balcony door in chefs Lisa and Peter Chang’s modern Bethesda apartment is wide open. Lisa eyes the smoke alarm as pork riblets sear in one saute pan and chillies hit the shimmering oil in another.
These are the beginnings of two of Lisa’s favourite make-athome dishes: glazed sweet-andsour pork ribs, flavoured with scallions, star anise, ginger and cumin seeds, and a zesty stir-fry of tofu skin, scrambled eggs and Chinese celery.
She and her family - Peter, their daughter, Lydia, and Peter’s mother, Ronger Wang, who’s visiting from China - are finally able to celebrate the holiday. The night before, they worked at the Changs’ packed fine-dining flagship restaurant a mile away, Q by Peter Chang.
Lydia, 31, sets the table with a bright, floral cloth and a bundle of longan fruit as a centrepiece. Wang mounds peanuts, pork, tofu and vegetables onto a mustard green leaf draped over her left hand and, in a flash of dexterity, forms a perfect triangular dumpling known as a wrap of delicacies. She completes a dozen, then wraps a dozen more in tofu skins.
Three generations of Chang women run the show, the celebration doing double-duty as a tasting session of dishes that may make it onto the menu at the family’s newest restaurant, Mama Chang, which opened in Fairfax, Virginia, a month later. Lisa’s home cooking - and dishes from the family’s home region of Hubei province in central China take centre stage at the 200-seat restaurant, a departure from the hot-and-numbing Sichu an influenced cooking for which Peter is known.
“At Mama Chang, I as a chef am not as important as my wife, because this restaurant - the idea, the cooking, the style - actually comes from her,” says Peter, 56. (He, Lisa and his 77year-old mother speak through an interpreter.)
Lydia puts it more bluntly. “At home,” she says, “she is a better cook than my father, period. Before we started working together, I never even tasted my father’s cooking, only my mother’s and grandmother’s. He cooks for a job. She does it for fun.”
The flurry of activity continues. Lisa, 58, dishes up soy-braised beef with tiny whole potatoes and tops rice noodles with pickled long beans, pickled mustard greens and chilli oil. Then she scrambles eggs and tosses them with sauteed tomatoes, Maggi Seasoning and scallions to crown longevity noodles (a New Year’s must) and stir-fries smoked pork belly, smoked tofu, green peppers and Chinese leeks.
Hubei cuisine is more ingredient-driven than Sichuan, with a focus on fish and “a lot of fresh seasonal vegetables, like lotus root, Chinese squash, snap peas and Chinese celery,” Lisa says. “You can describe Hubei cuisine as ‘fragrant spicy,’ where flavours come from vegetables and chilli peppers, rather than Sichuan peppercorns.”
As Lisa cooks, Peter preps ingredients, a sous-chef role he’s not accustomed to, considering that the Changs’ other eight restaurants in Maryland and Virginia all bear his name.
Peter’s career has been well documented. In China, his talent earned him the plum position as chef of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., for a twoyear stint beginning in 2001, and just before it ended, he fled the embassy with Lisa and Lydia. He took jobs at various restaurants, starting with China Star in northern Virginia. Bloggers and critics sang praises. Their followers thronged to try his cooking only to discover once they got there that he had left. A legend about the elusive chef took root, but the reason for his meandering was simple: He was on the lam from the Chinese and US governments and, without proper work papers, at the mercy of employers.
In 2011, Peter teamed up with business partner Gen Lee (now a silent partner) and started opening restaurants of his own. Under the terms of their negotiated status, Peter and Lisa can live and work in the United States, but if they leave the country, they can’t return. And the business must be in Lydia’s name. She obtained a green card in 2014 and intends to apply for citizenship in December.
Less well known is that Lisa was also a highly regarded chef in China, specialising in pastry. When she and Peter met in 1984, working on a Yangtze River cruise boat, she was his superior. Lisa’s real name is Hongying. At 19, she tasted Sichuan peppercorns for the first time. “I felt like I was electrified,” she says. “I was afraid to say anything because of the other chefs there. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I didn’t eat them. The master chef told me that to be a good chef, you have to taste and try everything. So I started using it and introducing it into dishes I made for my friends and family.”
It was unusual for women to work in professional kitchens. “You’d see a few here and there in the pastry department,” Lisa says. “Another master would tell my master, ‘Don’t teach her because she’ll be having kids in five years and will leave.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here for the rest of my life. I’ll just prove you wrong with my actions.’ “
A trope popular among American chefs today - learning how to cook at grandma’s knee - is a far cry from Peter’s experience. He was born in 1963, after the Great Famine claimed an estimated 36 million lives, among them Ronger Wang’s 45-year-old father and two of Peter’s aunts.
Ronger was a farmer, but the crops and animals raised belonged to the state under its collective-farming system. “My whole life was under the shadow of hunger,” Peter says. “We didn’t have rice. Our congee (rice porridge) was watery with very little rice in it. Drinking watery soup, you feel hungry again very soon. I didn’t really eat well until I went to Wuhan in 1981 for cooking school.”
The family’s lot improved in the early 1980s when the government’s Responsibility System allowed farmers,working under contract with the collective, to consume and sell some of what they raised.
“In Chinese villages, weddings, festivals, children’s 100-day birthday celebrations, my mom’s mom would help cook the dishes because they admired her cooking. Then my mom became the person people would come to for help for their important occasions,” Peter says. Before leaving China in January to visit her family in Bethesda, Maryland, she made dozens of wraps of delicacies for friends and family at their request. She learned how to make them from her mother and is passing the knowledge on to Lisa for Mama Chang’s menu. Her pan-fried tofu with bean sprouts, a typical 100day celebration dish, is already on it.
Lydia, who has a master’s degree in international business from King’s College London, is director of business development for the restaurant group, and sees her role as supporting her parents’ dream of revamping the image of Chinese food in America. She nudged her father to open Q and helped shape Mama Chang. She keeps her eye on trends, such as the popularity of street food, during annual research trips to China, and she influences menu decisions. As their New Year’s lunch ends, her father worries whether the public will take to Mama Chang. “What I’m doing now is different from what the Taiwan or Hong Kong restaurant owners did in the past,” he says. “I want to guide consumers, to show them something different.”
Two months later, there’s an hour wait for a table at Mama Chang at 4pm on a Saturday. The public, it seems, is taking to the place just fine. — Washington Post.
At Mama Chang, I as a chef am not as important as my wife, because this restaurant - the idea, the cooking, the style - actually comes from her. – Peter Chang