A STUNNING BEIJING BANQUET IN THE RICHMOND, FIT FOR A PRESIDENT.
Tong Gang Wang was an 18-year-old cook when he brushed up against history in 1972. Wang’s shifu, the master chef at a Beijing hotel, had been tapped to cook for Richard Nixon on the U.S. president’s historic first visit to China. The dinner took place in Mao Zedong’s declining days, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution — and the young cook, only two years into his apprenticeship, found himself toiling over elaborate 18th and 19th century dishes from the imperial court.
The experience marked him as a cook and culinary scholar. After he became a master chef in Beijing, Wang wrote a 1990 cookbook teaching home cooks how to make dishes beloved by the last dowager empress, in power from 1861 to 1908. He moved to the United States in 1997, and has quietly practiced making those dishes here ever since.
In November, Wang became the chef at Chili House, Li Jun Han’s Sichuan restaurant in the Inner Richmond. Han, owner of Z&Y in Chinatown, knew of Wang from their days in Beijing. There, Han’s own culinary master was a peer of Wang’s in a large restaurant organization. Han himself was trained in Sichuan food and cooked for two Chinese presidents before immigrating to California.
With Wang at the helm of Chili House, the two have been plotting a shift in direction, introducing more Beijing fare like hand-pulled noodles, Beijing pot stickers and lamb hot pot. They’ve already brought over a chef who specializes in carving Peking duck, and serve up to 20 crisp-skinned birds a night.
Wang has also begun preparing fixed-price banquets incorporating the imperial court dishes he has studied for 44 years, though few outside San Francisco’s Mandarin-speaking food lovers know about these dinners.
With his wire-rim glasses, precisely coiffed hair and low-pitched voice inflected with a Beijing burr, Wang, 62, resembles a university professor. Speaking through a translator, Wang says that court cuisine took shape during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735—1796), who brought chefs from Shanghai into his court to prepare re-
fined food representative of China’s eight major cuisines. By the Dowager Empress Cixi’s de facto reign (18611908), each meal consisted of 48 delicate dishes; on ceremonial occasions, the number would swell to 108.
Wang isn’t doing any 48-dish dinners at Chili House, but a recent meal ($400 for 10 people), documented in these photos, involved close to two dozen, presented following the same progression that the imperial court once practiced. Only a few restaurants in Beijing specialize in court cuisine, and even fewer in the United States. Wang’s dinners blend traditional with innovative, court classics with Beijing and Sichuan street food.
Wang continues to exchange recipes, techniques and photos with chefs across China through a group on the Chinese messaging app WeChat. He also concocts novel ways to present his food, sometimes incorporating proverbs or wordplay, other times molding pastries into fanciful forms, such as flaky crabs filled with avocados and Dungeness meat or lifelike chicks bursting out of sugary eggs. “From his upbringing, every chef has his own concept of art and his likes or dislikes,” Wang says of his approach to cooking. “That is expressed in the food.”
Chili House, 726 Clement St. (at Eighth Avenue), San Francisco. (415) 387-2658. www.chilihousesf.com. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Monday and WednesdayThursday; 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday.