HOW TWO BROTHERS TOOK OVER THEIR FATHER’S CHINATOWN SHOP.
In the room behind the butcher cases and hanging ducks at Hing Lung Co. on Stockton Street, the temperature rises 15 degrees. One cook uses a scoop big enough to rescue a baby from a bathtub to lift curled pork cracklings out of a wok of duck fat. Another cook pulls birds out of tubs of chilled salt water to trim the feet and excess fat and sew up the cavity, sealing in the juices.
Simon Cheung, latex gloves on, rubs spices and salt into the crevices of a butterflied pig carcass. Meanwhile, his brother, Eric, opens the door to a 6-foot-high silver cylinder. Heat pours out. With it comes the smell of toasted pig fat, star anise and browning meat.
It takes an hour and a half to roast a pig for siu yok — Cantonese crispy-skin roast pork — in the vertical oven. Eric stands by the whole time. He applies melted lard to the skin with a paintbrush, pokes the skin to release fat trapped under the skin, controls the flames with a practiced flick of the foot to the right lever.
The two brothers, burly and rubber-booted, each look like their own man but they sound almost identical. Their sentences echo and overlap each other. A subwoofer growl rolls out of their big bass voices when they emphasize a point or throw in a “dude!”
Eric Cheung, the elder at 42, never planned to become a master duck and pig roaster. His younger brother Simon, 37, had no intention of joining the family business. They emigrated from Hong Kong to San Francisco as kids and grew up in the Sunset. Both watched their dad, Wing Cheung, put in long days at Hing Lung, then buy the business in the 1990s.
In his 20s, Eric sold cell phones. Simon attended culinary school after high school until Wing convinced him he could learn all he needed to know at Hing Lung. Wing told Eric that, as the boss, he wouldn’t have to work hard — he could tell his employees what to do.
“He tricked us, man!” Eric says.
“Yeah, tricked us!” Simon adds simultaneously. “This is hard work.”
The word “hard” rumbles from his chest. “We’d see my dad, he’s this old Chinese guy, doing this crazy (stuff ), lifting up heavy boxes. He’s like, ‘I got it! Don’t worry!’ When we see that, we gotta help, you know?” Wing protested and protested, they say, until he switched up and told them, “All right, you guys take care of it.”
Suddenly, they were doing all the heavy lifting. They both cackle at the memory.
In the fall of 2014, Hing Lung’s roaster quit a week before the Moon Festival, one of Hing Lung’s busiest days. Eric, who had only watched him work, decided to step in.
Eric called on the expertise of a few men he calls “sifu” (”master” or “teacher”), including Wei Zhi Guo, head roaster at Hing Lung while he was growing up, and Tie Q. Zhu, who is still in charge of braised and other cooked meats at the shop.
It was slow going at first — four hours to roast one pig, instead of finishing one every 90 minutes. The sifus taught him right, Eric says. But he would return home from the shop and study online articles and YouTube videos, trying to make the food even better: Cutting out shortcuts. Testing out new methods of seasoning the meat. Learning how to play the valves of the oven so the pressure inside would make the duck skin puff up and turn glassy in the heat. The quality of Eric’s roasting improved, then the speed.
At the same time, however, many of the Chinatown roast-meat shops embarked on a price war. The younger Cheungs figured their best bet was to focus on quality instead of trying to keep up. They also convinced their father they needed to pay workers city wages and offer dinner breaks and sick time, instead of belowmarket rates doled out in cash.
“I understand,” Simon says of that latter approach. “We were reared immigrants, too. My dad, as the boss, that’s what he was doing in order to raise a family of five.”
They’re proud of Hing Lung’s new labor policies — proud enough to write about them on their Yelp profile — and yet at times their stance sets them at odds with the neighborhood. It can be hard to find staff willing to accept paychecks with all the normal tax deductions. The shop charges $20 for a roast duck, not the $14 the neighbors do.
Simon sometimes spends 10 minutes convincing a customer to buy a half-pound of pork because it costs $8 a pound instead of $4.99. He sometimes works at the counter, the only English-speaker there, where he enjoys drawing in non-Chinese customers and teaching them how to order the best cuts of roast pork.
Things might be easier in another neighborhood, they speculate. They dream of expanding to the Sunset or Richmond, where customers won’t harangue them for their higher prices, shops with shiny, welllit kitchens that Eric’s three kids might want to work in. But Stockton Street will always be their base.
“I love Chinatown, man. I
love Chinatown,” Eric says.
“We love Chinatown,” Simon echoes. “We grew up here.”
“I’m going to hold on to this (place) forever,” Eric adds.
He opens the oven door and rubs a wire scrubber over the golden skin of the pig, polishing off any burned spots, checking the surface to make sure it is evenly covered in fine “sesame-seed” bubbles.
The siu yok comes out of the kitchen at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., sometimes more often. Regular customers cluster around the counter when a fresh pig arrives, vying for the richest, most flavorful cross section. To get to it, the butcher cuts off the shoulder quadrant, then slams his cleaver through the ribs and crunchy skin to cut the pork into sharp-edged rectangles. The bubbly skin cracks loudly when you eat, yet the aromatic meat underneath is almost as tender as if it had been braised.
The sifus stop by the shop sometimes to visit. Simon says Sifu Guo tells Eric, “I taught you something and you built it a totally different way, and (your meat is) better than mine.”
Eric growls, “He can’t say (anything) because it works.”
They cackle again.