The Shun Lee Cookbook - Michael Tong [1]
I came to know Chef Wang quite well. One year later, he confided that he was about to open his own restaurant, which he planned to call Shun Lee Dynasty, in Manhattan’s Midtown East, which would be quite a radical change from the neighborhoods of his employer’s Shun Lee restaurants. He asked me to join him in the venture. It took me a while to make the decision to leave engineering and go into the restaurant business, but eventually I became the maître d’ at Shun Lee Dynasty.
Chef Wang’s mission was to share the delightfully seasoned food of Shanghai and Sichuan with New Yorkers, and Shun Lee Dynasty was probably the first upscale Chinese restaurant to offer these cuisines, so far removed from Cantonese cooking. Tough cuts of meat were “red-cooked”—simmered in a mahogany-red, spiced soy sauce braise until they fell off the bone. More tender bits of meat, poultry, and seafood weren’t just stir-fried, but first “passed through oil,” a technique where the food is first gently fried to give it a silky texture. New Yorkers were entranced by dishes that were enlivened by the exciting, aromatic flavor of Sichuan peppercorns and whole chili peppers.
At that time Grace Chu, the grande dame of Chinese cooking teachers, was ensconced at the China Institute in Manhattan, where her classes influenced an entire generation of cooks, both American and Asian. One day she brought in a friend of hers, a polite Southern gentleman who had an exotic appetite. He returned many times alone, and I served him such adventuresome fare for the time as mu shu pork, frog legs, and tripe, which he enjoyed heartily. I had no idea who he was until he handed me his credit card: Mr. Craig Claiborne. Mr. Claiborne, as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, was one of the most powerful men in the food business. When his New York Times Restaurant Guide came out, Shun Lee Dynasty received four stars, the highest rating. This endorsement legitimized Chinese cooking for New Yorkers, putting our restaurant at the same level as the bastions of French cuisine in town.
With our success, Chef Wang and I became partners. Soon we opened Shun Lee Palace on East 55th Street, followed by Hunam on Second Avenue. The latter restaurant brought yet another important Chinese cuisine to New York: the fiery food of the Hunan province. Like the Sichuan and Shanghai fare at the Shun Lee restaurants, the Hunanese food caused a sensation. Imagine being served shrimp with cilantro for the first time: shrimp in a piquant sauce of garlic, scallions, vinegar, hot bean sauce, and chili oil, showered with fresh cilantro. We then received our second New York Times four-star review, this time from Raymond Sokolov. These two four-star reviews put not only Shun Lee on the map, but also the foods of Sichuan and Hunan.
People returned for specialties such as Slippery Chicken (shredded chicken on a bed of spinach with a spicy sauce) and Lake Tung Ting Shrimp (shrimp and vegetables cloaked in a delicate sauce, covered with a lace netting of fried egg whites). When the clientele began demanding these dishes at other Chinese restaurants, our competitors (or colleagues, depending on your outlook) strove to meet our standards, and our recipes became part of the collective culinary consciousness. Over the years, I’d say that we’ve served around 10 million meals; my two restaurants serve 900 meals daily, plus about 400 take-out orders. And now, in The Shun Lee Cookbook, I am happy to share these distinctive recipes with you.
CHINESE COOKING AT HOME is different than cooking in a restaurant, where our ranges have extremely hot burners, our woks are seasoned from constant use, and our deep-fryers are at the ready. No matter. These recipes have been tested in home kitchens with generic equipment (a 24-inch Hotpoint electric stove) with the home cook in mind. You will learn