Not the same places, Not the same old egg roll : It’s Haute Chinese

In 1968, Doris Day made her last film, “With Six You Get Eggroll,” a movie whose title reflected the popular notion that Chinese food was bargain food. Take the kids for Chinese, order the special No. 2 dinner and get out of the evening for less than $15. This is what you were likely to eat: Egg fu yung. Chop suey. Moo goo gai pan. Egg flower soup. Twenty-two years later, your neighborhood Chinese restaurant is different. You might munch on kung pao shrimp. Sichuan beef. Clams with black bean sauce. Moo shu pork. Whole catfish with spicy garlic sauce. But even though the menu has changed, expectations haven’t. Americans want Chinese food fast, they want it cheap and they don’t want to dress up for it. Most people don’t think of Chinese cooking as serious food.

But some Chinese restaurateurs feel that a transformation is about to take place.

“I think right now Chinese food (in Los Angeles) is where Italian food was 10 years ago,” says Cecile Tang Shu-Shuen, who founded Joss (see review on page 90) in 1987 at the western end of Sunset Strip, mere feet from Beverly Hills proper. “Before, fettuccine Alfredo and spaghetti with meat sauce were all people knew--it was mostly Americanized Italian. But in the past 10 years we’ve come to know real Italian food. The same thing is starting to happen with Chinese cooking.”

Philip Chiang of the Mandarin in Beverly Hills agrees. “We’ve already seen a lot of change in Chinatown and Monterey Park,” he says. “The audience in the Chinese community is more sophisticated--they’re not just immigrants anymore. They’re business people who have some culinary sophistication so there’s a demand for better food. Most of the restaurants on the Westside have pretty much stayed with a familiar menu. But I think that will change in the next five years--it’s inevitable.”

There’s no question change is in the works, but is Los Angeles really ready for high-style Chinese?

Chiang himself has had trouble with changes he’s tried to make at The Mandarin, the Beverly Hills restaurant founded by his mother, Cecilia Chiang in 1975. (In 1962, she’d opened The Mandarin in San Francisco, a restaurant that broke through the Cantonese barrier there with sophisticated Northern-style dishes, but still made concessions to American tastes.) Since he took over the Beverly Hills branch of The Mandarin about a year and a half ago, he’s tried to serve less “Americanized” food in surroundings with the sort of casually elegant brand of decor that Los Angeles restaurant goers are used to. It hasn’t been easy.

“When you try to bring out new things, there’s always resistance from the public,” Chiang says. “Part of the problem is that we’ve got a clientele--basically a meat-and-potatoes crowd--that’s been coming here for 10 years and they have certain expectations. You can’t get too exotic with them; they like what they know. We hear a lot of ‘Well, you’re a Chinese restaurant right? You’re supposed to have chow mein.’ ”

Even after he made seemingly small changes--switching from Western-style broccoli to Chinese broccoli, for example, or from string beans to Chinese long beans--customers would gripe. And when Chiang, known in the restaurant community as a dedicated clothes horse, started coming to work in Armani suits instead of tuxedoes (a symbol of old-fashioned Chinese restaurants), it was a minor scandal. “The customers went nuts. They’d come up and say, ‘Philip! What happened to the tux?’ ”

Then there was the battle of the sweet-and-sour pork.

“We’ve always sold a lot of sweet-and-sour pork,” Chiang says. “And I think we do it fairly well--it’s not gristly or fatty. But it’s basically a very gloppy, ketchupy, starchy sort of sauce. I really wanted to take it off the menu, but I knew that would make a lot of our regulars unhappy. Then I decided to refine the sauce a little bit. I decided we wouldn’t use any more ketchup and we wouldn’t use as much starch--I thought we could serve a more authentic, sophisticated sauce. Well, guess what? People went crazy. They’d call me over and say, ‘What’s going on here? We like it the way it was.’ I couldn’t win.

It wasn’t until a fire destroyed much of the restaurant in 1988 that Chiang got to make a lot of the changes he wanted, including a complete redesign of the dining room. “It was like having a clean slate,” he says. “We closed for six months to remodel and when we reopened, it was like getting a new restaurant.”

There were no preconceived notions about Joss. But that doesn’t mean Cecilia Tang and her staff haven’t encountered resistance.

“People always complain about our prices,” Tang says.

“It drives us crazy,” says co-owner Serry Osmena. “Some of our customers happily pay $11.95 for a pasta with basil and olive oil down the street, but they balk at paying $12.50 for a chicken dish at our restaurant.”

“We don’t get a discount on chicken or fish just because we’re we’re a Chinese restaurant,” says Robert Rogness, Joss’ maitre d’ and wine director. “We pay $18 a pound for crab just like every other Westside restaurant.”

Joss also has a credibility problem.

“We have to work hard to be accepted as authentic because a lot of people misunderstand our food,” Tang says.

“We’re accused of serving some kind of French nouvelle version of Chinese food,” Rogness says. “They see a dish like our Bairlay scallops, which is scallops with fresh pear in a light mustard sauce, and call it French. But it is Chinese.

What Joss is up against is the conventional wisdom: the more expensive the Chinese restaurant, the less authentic the food. For the most part, this has been true of Los Angeles Chinese restaurants. What Continental service and fancy surroundings typically get you is sweet-and-sour pork, often a scary shade of orange, on a pretty plate.

Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main has received widespread respect for its pricey Chinese-influenced cuisine, and his customers have become accustomed to paying more for better quality Chinese cooking. But not even Puck pretends the place is an authentic Chinese restaurant. For one thing, his chefs use a lot of French-based cooking methods.

“There are certain basic techniques in Chinese cooking that you can’t get away from,” Chiang says. “How you chop things and the heat you use, it’s all indigenous to the cuisine. If you put Chinese ingredients into a Western-style pan, the whole outcome of the food changes. But if a Chinese chef combines new ingredients, that’s no problem because he probably won’t change his cooking methods.”

Take Michael Kang. His cuisine at Five Feet in Laguna Beach has often been compared to Chinois. “The end products might look similar,” Kang says, “but my process is very different from Puck’s. He applies what he likes best from various cuisines to his own French cooking, while I extract from other cuisines and bring them to Chinese cooking.

“Still, a lot of the Chinese laugh at me,” says Kang, who grew up in Newport Beach. “They don’t think what I do is Chinese, and they think I charge too much money.”

Kang isn’t fazed by the criticism, but he is pessimistic about the future of any sort of Chinese food movement. He feels there are too many obstacles in the way of real change--including the attitudes of Chinese restaurateurs and chefs.

“In the past you’d find a lot of restaurants run by unskilled cooks who didn’t know or understand the true essence of Chinese cooking. Some of them were greedy, some were just trying to make a living, but they abused the cuisine. Now you go to some of these restaurants in Chinatown or Monterey Park and they don’t use nice glassware or silverware, everything’s chipped, they use canned ingredients--the perception’s always sunk in that the Chinese run cheap restaurants.

“I think it’s strange that a highly sophisticated cuisine could have an appreciation level so low within the culture itself,” Kang says. “That’s why I wanted to open a restaurant that would respect the integrity of the cuisine. I use concepts of native peasant food combined with the alternative thinking process I learned when I was studying architecture. That means I’ll take something I used to eat at home, like my mom’s potsticker recipe, and change it slightly either by using fresher ingredients or a different ingredient to give it an alternate taste. (Of course, I haven’t told my mom about the changes.)”

Kang intended to run his restaurant with a kitchen staff at least 80% Chinese. It didn’t work out that way.

“My first sous - chef was a traditionally trained Chinese chef with a considerable reputation,” he says. “But I had to let him go after six months. He was stubborn and didn’t want to work with my ideas.”

Neither did a lot of other Chinese chefs. “They wouldn’t change their habits,” he says. “They’d smoke in the kitchen and they had no concept of sanitation. My feeling is that no one trained by a master chef in China is open to change. No chef from China would open a restaurant like mine. That’s why I’ve decided to use Americans instead.”

Kang’s head chef at Five Feet, Steven Kwok, might be from mainland China, but when Kang met him Kwok was studying for a master’s degree in music and had never cooked professionally. (“I basically taught him to cook,” Kang says.) The chef at Kang’s second restaurant, Five Feet Too, is Italian.

But Chinese chefs do head the kitchens at Joss and The Mandarin. And they are receptive to innovation--on their own terms.

“There’s a lot of young talent now,” Chiang says. “But it’s hard. For one thing, when Chinese chefs die, their recipes go with them. To give away their secrets, well, it’s almost like giving away their souls. So they don’t teach. Apprentices have to keep their eyes and ears open and pick things up by watching. It’s like a touch of this, or maybe they turn up the fire for just that split second.

“Meanwhile,” Chiang says, “a lot of the younger chefs have been influenced by the French and Swiss staffs working in major hotels all over the Orient, especially in Hong Kong. They’ve seen different methods of teaching and learning and cooking. And they’ve opened restaurants that reflect those influences.”

Some cosmopolitan Hong Kong-style restaurants are showing up in Los Angeles and they’re nothing like the cheaper places described by Kang.

“Our customers want the delicate Chinese cuisine,” says Jimmy Chui, manager of Chinatown’s Empress Pavilion, a Hong Kong-style restaurant owned by local Chinese investors. “They want a more contemporary decor--no more red and green and gold, no more Chinese lanterns--and they want clean restrooms. We spent a lot of money to give them what they wanted.”

Chui himself spent a year and a half scouting for a kitchen staff, and hired several chefs from Hong Kong. He set up the restaurant’s supply network (“We use a special flour from Hong Kong to make our barbecue dumplings more soft and white,” Chui says) and instituted an elaborate management system for both the kitchen and the dining room. At the table, this means plates are changed between courses, in the kitchen it means the chefs can’t smoke while they’re working (“We try to break all their old habits,” Chui says).

But the menu at Empress Pavilion is far from rigid. “We improvise with the ingredients that are available here,” Chui says. “For example, we don’t sauce our beef dishes as heavily as we would back in China. Beef quality is much better here than in Hong Kong where it mostly comes frozen.”

Empress chefs have even been known to incorporate other ethnic influences into the food. “In our curry pot,” Chui says, “the chefs use udon , which is a Japanese noodle; sometimes they stir-fry sea snail with Japanese vegetables . . . but they cook them in the Chinese way.