Jacky was my informant. He told me all kinds of things about the dim sum team. They liked to gamble in Atlantic City, for example. They headed out en masse on Saturday nights for the AC bus, returned early in the morning to take catnaps on the puffy laundry bags in a dark basement break room, and woke up just before service to make a restoring vat of congee, which they decorously shared with the crew. They cursed Shorty for making them use sea salt instead of “chicken powder,” their prized salt-and-MSG mixture, and had hidden the forbidden canisters deep beneath their stations. They preferred Korean brothels.
And these guys could really cook. I watched Wei-Chin flipping the iron wok over its jet of blue fuel, controlling the heat with the lever at his knees. He rocked the wok line like a stadium drummer on the trap set: with raised knees, mad precision, and regular bursts of flames. I saw that stir-frying was not a process of addition, as I had previously thought, but a careful orchestration. I watched as he briefly fried the beef in oil, then scooped it out with a wire spider and set it to drain on a railing above the line. He poached his Chinese broccoli (gai lan) in water, then set that to drain as well. He whisked his hot wok clean with water and a stiff bamboo brush, then sizzled his aromatics—ginger, garlic, and whole red chilies—in a little oil, returned the beef and broccoli to the pan, and tossed the mixture in one-two-three high-rising waves in the air. With one hand he seasoned it with salt (a little) and sugar (a little more) and with the other added a pinch of cornstarch slurry from the pot at his side. The mixture turned immediately glossy, each separate piece wrapped in a thin vellum of sauce. This operation took about two minutes, start to finish. When it hit the plate, gleaming, I thought it was one of the most glorious things I’d ever seen.
I stood at the hot app station in the sweaty heat at the end of the night, when my defenses were down, and I let the movie stream of new techniques and textures wash over me. Chinese food seemed to contain so many more of them than Western food. The Chinese don’t just have crisp: they have wet crisp (stir-fried lotus root, for instance) and they have dry crisp (the crispy pile of fried egg yolk crumbs I gently squeezed into a peak on top of the frog’s legs). There was moist soft (tofu and steamed fish) and dry soft (the cloudy-white steamed bao buns). I wondered why we Western-trained cooks had so few ways to describe textures.
And the Chinese guys cooked brilliantly in a way that felt counterintuitive to me. To make lemon chicken, they dredged a flattened chicken breast in egg and fluffy white potato starch and then deep-fried it for at least ten minutes, about eight minutes longer than flattened chicken breasts usually need to cook through. Greg, the other sous chef, yanked it up from the fryer after a regulation three minutes, and Wei-Chin came over in alarm, motioning him to drop it back down. Implausibly, after the full ten minutes, when we sliced into it, the interior still ran with juice. They dumped tubs of liquid maltose, as clear and sweet as corn syrup but thicker, right into a vat of boiling peanut oil—sugar in oil, which seemed like a surging grease fire in the making—added piles of skinned walnuts, and then calmly ran their spider through the foaming head of oil. A few minutes later, each browned walnut emerged from the sugared fat painted with a thin layer of sweet lacquer. They were so delicate and crisp that they clicked lightly on the sheet tray as the cooks swiftly ran their chopsticks through the mass to separate them. When we ran out of suitable vegetables for family meal, they stir-fried a case of green leaf lettuce and somehow made it taste like cabbage. They ran water for hours through colanders full of shrimp, which we feared would bloat them and sap their flavor, but instead restored their original clean ocean snap. They resuscitated what smelled to us like soured fresh water chestnuts the very same way, chasing Shorty with the containers in their hands to show how the running water had brought them back from the dead.
The ways in which the Chinese cooks deviated from the script of my French-based training was confounding to me, but also revelatory. Years afterward, holding a pack of frizzle-ended supermarket green beans in my hands, I remembered how to fry them hard in oil until they shriveled and to top them with a porky black bean sauce. From these guys I knew that these dead beans held some possibility. The produce we used at 66 was always top-notch, but the Chinese dishes held clues to a past rooted in deprivation and resourcefulness. Like a Midwestern farmhouse cook and her April sack of storage carrots, they could wring sauce from stones.
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Some of the Western chefs were getting sick of Chinese food; not me, but some. We put up two different family breakfasts each day, one Western style and one Chinese. Given this choice, I always ate the Chinese one. Greg, the other sous chef, asked me, “How can you eat that gloppy stir-fry for breakfast every day?”
What, this? Chicken with bamboo and vegetables? I loved it.
But one day Shorty, our Jewish, Manhattan-born chef, said, “God, I can’t eat any more Chinese food. I need some chicken liver paté.” So he called for takeout from Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side: smoked whitefish, lox, smoked sturgeon, sour pickles, chicken liver paté, and pickled herring, its silver skin as shiny as stainless steel. He arranged this spread carefully on the pass. The Chinese cooks looked on in amusement.
“Pickled herring,” Shorty said. “It’s fish! Try it!” Dao, one of the dim sum cooks, took a piece and bit off one end, then spat it into his cup of tea in horror. The others tried it and all had the same reaction.
“NO GOOD!” Dao pronounced. Mei One tried it and had the same reaction. He was appalled; his body shuddered at the combination of sugar and fish.
“Wei-Chin, try the herring. Very good,” I said. He chewed it carefully, spat it immediately into the garbage, and grinned slyly at me.
The tables had been turned. In pickled herring we Westerners had found our chicken feet. Similarly, its joys were largely textural. Good herring has a sensuous resistance to the bite. When cured perfectly—not too sweet—it holds the mark of your teeth, as fudge does. The sting of the pickle transported me straight to summer at our lake cabin, where my mom ceremoniously uncapped the plastic tub of silver diamond-cut fish bobbing in brine, setting my mouth to swim with juice.
We ate and ate, slurping it up lasciviously. The dim sum team laughed at us and animatedly tapped their short dim sum rolling pins on the metal counter, talking joyously about our bizarre food.