In 1983, Tim Ma’s parents opened Bamboo Garden in
Conway, Arkansas. It was a side hustle — his mother was in graduate school, and
his father worked full time as a medical technician. As owners of the only
Chinese restaurant in their small town, the Mas made good money in their first
year. But it wasn’t without setbacks. There was the brick hurled into their
family’s home, the drunken driver who crashed into the restaurant’s dining room
and the eventual arrival of competition, when their talented chef opened his
own restaurant across the street.
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The struggles the Mas endured informed their son’s future
career in food, and his new restaurant, Lucky Danger. The Washington, D.C.,
takeout spot, which he opened with Andrew Chiou in November, is a reflection of
the Asian American experience, he said.
“It is a kind of respect for our elders,” Ma said of Lucky
Danger. “That’s a little bit of the mission here.”
Billed as “American Chinese by a Chinese American,” Lucky
Danger serves many of the American Chinese classics that Bamboo Garden once did
— lo mein and fried rice dishes, orange beef, cashew chicken — as well as less
conventional offerings inspired by the chef’s personal tastes and experiences,
including a Taiwanese-style omelet with dried radish and a whole branzino dish.
Lucky Danger joins a new generation of American Chinese
takeout restaurants redefining how this food is regarded. Historically, “most
Chinese eaters have really disdained Americanized Chinese food,” said David R.
Chan, a historian and archivist of Chinese food in America. Intimately aware of
Chinese food’s long and complicated history in the United States, the owners
and chefs behind this new crop of restaurants are proud of their Americanized
offerings. With a more modern emphasis on branding, marketing and operations,
they’re transforming what Chinese takeout can be.
“American Chinese food is a really great case study in how
cultures come together,” said Lucas Sin, the executive chef and co-owner of
Nice Day Chinese Takeout, which opened in New York City’s West Village last
summer. Having grown up in Hong Kong and attended college in the United States,
Sin is fascinated by the cuisine’s ability to absorb influences from all over.
Nice Day’s website describes American Chinese food as “a wonderfully inventive
and flavorful regional Chinese cuisine.”
The notion of American Chinese food as a legitimate
subcategory of Chinese cooking is a fairly recent and radical idea, according
to Chan. That sensibility is on full display at Lucky Danger and Nice Day, as
well as at San Francisco takeout shops Mamahuhu and Lazy Susan, where the
owners are committed to the classics — at least from a culinary standpoint.
“People chalk it up to ‘just takeout,’ but what I see is a
lot of ingenuity, observation and a lot of skill,” said Brandon Jew, the
chef-owner at San Francisco’s lauded Mister Jiu’s and the owner of Mamahuhu, a
casual American Chinese restaurant that opened in January 2020. “No question,
that is why people love it so much — because there was so much thoughtfulness
in how it was done.”
Traditionally, meat is used sparingly to stretch across
vegetables and rice, a resourceful hallmark of the cuisine. Even the precise
way the chicken is cut for a sweet-and-sour dish contributes to the overall
experience of eating it, Jew said. Inspired by historical recipes, the
sweet-and-sour sauce at Mamahuhu is made with pineapple juice, honey and
hawthorn berries, which impart an earthy flavor and reddish tint.
“As much as I am interested in Chinese food on the mainland,
because I’m cooking for an American audience, I’m interested in what Chinese
chefs have done here, too,” he said.
Chinese food’s evolution in America goes back more than 150
years, and can be traced to the first wave of immigration in the 19th century,
when mostly Taishan men found work in the United States as laborers. After
taxes aimed at foreign workers and violent attacks effectively barred many
immigrants from holding jobs, some of them opened restaurants, offering humble
stir-fries with no direct parallels in China, said Jennifer 8. Lee, the author
of “
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” a history of Chinese food in America. The
cooking was improvisational, a means of survival rather than a point of pride.
Dishes like moo goo gai pan and chop suey — which roughly translates to “odds
and ends” — were the beginnings of a culinary tradition.
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