Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Ruth Paget
When I told my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) about the Fu Dogs guarding the entrance to Chef Lee’s Mandarin Restaurant
in Monterey (California), she assigned me to write a restaurant review of the
place due to this great visual to go along with the article. They had windows looking out onto Chinese
gardens for a visual, too.
I knew this would be a trip to China for my little Florence,
who just laughed at my diplomacy-career training sessions when she wanted to sing
and act when she grew up.
I took some of my friends along, so we could do a real
Chinese banquet with several dishes to sample.
The following is the article that appeared in the Monterey County Weekly.
A Traditional Banquet
A pair of white, stone Fu Dogs, protectors of sacred places
in Chinese lore, welcomes diners to Chef Lee’s Mandarin House, which resembles
a small palace with its carved red-tiled roof and white walls festooned with
oversized Chinese characters.
Chef Lee’s makes me feel like dressing up, so I can fit in
among the decorations of deities clad in pastel colors that dance across the
walls and across the stained glass in the ceiling. Wood sculptures of Chinese sages in the
mountains vie for attention with the golden peacocks carved into the screens.
I reserved a round table with a round, turntable in the back
room. From our vantage point near a
window opening onto the restaurant’s Chinese garden with waterfall, we could
watch water stream down a rock face into a pond bordered by garden plants.
The surroundings whetted our appetites for a
grand meal as a waiter in white shirt and black bowtie took our order.
We started with a medium-sized bowl of san-san soup, this a
basic egg-flower soup based on a chicken-ginger broth made with the imperial
addition of scallops and shrimp.
Chef Lee’s big scallops were so tender that they melted in
our mouths like chocolate. They also had
the sweet flavor that fresh seafood has as did the shrimp. The shrimp had more seafood in it than some
other restaurants put on their seafood platters.
While we watched for the arrival of our banquet - walnut
shrimp, Chef Lee’s special lab, Mongolian beef, and Mandarin chicken – my
friends enjoyed Tsing Tao beer from the People’s Republic of China.
Having all the dishes on the turntable persuaded Florence to
share the Mongolian Beef she ordered for once, but that dish was not the
banquet star.
That honor went to the Walnut Shrimp. Three elements go into this dish:
-sugared walnuts
-deep-fried shrimp
-honey-lemon mayonnaise that holds it all together
The walnuts first get boiled with sugar, then they are
deep-fried until they are shiny and brown.
While they cool, the shrimp is deep-fried in a light cornstarch and
egg-white butter.
The secret to the mayonnaise’s flavor comes from adding
condensed milk to the mix. Florence
thought this dish was too rich, but the rest of us gave the turntable a workout
as we politely took three morsels at a time from the mound on the serving dish.
One of my friends was more intrigued with Chef Lee’s Special
Lamb. The lamb came coated in a
sweetened soy sauce with mushrooms and other garden vegetables.
When I first
went to Chef Lee’s, I was surprised to see lamb on the menu and thought
the restaurant was caught up in the Mediterranean Diet craze.
However, after reading Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine, I
learned that China’s northern regions have a Mongolian population, who
influenced the Chinese with their Muslim dietary laws.
Muslims shun pork and prefer lamb. The Northern Chinese like lamb, too, to such
a extent that Beijing was once called “Mutton City.”
It was interesting to eat thin slices of salty, sweet lamb.
The Mongolian beef came with a mild, soy sauce coating on
green, stir-fried scallions and tiny noodles.
The sauce tasted sweet from the addition of brown sugar and savory from
the addition of ginger and garlic.
The Mandarin fried chicken begged to be picked up; it
resembled Chinese chicken McNuggets. I
bit into the spicy meat and crushed three bones. You have to pick these out. The menu did not list that this dish was made
from chicken wings. It is delicious, but
be careful.
I now had to indelicately removed bones from my mouth. We all tried eating the chicken with our
forks and chopsticks, but had little success.
We asked for a bag to take this dish home, so we could eat it with our
hands.
Chef Lee’s started out as a small restaurant more than 20
years ago. It now has two rooms for
large parties in addition to the two dining rooms, which attests to the
restaurant’s role as a real banquet provider.
I secretly hope to be invited to a banquet there one
day. Until then, I can eat palace
cuisine without the imperial price tag.
End of Article
Chef Lee’s serves from northern China which is different
from the food of Guangzhou in southern China.
(Most Chinese restaurants in the US serve food from Guangzhou, where
railroad workers came from.)
Three cookbooks I would recommend that have information about
the food of northern China follow:
-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds
-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom
(He does a nice explanation of the four main cooking schools
of Chinese cuisine.)
-The Food of China by E. N. Andersen
This is not a cookbook, but a history and ethnographic book
combined.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
