Pages

Showing posts with label Chef Lee's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chef Lee's. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books


Ruth Paget Selfie