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

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Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The editors of the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) all wanted me to review the local Chinese-American restaurant Happy Dragon. 

I like the Chinese-American dish Beef-Broccoli with rice.  It is a perfect protein-carbohydrate-vegetable dish that made the Chinese immigrants in the US strong enough to lay metal railroad track and wood ties that connected the east and west coasts of the United States.  (Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden discusses how the invention of refrigerated rail cars made Salinas rich on shipping produce to the east coast.)

I told all of this information to Florence before we went to Happy Dragon, because many people made fun of Chinese-American cuisine for not being authentic.  (“Authentic” meaning the food of the rich people in the homeland.  Jook, also known as congee, is not really a desired dish by rich Chinese from abroad in the US.)

“I’m happy Chinese-Americans eat beef, chicken, and pork to their heart’s content.  Chinese-Americans are actually taller than I am now.  They know about the importance of protein and calcium,” I said to Florence.

With my food lecture out of the way, Laurent, Florence, and I set out for Happy Dragon full of fun expectations.  The article I wrote for the Monterey County Weekly around 2000 follows:

Blowin’ Smoke

For six years, Happy Dragon’s owner operated of a much smaller building nearby.  All the neighborhood families who kept coming back to the restaurant convinced the owner to move to more spacious quarters on Fremont Avenue.

The owner has made maximum use of his space.  Two big, red pillars on either side of the counter greet you when walk into the wide reception area.  Large scenes of Chinese landscapes with mountains, clouds, and little villages typical of Chinese landscape painting decorate the walls.

Best of all there are several big, round tables with Lazy Susan turntables in the middle of them designed for serving Chines family-style meals.

So, that was what I decided to do.

“We’re going to eat like a Chinese family,” I told my family as we looked over our menus.

“That means we order a soup, a poultry or meat dish, a fish or seafood dish, a vegetable dish, and rice to share all at once,” I announced, proud of the knowledge I had gleaned from Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine.

Heeding my proclamation, we ordered egg-rolls, crab rangoons, egg-flower soup, Mongolian beef, shrimp in lobster sauce, and eggplant in Yu Shiang Sauce.  My efforts were undermined, however, when our waiter began to bring us our dishes in courses, starting with the egg-flower soup.  My family was saved from my whims this time.

Happy Dragon’s egg-flower soup tastes of ginger, chicken, and fresh corn.  Crunchy water chestnuts added some texture to the velvety sheets of egg that had been stirred in at the end of cooking.

The soup gets its thick consistency from the addition of cornstarch.  My only complaint was that it arrived warm instead of hot.  I learned later that the restaurant was short-handed the night we were there, which might explain the temperature problem.

Our egg rolls had a yummy, flaky wonton covering and al dente cabbage filling.  Egg rolls dipped in plum sauce with a good dab of mustard for heat on them is one of my favorite dishes in the world.

The crab rangoons resemble four-pointed stars made of deep-fried wontons with a crab filling in the middle.  Laurent liked dipping the crisp rangoons in plum sauce – a Chinese version of chips and dip.  The crab filling seemed buttery to me, but Laurent loved it.

My Chinese family-style dinner plans went further out the window as my Florence claimed the Mongolian Beef for herself.  This dish is typical of the Mandarin cuisine that is made in northern China.

The Mongols introduced barbecuing to Chinese cuisine in this dish that features sweetened soy sauce marinade flavored with ginger and sesame.  Happy Dragon uses fresh scallions to counter the rich flavor of the marinade.  Mongolian Beef is not my favorite dish, but I liked the restaurant’s spicy version.

Happy Dragon bills itself as a specialist in Mandarin and Sichuanese cuisine.  Northern China where Mandarin cuisine comes from experiences extremes in climate brought on by Siberian winds during winter and heat blasts during the summer.

Western Sichuan’s hot, humid climate yields foods like chili peppers and eggplants in abundance.  Sichuan is famous for the eggplants in Yu Shiang Sauce that I ordered.

This dish is usually prepared with ground pork or beef.  I thought this vegetarian dish would be light, but the minute I tasted the sweetly, tart sauce I knew stir-fried vegetables can pack in the calories, too.

Happy Dragon’s version of this dish is mild, so I added some of the chili paste that was on the table to give it some kick.  The traditional recipe calls for a generous dose of chili paste – hot, spicy food is a trademark of Sichuanese cuisine.

Laurent ordered shrimp in lobster sauce.  This dish typifies the haute cuisine of Southern Chinese cooking.  The shrimp were sweet and the sauce, full of peas, corn, green peppers, carrots, and many crunchy water chestnuts.  This sauce was so rich that Laurent could not finish it.  (Personally, I think the crab rangoons dunked in plum sauce had something to do with this.)

There are some other insider techniques and ingredients that made this shrimp in lobster sauce such a great dish.  The shrimp are coated in egg white and refrigerated before they are stir-fried.

This gives them the beautiful sheen I always associate with Chinese food.  Also, ground pork usually gets stir-fried into the sauce, which is thickened with egg.  Often the pork flavor is the taste you just cannot place when you eat Chinese soups.

Happy Dragon was packed with families on a Saturday night having fun just like we were.

End of Article

Cookbook Recommendations:

-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom

Hom has a nice discussion of China’s different culinary regions in his book.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Sampling Filipino Family Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Filipino Family Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Strip malls have many good ethnic restaurants in them.  They usually have lots of parking without time limits, modern plumbing in the restrooms and kitchens, and larger dining areas, so the tables do not have to be tightly wedged together.

As I drove my daughter Florence home from her charter Waldorf School in Pacific Grove one day, I looked for the Filipino Restaurant my Filipina co-worker told me about and queried the editor at the Monterey County Weekly  (Circulation: 200,000) to do a review.   This was the year 2000.  I am not quite sure they knew what that cuisine was, but wanted to find out. 

So, off I went with my family to try another Asian cuisine.  The following is the Weekly article I wrote:

Filipino Feast: Lola’s Kusina Serves up South Seas Island Charm

When my Filipina co-worker told me that she eats lunch at least once a week at the newly opened Lola’s Kitchen, I knew I would have to try it.

The restaurants hot table with 20 steaming entrées appears daunting at first, but the chef quickly explains the various delicacies.  Choosing among Lola’s many offerings is a first-class problem.

The owner of Lola’s was introduced to the cuisine of the Philippines was introduced to the cuisine of the Philippines by his Filipina wife.  He said they make all their dishes fresh every day at 11 am with new batches cooked up two hours after that.

We chose the two-item combination plate, which comes with rice or pancit, Filipino rice noodles.  My husband Laurent ordered coconut juice, and I ordered a chocolate energy drink called Milo.

We chose the two-item combination plate, which comes with either rice or pancit, Filipino rice noodles.

My husband Laurent ordered coconut juice, and I ordered a chocolate energy drink called Milo.

Florence ordered à la carte; two lumpia, Filipino egg rolls and one entrée of rice.  We used the Filipino “turo-turo” method loosely translated as “point-pint,” to order our food.

My two entrées were salted pork cooked with shrimp paste and kare-kare, beef-and-tripe in peanut butter sauce.  The shrimp paste called bagoong, made from salted and fermented shrimp, gave the pork a sweet taste.  I almost thought the dish contained coconut milk due to the salty-sweet flavor.

I liked the kare-kare a little less, but that is because I did not know how to season it.  I was expecting the peanut sauce to be hot and spicy like Thai peanut sauces.

I had forgotten that Filipino food, unlike its Southeast Asian cousins feature mild flavors.  A quick look in Reynaldo Alejandro’s The Philippine Cookbook reveals that diners usually add bagoong to this dish at the table.

That would no doubt add a sweet, salty tang to the spongy tripe and beef salad over green beans and boiled eggplant.

My husband and daughter both selected adobo, the national dish of the Philippines.  Adobo refers to a method of cooking with soy sauce, white wine vinegar, garlic, and peppercorns.

The vinegar mellows as it cooks and helps preserve food in a tropical climate.  The chicken and ingredients boil together, but then the chicken is usually broiled while the sauce gets reduced before being added back to the chicken.

In Lola’s version of this dish, there remains a slight tang of vinegar along with a sweet taste, when makes me suspect that some sugar goes into the preparation.

Diners skeptical about trying Filipino food would probably like the mechado, a beef stew, which Laurent ordered as his second entrée.  Basically, this is a dish of boiled beef with tomatoes, bell peppers, and potatoes that have been cooked with soy sauce and seasoned with garlic.  There is just enough salt in this dish to bring out the full flavors of the meat and the vegetables.

Diners new to Filipino cuisine would probably like the pancit (rice noodles) that Laurent chose instead of rice to accompany his order.  Boiled pork gets simmered with the noodles, along with shrimp, scallions, and whatever vegetable the chef might like to add that day.  The savory, slick noodles are like an entrée by themselves.

Florence’s dish was made up of long, thin lumpia egg rolls that came stuffed with ground beef, carrots, corn, and peas.  Since my daughter does not care for these vegetables, she did not like the lumpia even though she ate them to be polite.

The owner suggested that on her next visit, she might try the Shanghai lumpia made with ground pork as these contain no vegetables that a child might dislike.

Florence liked the homemade leche flan better than her vegetables.  Lola’s thick flan is homemade and exudes a delicious juice that tempts you to ask for a spoon to get every drop.

Laurent ordered this as well and declared it too rich to eat at one setting.  It went into a take-home container for midnight snacking.

I ordered maya blanca, which does not appear on the menu.  It certainly pays to ask, “What desserts do you have today?” in a place like Lola’s where things are being freshly made throughout the day.

Lola’s version of maya blanca turned out to be a thick, coconut pudding cake made with sweet corn.

The corn gave the dessert texture.  I thought that putting vegetables in pudding form might get our daughter to eat some of them.  This was another dessert that I took home for midnight snacking.

Lola’s Kusina features a special “Seafood Day” on Fridays, but the owner is quick to point out that the restaurant serves seafood daily.

End of Article

Books you might want to look at for information on Filipino cuisine:

-7,000 Islands: A Food Portrait of the Philippines by Yasmin Newman

-The Philippine Cookbook by Reynaldo Alejandro

Note:  Lola’s Kusina is small, buy maybe they could do a reserve-ahead-and-pick up system for sandwiches.  I like fried bangus fish – maybe that could be turned into a sandwich with a pumpkin muffin with nuts and a gazpacho.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Exchange Student Food at Michi Cafe by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student Food at Michi Cafe by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Since I had lived in Japan as an exchange student with Youth for Understanding in high school, I naturally wanted my daughter Florence to learn about this country when she was growing up.

My husband Laurent was subject to yakitori (sweet-flavored, chicken shish kebab) and tonkatsu (breaded pork fillet of Portuguese origin – the Portuguese had a trading post at Hirado, Japan), because he did not like sushi.  He did approve of teaching Florence about Japanese culture, so I had a “go-ahead” on teaching Florence how to eat udon soup with chopsticks.

I had Florence read an article I wrote for the Monterey Country Weekly (Circulation: 100,000) to give her background on how I learned to eat soup with chopsticks as a teen for the “Side Dish” column of the Weekly before we ventured out to Japanese restaurants in our neighborhood.

Slurping Sisters (Original Title Selected by the Editors)

As I changed my inside slippers for my outside shoes, my Japanese host sister said, “We will eat lunch now.”

She then led me out of the house, both of us ducking under all the doorframes as we went.  It was my first day as an exchange student in Japan.

We walked through narrow, winding streets without sidewalks, fighting for space with trucks, bikes, and cars.

We arrived at the restaurant, a dark wooden building.  Curved strips of blue-and-white checked fabric with large, red kanji (Chinese) characters written on them swayed in the open doorway.  There was a display case with plastic models of the foods served inside.

I pointed and asked, “Is that eel? Shark? Octopus? Sea urchin” Sea cucumber?”

I did not want to eat those things. I made my host sister look up all these words in her Japanese-English dictionary.

Finally, I chose what my host sister told me was nabeyaki udon soup, which was made with thick, flat, wheat noodles.  I chose this soup, because it had shrimp, onion, carrots, and shiitake mushrooms in it.  There was only one suspicious item in it.

“What’s the white stuff with the bright pink edges?” I asked my host sister.

“What is ‘stuff’?” my host sister replied not totally grasping colloquial English.

“Never mind,” I said.

“What’s that?” I said as I rephrased my question.

“That’s kamaboko,” she said.

“What’s kamaboko?” I asked

My host sister leafed through her dictionary some more.

“Fish cake,” she announced.  The kamaboko was a small oval.  I reasoned that if it tasted repulsive, I could choke it down in one swallow.

The other patrons discreetly looked at me when we entered the restaurant and sat down.  A foreigner, a gaijin, was a rare sight in the 1980s.

The waitress brought us noodle soups and a pair of chopsticks.  I knew I was supposed to eat first, because I was the guest.  I smiled and waited for the waitress to bring me a flat-bottomed spoon like they do in Chinese restaurants.  No spoon was forthcoming.

My host sister and I smiled at each other while our soup cooled.  I looked at the two people on the other side of the restaurant.  I saw that they were picking out their noodles and other ingredients with chopsticks.  I started doing the same.

I immediately noticed that Chinese and Japanese chopsticks are different.  Chinese chopsticks are about six inches long and have pointed tips, which you never use for stabbing your food.  I had to practice getting the right grip and distance on my Japanese chopsticks.

Pretty soon I was left with a bowl of broth.  I was stumped.  I discreetly glanced at the same diners, who had helped me out before.  They were drinking soup from their bowl.

So, I began to sip more quietly from my bowl.  My dainty host sister’s slurping surprised me.  In Japan, slurping can show your appreciation to the chef.  It is also hard to eat noodles without doing otherwise.

I liked the soup and made a mental note that udon was a good food choice.

Even that thick, fish paste patty with the bright, pink edges tasted good.

End of article –

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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