Lifestyle & Culture

Striving to Cook Up Authentic Chinese Food

By Celina Zhou
Spectrum staff

Delicacies like chicken feet and century eggs are familiar fare to many Chinese immigrant and Chinese-American people, but unheard of by many Americans. Some restaurants in New York City, however, make these dishes available to anyone willing to try.

Under the experienced eye of Joe Si, founder and owner of Joe’s Shanghai—it has restaurants in Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan’s Chinatown, its original location in Flushing, Queens and three Japanese cities—chefs transform flour and water into soup dumpling skins that are so thin you can see straight through to the ingredients.

Even if dishes such as kung pao chicken and mu shoo pork—which those devoted to authentic Chinese food argue are far from authentic—the chefs at 20-year-old Joe’s are among those who say they have tried stay true to the earliest traditions of Chinese food.

“My boss first opened this restaurant because he is a chef of Chinese Shanghainese food. He wanted to share the cuisine with others,” Marvin Lin, the manager of Joe’s location in Manhattan’s Chinatown, said in Mandarin.

Lin is among the chefs to whom Joe Si has been passing down Shanghai cooking traditions, Lin told this reporter. He and other chefs get hired at Joe’s Shanghai after they undergo a stringent selection process.

As a result of their training and the standards at Joe’s Shanghai, chefs make the soup dumplings by hand every single day, with skins and fillings made completely from scratch, following Si’s original recipe.

The ingredients for all dishes are bought fresh from local markets and areas near the restaurant, Lin said. Rather than using imitation crab, which is a popular, cheaper substitute, real crab meat is bought and shelled daily to use in the famous crab meat pork soup dumplings.

About a third of customers at Joe’s, which is listed in a variety of books about things to do and places to go in New York and is Zagat-rated, are of Chinese descent, Lin said. The remainder include foreign and American tourists and a variety of New Yorkers.

Even with this influx of non-Chinese customers, Joe’s continues to produce some of the “best, most authentic soup dumplings I have ever had,” said Jieping Wang, 52, who lives in a nearby New Jersey suburb but is a regular at Joe’s. “I was born in Shanghai, but the soup dumplings in Shanghai cannot compare to the ones at Joe’s Shanghai.”

Wang is an investor who has helped finance the opening of several Chinese restaurants.

The food is so close to what they grew up eating that some customers are especially grateful for it. One China-born woman once wept at the restaurant, Lin said. Her husband told him, Lin said, that she was overwhelmed with the emotion while eating at Joe’s, which they chanced upon two hours of after walking around and searching for a place to eat.

While there are customers who want that strictly Chinese experience, Joe’s also offers more American-ized Chinese food, Lin said. But exactly how American it is served up is left up to customers.

Whether or not something is “authentic” is a subjective question, said Heather Lee, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research on Chinese migration patterns includes exploring “the historical transformation of Chinese restaurants in the United States.” It is important to look into the history, social and cultural conditions that existed when a certain dish was created to determine how Chinese that dish is or is not today, she said.

“Authenticity is an idea,” Lee said. “It is something you are looking for and holding on to that reminds you of a taste or sensation.”