The taste of China

Katie Chan from Chinese Cuisine in Mercury Plaza. Photo / Doug Sherring

A generation ago, Chinese food meant fried rice and chop suey seasoned with MSG. Now, dinersare spoiled for choice, finds Living’s restaurant reviewer, Peter Calder

The first restaurant I can remember eating at when my parents weren't picking up the bill was Chinese. It was called the Kam Sang and it was over the road from the Town Hall. You could fill up on thin-sliced white bread and butter while they knocked up your chicken fried rice. There may have been soy sauce on the tables. There certainly was tomato sauce.

It was only looking back that I realised that the clientele - mainly florid Pakeha drunks and indigent university students (I belonged to the latter group) - never included Chinese. This was Chinese food no Chinese would recognise.

It's tempting to conclude that the food Chinese immigrants cook was blanded down to cater to unadventurous Western tastes. But the real explanation was that they had to make do with the ingredients available.

Peimiao Li, who came here 16 years ago, said she lost weight on the meat-and-three-vege diet she was served by her well-meaning hosts.

"I didn't like the food. Once a week I would go to the Chinese takeaway for a little treat. It wasn't Chinese, but I liked it more."

She couldn't even cook the food she loved for herself, because she couldn't get the ingredients she regarded as kitchen essentials.

"It was not as good as at home," she says. "Whenever I went back to China I would bring back what I needed."

Her dried chillies and fungi, pickled vegetables, green tea and Chinese sweets must have excited the interest of the border-control inspectors, but these days Li doesn't have to bother. Chinese supermarkets all over Auckland, but particularly in the southeast, are packed with delicacies and basics, usually, though far from always, with labels in English to help shoppers not familiar with Chinese characters.

Stroll along the aisles at Lim Chhour in Karangahape Rd and you'll find sesame and coconut rolls, and fish balls with lurid candy-colour stripes in the freezer; beef omassum (for people who don't think tripe is offal enough) in the meat fridge; and mustard oil, "expert" dried mushrooms and dehydrated longan (a sister fruit to lychee). Li's appetite for chillies and pickled vegetables seems positively unadventurous.

Immigrants from China in the mid-20th century, fleeing war and, later, the Cultural Revolution, were overwhelmingly Cantonese (from what is now called Guangdong, in the southeast near Hong Kong).

So when authentic Chinese food started to make a mark in this city, the delicacies of that region were the ones curious diners first came across: the little dishes, called dim sum, that constitute yum cha; barbecue pork and roast duck; wontons and dumplings.

But the immigrants arriving since 1990 have hailed from various parts of the People's Republic and, to the good fortune of curious Auckland diners, they've brought their food with them.

As I sip tea of wild chrysanthemum buds, goji berries and fresh ginger, Leon Lyu gets on with cooking lunch in the industrial-strength kitchen he has had built on to his Remuera home. A retired dentist and full-time foodie, Hong Kong-born Lyu, whose mother came from Shandong province in China's northeast, explains that the food of the Chinese diaspora always adapted itself to local circumstance - in the process influencing the food of the immigrant's new land.

The vinegary notes in Philippine food for example, are a relic of the pickled ingredients Fujianese immigrants brought with them.

"What we know as classic Korean food is not very classic at all, actually," he says. "Koreans tend to eat meat on special occasions. And no one in Singapore has heard of Singapore fried noodles."

Lyu dines out less than he used to - he prefers his own cooking, he says, as we enjoy braised shin beef on steamed buns and a Szechuan-style warm noodle salad.

But he advises dedicated diners always to establish what the native cuisine is of the restaurant they are eating in. Few restaurants will specialise completely, because they want
to cater to a wide clientele, but all will have their specialties.

"Szechuan food is really hot because they like to sweat because it's so humid," he says.

"If you go to a Shanghainese restaurant and order a Szechuan dish, they can do it. They will just pile the chillies in. But they will not know the subtleties. They will not do it with the same finesse."

Anyone who has eaten Italian food made by Macedonians or Croatians may understand what he is talking about. If you order North Indian food in a South Indian restaurant, you will be missing out on the kitchen's best food.

Li, who hails from Hunan Province in south-central China (classic dish: duo jiao yu tou, steamed fish head with pickled chilli) led a food tour of half a dozen eateries in Balmoral, an area packed with Chinese food options.

The restaurants we visited, on a tour run by Auckland Food Tours, were all specialists in northern food and offered the familiar (fried dumplings) and the unfamiliar ("breakfast" pancakes that were half rice flour, half fried egg). At Wang Wang Spring Pancake, where the only English writing is on the council food hygiene rating (an A), we piled "noodles" of potato - julienned with such exquisite finesse that it took a taste to establish their composition - into pancakes as light as paper.

Dedicated foodie Connie Clarkson, a Singaporean Chinese who has been here 38 years, enthusiastically agrees that Chinese food has come of age here.

"It used to be all Cantonese, but the regions have arrived now, in particular Szechuan food.

I put it down to the availability of ingredients - market gardeners grow bok choy and choy sum, specifically for Chinese to cook their own."

This widening range of ingredients has broadened and sharpened the appetites of native New Zealanders, who are famously adventurous travellers, says Clarkson.

Even 20 years ago, we could travel to China only in approved tour groups and "now China is huge - everybody goes to Shanghai or Beijing. Once you travel, you get a taste for what the food is like where it was born and when you come back, you go in search of it."

Clarkson agrees with my assessment that Cantonese food is among the less challenging of the Asian cuisines. "But you can tell who a restaurant is catering for by who is sitting in there. If you go to a yum cha that caters to the non-Western palate, you get more of what my family calls the wicked trolley: tripe and chicken hearts and stuff."

Lyu and Clarkson make the point that we have yet to see anything in the way of serious Chinese fine-dining here.

"We have not touched the tip of it," says Clarkson. "We have not seen how extraordinary the 10-course banquet can be. Because we tend to eat in small groups or pairs but the 10-course dinner is created for 10."

Lyu says the shortage of clientele for such dinners means there are no chefs here capable of preparing them. "The chefs who are here would be quaking in their boots at the prospect."
Clarkson is heartened by the development of Chinese cuisine here but stresses its continued growth depends of the enthusiasm

of diners. "If we don't keep eating it, it won't keep progressing. We have to just get out there and eat the stuff."

• aucklandfoodtours.com

A guide to Chinese regional cuisine

Depending on how you slice it, there are at least four (often further subdivided into eight) "great traditions" of Chinese food:

Lu (or Shandong), from northern coastal regions, emphasises seafood and river fish and also makes use of grains, rather than rice. Classic dishes: sweet and sour carp (tang cu li yu); braised abalone (hong shao bao yu).

Chuan (or Sichuan) is from the southwest and is for chilli-lovers. The distinctive sauce, made of peppercorns, is called "mala", a single word that means "so spicy it makes your mouth numb". Classic dishes: shui zhu yu (fish fillet in hot chilli oil); ma po tofu (tofu with mince in hot chilli oil).

Yue is the cuisine of Guangdong, which English renders as Canton, and is what visitors to Hong Kong encounter. Classics: dim sum, barbecue pork, congee (rice porridge, served with savoury ingredients; they're big on pig offal).

Su (in full Jiangsu) from Nanjing in the coastal east features braising and stewing, often with soy sauce and sugar. River fish and duck are popular. Classic dishes: xigua ji (water melon chicken); yanshui ya (brine-boiled duck).

The list of eight traditions adds Anhui, Fujian, Hunan and Zhejiang, and subsumes a host of regional cuisines.