When generations of New Yorkers talked about Chinese food, they almost always talked about Cantonese food.
It was what the city’s early Chinese immigrants ate as they tried to recreate meals they once knew in the southern province of Guangdong, when it was still called Canton.
Adapted for non-Chinese palates, it formed the basis of what Chinatown’s first restaurants served, beginning in the 1880s, and what later Chinese restaurants would bring to neighborhoods north of Canal Street. Cantonese food became more or less synonymous with Chinese food in New York until the 1960s and 1970s, when a handful of notable chefs who made it out of Mao’s China shook the city with the glories of Hunanese and Sichunese cuisine.
Cooks from other provinces kept coming. These days, any college student taking the bus into town for a weekend can tell you where to find fiery lamb dumplings from Shaanxi or bridging noodles from Yunnan. Yet no other regional Chinese cuisine has found its way into the diet and identity of the city more deeply than Cantonese. There is no New York without won tons of soup and char siu.
Both items are on the menu at Bonnie’s, a new Brooklyn restaurant that bills itself as Cantonese-American. The barrels extracted are easy to spot, although they have shrunk to the size of tortellini, small enough to fit on a teaspoon. Other than their fillings — ground meat in the Italian dumplings, ground seafood in the Chinese — they’re not that different, which may be the point Bonnie’s is making by calling the dish “wun tun en brodo.” The brodo is a Chinese superior broth brewed from a mix of meats and pumped with orange peel, among other things.
The char siu is harder to spot. It travels incognito, disguised as a McRib, though a knife protrudes from this sandwich, as if Hercule Poirot had discovered it as it lay face down on the library carpet. Like the original, Bonnie’s char siu McRib comes with sweet pickles and white onions. Unlike the original, it’s filled with one-third the size of a real baby rib rack, minus the bones, which are cut out after the meat is steamed.
It’s no big surprise that this tastes better than the pork scraps McDonald’s kneads into an eerily soft raft. But I wasn’t prepared to find that Bonnie’s char siu glaze, with its honey, five-spice powder, and ginger-garlic-soy trinity, made perfect sense in place of the original sandwich’s sweet orange barbecue sauce, and I was even less prepared. to find that Bonnie’s McRib makes a compelling statement about the long and intertwined history of American food and Cantonese food. Even if the full view doesn’t come into view, the sandwich is still very nice to eat.
Bonnie’s chef and owner is Calvin Eng. Raised in a Cantonese household in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he learned Guangdong cuisine from his mother. (She’s Mew Ha Chew; Bonnie is her American nickname.) His restaurant is not Cantonese-American in the sense used to describe chop suey and other dishes that Cantonese chefs devised to appease other people’s tastes. It is Cantonese American in the sense that Mr. Eng himself is.
His family’s culture forms the basis of his menu, but he allows it to be pushed and pulled by the world he traveled through outside his home, such as meals at McDonald’s, his years in Rhode Island culinary school, and his time as head chef of Nom Wah, the century-old Cantonese tea room on Doyers Street.
Like many young chefs today, Mr. Scary popups to build a devoted fan base before setting up a place of his own on Manhattan Avenue in Williamsburg. Tired of waiting for gas at Bonnie’s, he even set up a “no-gas pop-up,” giving his followers a taste of his raw oysters in a raw ginger and white pepper mignonette, among other items. .
As a result, the dining room, in the style of a vintage luncheon diner with tiled floors and pendant globe lamps, has been packed nearly every night since its official opening in early December. Reservations are disappearing faster than you can swallow a ginger-smeared oyster, and if you’re hoping to get one of the six stainless steel counter stools reserved for walk-ins, you’d better queue up outside the front door—painted with a impressively coordinated dragon eating noodles with his front legs while pouring tea with his hind legs – unlocks at 5pm
Soon the whole place will be in motion. Bartenders will race to keep up with orders of pineapple-tinged negronis and black-tea penicillins. Flames under the wok roar to life. Their heat will make the garter skins puff in butter teeming with golden bits of garlic. It will weld XO sauce, intensely flavorful of chopped dried scallops and shrimp, to the surface of rolled cheung fun noodles. It will crisp up the dredged salt-and-pepper squid bits as they stir fry with onions and green chiles. (These are served with lemon cheeks and a garlic chive-laden dip that the menu calls “Chinese ranch.”)
Bonnie’s even uses the wok for cacio e pepe. Fever for this pasta has gripped New York cuisines in recent years; Mr. Eng may have come up with the most compelling of all the non-traditional versions by stir-frying the nearly cooked noodles in a compound butter of garlic and fermented tofu.
That’s about as far as Mr. Narrowly deviates from recognizable Cantonese inspiration. More often, he amplifies the flavors of homely vintage recipes so that they register with diners weaned on Mission Chinese and various Momofukus and now expect a low of umami at the end of each chopstick.
Normally a low-key affair, a shallow bowl of steamed egg custard is packed with mussels in salty fermented black bean sauce. Jasmine rice congee is powerfully savory even before you stir in the sliced scallions, powdered scallions and peanuts and mossy pork silk threads; the saucer is like a minivan with a Ferrari engine.
Things rarely go wrong in the kitchen, but sometimes the accelerator pedal can be pressed too hard. The cheung noodles which were thrilling one night, were showered with XO sauce the next. I suspect this problem will be ironed out over time as the chefs focus on balance and proportion at the heart of Cantonese cuisine.
Bonnie’s version of cold-poached chicken hits the mark: the ginger-shallot-chili sauce sings, sweetened soy sauce provides a powerful counterpoint, and blue-and-white china teacups filled with golden chicken stock underline the one-pot simplicity of the dish.
Anyone wanting a more elaborate main course should consider the rainbow trout. In the lightly baked skin, the meat with shrimps is finely chopped and poured back into its original shape: a fish-shaped fishcake. Bouncy and springy, pungent with chopped garlic chives, it’s punctuated here and there by crunchy bits of water chestnut. You can eat this as is and be very happy, but it is improved by wrapping a slice in butter lettuce with a few leaves of herb salad and a spread of green mustard.
For dessert there is of course an ice cream sundae. This one comes via Hong Kong, the vanilla ice cream topped with small cubes of baked malted milk custard and topped with Ovaltine hot fudge. But at this point in the meal, my mind always turns to Bonnie’s fruit bowl, a seasonal spread that has lately yielded clementines, dragon fruit speckled with black seeds, rambutan peeking out of its hairy skin, elongated purple grapes, maybe a ripe wedge or two. of pumpkin-orange fuyu-persimmon. These are not mentioned on the menu where the description only reads “health is wealth!!”
To italicize the point, maybe the fruit bowl is a dollar cheaper than the ice cream.
What the stars mean Due to the pandemic, restaurants are not getting star ratings.
