Poached chickens and roasted chickens dangle in the window of Hainan Chicken House on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Above the door is a chicken-sized sculpture of a chicken. Scattered between the plain white tiles on the dining room walls are other tiles printed with images of chickens. And if you order one of the noodle soups, it comes to the table in a white bowl with a picture of a chicken on the outside.
Attentive readers will have noticed a decorative theme. In fact, the motive extends to the menu. Hainan Chicken House is dedicated to Hainanese chicken rice, a dish with ancient origins in Hainan Island in southern China. It has since traveled to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and beyond, along with Hainanese chefs, and has deep roots wherever it lands.
The owners of Hainan Chicken House are Malaysian New Yorkers, and it’s the Malaysian version of chicken rice that they serve, along with curry laksa, mee goreng and a few other kitchen classics. What is called the House Hainan Chicken at Hainan Chicken House comes to the table wrapped in paper, Hawker style, and sealed with a sticker printed with a picture of a chicken. Inside are two scoops of rice, a coriander sprig, cucumber slices and poached chicken that has been chopped into pieces with a cleaver.
A peculiarity of Hainanese chicken rice is that the chicken is perhaps the least important part of the dish. It certainly takes a back seat to the rice, which is usually cooked in chicken broth and slathered with rendered chicken fat. The rice at Hainan Chicken House tastes like chicken, but doesn’t taste like chicken; it is particularly nuanced, fragrant with jasmine, pandan, lemongrass and fried shallots, among others. (For the chicken flavor clear as a searchlight, sip from the warm bowl of broth that comes with the packet of butcher paper.)
Depending on your point of view, the meat can also take a back seat to the three freshly prepared condiments it is served with: sesame-scented dark soy, a potent paste of ginger and spring onion, and a red chilli sauce, spicy and spicy. fruity and a little sour. The chicken itself is not devoid of flavor – like the rice, it’s poached in broth – but the joy of eating is in the texture, the way it’s firm and yielding, at the same time limp and juicy.
If you imagine a plate of chicken rice in New York, chances are the chicken you’re imagining is poached. In Asia there is some flexibility in this area, and “chicken rice” can be eaten with roasted or even fried chicken. Hainan Chicken House’s fried chicken is covered in a thick, whimsical shell on which is spooned some kind of coconut milk gravy with a slow-burning heat. It’s very good, but in my opinion the more natural partner to the restaurant’s chicken rice is the roast chicken, the skin stained with soy and the meat infused with spices and washed with fragrant dripping fat.
Best of all, though, is the char siu pork belly, cut into small, sweet, concentrated pieces that I’d like to keep in a jar so I can eat them like jelly beans. However, if you eat this, you will no longer have chicken rice, but roast pork with chicken rice.
If that, along with a green vegetable like stir-fried Chinese broccoli or watercress, were the whole menu, then Hainan Chicken House would be the top contender on the very short list of local cuisines that know how to make good chicken rice. This was more or less what Chef Hann Low had in mind last year when he told his son Christopher and daughter Rebecca that he had dreamed of opening a restaurant. For years he cooked Thai food, tapas and other things in restaurants around the city. Now he wanted a simple Malaysian place, like his parents’ kopitiam, where he had learned to make Hainanese chicken rice before moving to the United States.
The restaurant he built with his kids and two other family members expanded on that idea, but not much. To the Hainanese chicken and char siu they added a handful of classic Malaysian dishes, noodle soups and fried noodles. The limited menu makes Hainan Chicken House closer to a hawker stall than some of the other restaurants in the city that do dozens of Malaysian dishes but do little justice.
In fact, much of the cooking has the practiced, steady intensity hitherto missing from many of Urban Hawker’s stalls in Midtown.
For his Penang shrimp noodle soup, Mr. Low a broth of dried and fresh chili peppers; the shrimp paste belacan, with its room-filling sharpness; and shrimp heads and shells and tails seared until smoking. In his curry laksa, a rich and fiery lake of coconut broth, aromatic with curry leaves, clings to the thick egg noodles and crunchy bean sprouts.
In the sauce that coats stir-fried egg noodles and seafood in mee goreng, sweetness and heat are tightly packed together until they become one idea. Char kway teow is more charred and intense than some local versions, cooked in a wok so hot that smoke seems to rise from the rice noodles entangled in shrimp and clams when they hit the table.
The menu features generations of recipes side by side. The curry puffs—peppery potatoes in crushing pastry crescent shells—come from Chris and Rebecca’s maternal grandmother. There are never enough to keep up with demand.
Then there is the chicken liver mousse. The livers are flavored with ginger and scallions, enhanced with Shaoxing wine and served on Malaysian cream crackers. So far we’re on solid Asian soil, but the garnish comes from Eastern Europe via the old Lower East Side: gribenes, the crackling that’s a by-product of fattening schmaltz (or chicken rice in this case). It’s a classic second-generation idea.
