Yet more food

Steven Stern has an article in The New York Times about food:

A couple of years ago, Jason Wang graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s degree in business. At the moment, he is dishing out spicy hand-cut rice noodles in a narrow storefront in the East Village, and seems pretty thrilled about his career path.
Xi’an Famous Foods, where Mr. Wang toils six days a week, started in 2006 as a tiny basement stall in Flushing in Queens, run by his father, David Shi. After a decade of cooking in Chinese restaurant kitchens, Mr. Shi opened his own business, serving the little-known cuisine of his hometown, the restaurant’s namesake city, Xi'an, in China.
It didn’t take very long for word to spread. Bloggers and denizens of food message boards praised Mr. Shi’s mysteriously complex sauces. Mr. Wang, who came to the United States when he was eight, translated his father’s menu into English to help the newcomers.
Now there are five branches of Xi’an Famous Foods, three of them in Manhattan. Mr. Wang, 23, came on board full time last year, fresh from classes in marketing, and full of big plans for expansion. While he and his father scout new locations, they are setting up a commissary in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn to be a central distribution point for the restaurants.
But chasing a larger audience does not mean they will be taking lamb face salad off the menu. Mr. Wang is canny enough to realize that undiluted ethnic legitimacy is a key part of the brand. “We’re going to keep it pure, because that’s what people are coming to us for,” he said. “We’re even going to keep the cashiers non-English-speakers, just because that’s more authentic. Except me, of course.”
The ability to move easily between cultures and codes has helped Mr. Wang steer his father’s restaurant from a Flushing basement to the East Village and beyond. It is a skill he shares with other ambitious children of first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs who are finding that this is an opportune moment to bring their own families’ food businesses to a public hungry for the real thing.
They grew up around restaurants and food shops founded by their parents to offer a taste of home to their own ethnic communities. In these businesses, English was optional, marketing was word of mouth, and innovation was beside the point. Such places evolved far away from the bright lights of mainstream food culture.
But mainstream food culture is not what it once was. When hordes of bloggers and television hosts scour every corner for hidden culinary treasures, any tiny taqueria or noodle shop can abruptly find itself with a whole new clientele and, occasionally, a national profile. And some savvy American-educated heirs to these businesses are trying to attract a wider audience without losing the qualities that made them popular to begin with.
For some of them, this means adopting modern business methods (Danny Meyer’s upscale fast food chain, Shake Shack, is one of Mr. Wang’s models) while leaving the menu intact. For others, it can mean a double-barreled approach in which Old World recipes share space with hybrid creations.
Jonel Picioane, owner of the Ridgewood Pork Store and the Sunnyside Meat Market, both in Queens, is a second-generation butcher and a second-generation American. His father, Kornel Picioane, an ethnic Romanian from Banatski Karlovac in Serbia (photo), ran the two shops until he retired ten years ago. “Even though he went to college, I always secretly thought he’d come and work in the shop,” Kornel Picioane said, as his son translated. Jonel Picioane, 41, still makes the smoky salami and paprika-crusted hams the way his father did. He chats with older patrons in fluent Romanian and Serbian. Every spring, he whips up a huge batch of the traditional Romanian Easter dish drob de miel, a dill-flavored terrine of lamb lungs and kidneys. Lately, the skills Jonel learned in his youth have turned out to be a rather hot commodity, and so he has decided to take those skills in new directions. He has been making cheeseburger sausage and chorizo. He also does cured duck breast, French-style saucisson and hazelnut salami. His charcuterie is on the menus of restaurants like Jadis on the Lower East Side and Le Comptoir in Williamsburg. While Kornel Picioane doesn’t come into the shop anymore, he still tastes all the new offerings. “I like the old stuff better,” he admitted, “but the truffle hot dogs are pretty good.” These days, his son said, “you have to go every which way.”
Since taking over management of the Nom Wah Tea Parlor from his uncle last year, Wilson Tang has been engaged in a similar balancing act, as he works to selectively modernize the 90-year-old dim sum restaurant on Doyers Street in Chinatown. He has revamped the menu, keeping the almond cookies and egg rolls, while adding more-contemporary dim sum dishes, like stir-fried turnip cakes in XO sauce. Research trips to slick new Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and Vancouver helped him get a line on hot new items. Mr. Tang, 32, has a standing order for friends who visit Hong Kong: “If you see anything cool, order it, eat it, tell me what it’s about.” Nom Wah now has a website, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page, a;; to keep fans updated on the latest dumpling developments. Its appearance, though, still belongs to a time before cool. Mr. Tang scrubbed and repainted, but the red vinyl booths and the tin tea canisters are still there, and so are the stools where as a boy he used to spin himself dizzy. Mr. Tang recognizes that there is a certain perversity in returning to restaurant work at this point in his family’s history. “I’m a typical second-generation Asian-American,” he said. “My parents wanted me to go to school and study hard and get a good job at a big company. And I did exactly that.” He spent much of the last decade bouncing back and forth between Wall Street and the food world. He quit his job at Morgan Stanley to apprentice at a pastry shop in California, ran his own Chinatown bakery for a couple of years, then returned to work in finance. When his uncle Wally Tang, 83, began to talk about retiring a few years ago, it seemed like an ideal opportunity.
For her 2005 book Consuming Citizenship, the sociologist Lisa Sun-Hee Park interviewed children of Korean- and Chinese-American entrepreneurs, including many who sold food. Quite a few of her subjects cringed in embarrassment while recounting their parents’ stories; they spent much of their lives trying to get as far away as possible from jobs they considered demeaning. But that might be changing, at least in the food world. “There are different trajectories happening,” Dr. Park said. “The restaurant business and food culture have become professionalized. It has a level of status, a sense of upward mobility, that it didn’t have earlier.”
For many newly minted second-generation restaurateurs, professionalism means, in part, harnessing the online food world that their parents never quite figured out. When he was in college, Mr. Wang set up a website for the original Xi’an Famous Foods stall. While monitoring the server logs, he noticed he was getting a lot of hits from one place: the food-geek message board Chowhound. “I kept tabs on the people that visited, and noted every little comment,” he said. “It was a little stalker-ish, but it was fun.”
Chowhound and similar sites have fostered a culture of try-anything, go-anywhere food exploration. “Adventurous food has become a national obsession,” said Gary Wiviott, the founder of the Chicago-based food discussion board LTH Forum. Kelly Cheng, 33, first encountered the LTH Forum back when she was attending law school. She was amazed to learn that her parents’ bare-bones Cantonese restaurant, Sun Wah BBQ, in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, was a hot topic. “There was about four years’ worth of material on us that I didn’t even know about,” she said. Ms. Cheng ended up befriending many of the forum’s regulars. She also ended up dropping out of law school. She and two of her siblings now run the restaurant, which her parents had operated since 1987. Two years ago, Sun Wah moved to a larger and more stylish space around the corner. Now, there’s exposed brick, local beer on tap, and a multicourse Peking duck special. There is also a greater selection of traditional Cantonese dishes. Ms. Cheng uses the LTH Forum members for a sort of market research, alerting them to specials, testing new ideas. “We’ve been able to put items on the menu that we thought only Chinese people were going to want to eat,” she said. “Pork belly, lotus roots, pan-seared fish with the head on. It’s kind of amazing.” While the crowd at the new Sun Wah is more diverse, their old Asian clientele remains loyal. “As long as they see the same faces, they’re actually quite happy,” she said. They appreciate “the fact that I hadn’t gotten rid of the dad and the mom.”
Eric Cheng — the "dad", who came to the United States from South China in the 1970s — still shows up at Sun Wah most days. “I go into the kitchen,” he said. “If something is wrong, I’ll tell them. Sometimes I yell.” Of course, the shouting, the smoking oil, the dirty tables and the long days are all things that immigrants of Mr. Cheng’s generation hoped their children would leave behind.
Diep Tran, 38, spent most of her childhood in the restaurant business. She came to the United States in 1978 from Vietnam, and was raised in the Los Angeles suburbs. Since the early 1980s, her aunt and uncle have run the Pho 79 chain, among the first Vietnamese restaurants in Southern California. She got her first real taste of kitchen life one Saturday when she was fourteen, after a cook called in sick.
Her aunt put her to work making banh cuon, a thin rice-flour pancake. Ms. Tran had made them before, at home, in small batches, using chopsticks to flip the delicate crepes. There was no time for such niceties in the restaurant, though. “Use your fingers,” her aunt said. “After a while it won’t hurt anymore.” “By the end of the day,” related Ms. Tran, “my fingers were all blistered. And I loved it.”
Today Ms. Tran is the chef and owner of the Good Girl Dinette in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. It’s a casually chic, bohemian sort of place, serving organic, and sometimes tweaked, versions of the food she grew up with: banh mi made with roasted oyster mushrooms and chicken curry potpie, topped with a buttermilk biscuit crust. Though her customers might be different from the people who came to Pho 79 when she was growing up, Ms. Tran sees some continuity. Her aunt and uncle, she said: “opened up their restaurant to feed their community, as defined by them, by ethnicity, by the hamlets they grew up in, by their association with the Catholic church. I opened up the Dinette to feed my community, how I define it.” She feeds them “American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food,” according to the description on the restaurant’s website. It might be the archetypal second-generation restaurant. As a child, Ms. Tran said, her family “wanted me to be a doctor or something. That was what they told me every day. But what they taught me every day was different. What they taught me every day was: do what you love, because that’s what they did. They toiled all their lives, but they loved it.”