Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (20 page)

Was Corinne playing me? The whole thing: the weird phone call I'd intercepted back at my parents' house; the trip to Buffalo; Bobby Chu; the phone call from her to come pick her up; the trip
back
to Buffalo; the mugging—all of it. I wondered if that night lying on her bed and the conversation we'd had driving back after the afternoon in Illinois, if the whole thing wasn't some trouble a very unusual woman was in—and was dragging me in as well. If maybe Corinne was one of Toby's “trouble drains”—a supersize version of it. And whether she was or wasn't, there was still the big question: How was all this supposed to end?

I picked up another head of broccoli. There was no shortage of Chinese restaurants. There were a limited number of chefs who could cook like me to fill the kitchens of those restaurants. I could get a job anywhere. I sliced the stem from the broccoli and began peeling it. My cleaver was so sharp it separated the tough outer skin into paper-thin shreds. That crow I'd seen back in the sycamore outside the apartment: I never had seen him again. Maybe he'd left town. Maybe that was a sign.

I finished the broccoli and rapped the side of my cleaver against the cutting board, the steel pinging a sharp rhythm. I was so lost in thought, I hadn't noticed someone had come in to the kitchen behind me when I said aloud, to myself, “Nope.” And I let out a long exhalation. “Gotta remember Rule Number Forty-Four. When it's interesting, you may as well stick around to see how it comes out.”

“How what comes out?” Thuy asked me.

“Good question.”

Rule #45: Never pass up the opportunity to have dumplings.

 

The contest was simultaneously simple and elaborate. Typically Chinese. It would have been easy just to invite all the contestants to some place, have them all present their meals, and be done with it. That wouldn't have had all the razzle-dazzle, though, that would bring a lot of publicity to the event. It wouldn't have had the grand air of importance and formality that were essential for the restaurant owners to present their image to the public. Then, too, some of those owners could have argued that their chefs were working under unfair conditions if the contest was held away from the kitchens where they were accustomed to cooking. I knew the chefs; I'd eaten in their kitchens in the months I'd been in St. Louis. I didn't think any of them would have a problem. I figured the real reason the owners wanted their chefs in their own kitchens for the judging had to do with the attention it was going to draw. And the business it would mean.

Five restaurants had put their reputations on the line by nominating their chefs for the contest. Over the course of five nights, the five chefs were presenting their best, one each night. A panel of judges would go to each of the five restaurants in turn, bringing their appetites with them, and sit for a sampling of the dish. As soon as the story of the upcoming contest was published in the
St. Louis Chinese News
and then in the
St. Louis Chinese-American Journal,
reservation requests started coming in for every restaurant participating. The local St. Louis paper got wind of it and gave it a story too. Within a couple of days, all five restaurants, including the Eastern Palace, were booked solid. We were booked for every night that week, in fact, even on those nights when I wasn't going to be presenting my dish. I'd never seen Mr. Leong so happy since he'd discovered a styling gel that kept his comb-over in place.

The five owners got together at Wei Hong's, a little café that sold Chinese pastries and tea and was kind of a gathering spot for restaurant workers. They each put their business cards into a box, and Mingyu Sun, the girl who worked at the counter, reached in and pulled them out, one by one. That's how the contest schedule was decided. We'd get a visit from the judges, Mr. Leong told me after he came back from Wei Hong's, on Thursday.

“Not too bad,” he said. He had already developed a complex theory as to why this seeding was bound to work in our favor. “The judges have three nights before, only one after. They forget what the food tasted like on Monday and Tuesday,” he told me. “They remember Wednesday. Then they eat your dinner Thursday, it be most fresh when they thinking. They still thinking about it when they eat on Friday. Friday guy no gotta chance. They been eating this kind of good food all week. They sick of it.”

It took Mr. Leong about five minutes to lay out his fascinating theory on why Thursday was so absolutely perfect for me that the contest was already more or less in the bag and I may as well consider it accomplished.

“What are the other chefs preparing?” I asked. “Do we know yet?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mr. Leong said, shuffling his hand into his pants pocket. “I write it.”

We sat down and looked at his list. At China Gate, the head chef, Jiangguo Wen, was making
mapo
tofu. It was a good choice. A Szechuan classic. A braise of finely chopped pork, mixed with chili paste, little nubbins of black beans, and crumbles of soft, custardy tofu.
Mapo
tofu got its name, “pockmarked tofu,” supposedly because it was the invention of an old lady—
po
in Mandarin—who was disfigured, or “pockmarked” (
mazi
) by smallpox. I knew Wen's version of the dish at China Gate. He made his own Szechuan chili sauce to go into it, instead of the prepared stuff from a jar. He had an advantage. Wen was from Chengdu, a city in Szechuan Province. He had relatives there who sent him a steady supply of Szechuan chilies. Chinese chefs make a distinction between
huajiao,
“flower peppers,” and
shanjiao,
or “mountain peppers.” Most of us had to settle for the former, which were more common. Wen, through his relatives, had access to some of the mountain peppers. These were a pure strain, much more fiery than what we could get, with a smoky, snappy flavor that upped the taste of the dish noticeably. In fact, we had a small jar of oil infused with Wen's special peppers in the kitchen at the Eastern Palace, a gift from Wen. We'd ground the carmine dried peppers into powder, then added them to a couple of cups of hot peanut oil. We used just a few drops of the oil on pot stickers, to give them an unmistakable piquancy. There was no way I could make an infused oil taste the same. Not without those dried peppers. It made Wen's
mapo
tofu unique. There were certain to be some judges who had a thing for Szechuan spiciness. Wen would have their votes.

Parker Huang, who was manning the first wok station at the Din Ho Restaurant, was going with a soup called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall. I was surprised. It was probably the most famous dish from Fujian Province—and certainly one of the most complicated meals of any style of Chinese cuisine. Even a basic recipe called for more than two dozen ingredients. Dried scallops. Boiled pigeon eggs. The leg tendons of pork, duck stomach, chicken, bamboo shoots. It was extravagant. The rest of us would be plinking out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while Parker was performing all four of Vivaldi's
Seasons.
The dish was supposed to be so delicious that the aroma alone would have the Buddha leaving his meditation cushion and hopping over the monastery walls for a taste. Popping the lid off a pot of that soup was going to be impressive. I wondered, though, how many of the judges would really be able to appreciate a gourmet delicacy like that.

Langston and I had both been right about Hung I-mien, the head chef at the Red Dragon. He was going with soy sauce chicken.
Chicken,
I thought.
It was too safe.
Jiang su ji
was one of those dishes, from Canton, that Chinese and Westerners both liked. It wasn't exotic. A whole chicken braised in soy sauce, with anise, rock sugar, and some other stuff, then hacked into pieces and arranged on a platter. It was sold in a dozen good Chinese restaurants all over town. Even some of the cheaper take-out joints had it on their menus.
Jiang su ji
was good, even in the cheap joints. And it would please the judges, a taste of familiarity. It lacked the flair, the exoticism, though, that I was guessing the judges would want in a winning entry. If Parker was going overboard with his Buddha Jumps Over the Wall soup, Hung was being too conservative with soy sauce chicken.

And Langston?

“He is making steamed shredded three meats,” Mr. Leong said. He looked at me.

I cocked my head and pursed my lips. Which I tend to do when I don't want anyone to know what I'm thinking. As with my initial meeting with Ms. Masterson, I lack the ability to conceal my thoughts with a blank face. Sometimes, like with her, I go for looking up and raising my eyebrows. Or I do the head cock and pursed lips instead, which is another one of my ways of trying to be a blank slate. To add to the effect now, I crossed my arms and sat back in my chair.

Langston's the one to beat,
I thought. His choice was a good one. An excellent one. It was a Shanghai-style classic. Three meats: lean pork, ham, and chicken were all steamed, along with slivers of bamboo shoots, then sliced finely into long, skinny needles. The shreds went into a bowl, laid along the side vertically, alternated with the shredded bamboo shoots until they filled the bowl. Put a plate on top the bowl, flip it over, and pull it off and you have a perfect mound of the meats sitting beautifully on the platter in three colors, drizzled with a light chicken stock–based sauce. It was a very “Chinese” Chinese dish, with lots of eye appeal. It was also just right for putting in the middle of the table for diners to sit around, picking it apart slowly with their chopsticks, nibbling and talking, and talking and nibbling, for a couple of hours, sipping tea all the while. The problems of the world could be solved over a mound of three steamed meats and bamboo. It was too subtle and at the same time too plain—steamed meat wasn't really all that exotic—for a lot of non-Chinese diners. Chances were good, though, that the judges would eat it up—literally.

“You worry?” Mr. Leong asked me.

“No worry,” I said. I unfolded my arms and stood up.

 

It was a little past eleven when we finished cleaning the kitchen that evening. A party of twelve had come in at nine. I was fairly sure they were college students. From their ages, I was guessing grad school. About half of them were Westerners; the others were Chinese. I peeked out through the swinging door when Corinne delivered their order. I knew the Chinese students had done the ordering. Boiled dumplings. A soup of ham and winter melon. Orange peel chicken. Dry sautéed green beans. Crispy garlic shrimp.

“They specified boiled, not steamed dumplings?” I asked Corinne when she came into the kitchen to deliver the order.

“Shui jiao,”
Corinne repeated. “Don't you speak English?”

Tuan, who'd just finished up a load of dishes and was leaning with his back against the rim of the sink, snorted. He was picking up enough of the language to start to get some jokes.

The boiled dumplings were consistent with the rest of the order; it was a pretty typical Szechuan dinner menu. I assumed the Chinese in the group were showing their Western colleagues some of the basics of Szechuan cuisine. The three of us went to work; it didn't take long. By the time the grad students filed out of the Eastern Palace, telling a beaming Mr. Leong who was standing at the front counter that they were delighted to be having “real” Chinese cooking for a change, the dining room was completely empty. We relaxed in the kitchen.

Li took a generous helping of dumplings from the freezer and tossed them into a heated wok, where they instantly began to crackle and hiss. At the Eastern Palace, we all preferred dumplings fried on the side of the wok—“pot stickers”—to the steamed or boiled versions. Well, actually Thuy and Tuan, our dishwashers, liked them better steamed. But dishwashers were too low in restaurant hierarchy to have a full vote on stuff like that. So they were learning to eat them the way the rest of us liked.

Eleven o'clock is late for most people to eat. And usually none of us who worked in the kitchen or in the dining room wanted a big meal at that time of night. We weren't really hungry. We'd been nibbling, sampling, all night long. We needed more to decompress from the dinner shift than to sit down to a full meal. For some restaurant crews, that means a trip to a local bar. We had a ceramic jug of fiery Chinese liquor we broke out occasionally. Mostly, though, we just wanted to sit around for an hour or so, snacking, drinking tea, talking. The first restaurants in China were probably doing business back in the Song Dynasty, starting in the tenth century, catering to travelers. They specialized in the same sort of light snacks and tea. A thousand years before, cooks at those Chinese restaurants sat down after their places closed, eating and drinking more or less exactly what we were eating and drinking.

Corinne came in after the last customers had finally ambled out; we'd just sat down. Langston banged twice on the door, then paused, then banged again once. It was the system all the restaurants used, the code that let you know there was a cook from another restaurant, or a waiter or waitress, who was coming by to sit around and talk and eat.

Thuy got up to let him in. Langston nodded at him, walked over to a rack of dishes, and picked up a small plate. Then he pulled a chair up to the table.

“You see the list?” he asked. He sat down. I passed him the little jar of hot chili pepper oil.

“I did.”

“Five willow fish,” he said.

“Steamed three meats,” I said.

“Both classic dishes,” Langston said. He spooned just a couple of drops of the orange-red oil onto the plate, then used a pair of chopsticks to swirl the dumpling around in it.

“By a couple of classic guys.”

“You think anyone's in the running but us?” Langston asked.

“I was ruminating on just that,” I said. “Parker's soup is a good choice if the weather's cold. But I think it'll be a little warm this time of year for it to have the full effect.”