(
loup
) baked inside a fish-shaped pastry crust he served me adorns his restaurant’s “classic” menu. ( illustration credit 3.1 )
Guérard’s
ris de veau Club des Cent
presented a sweetbread in one imposing lobe chastely topped with matchstick truffle slices and a clear, light brown sauce.
Some days chicken, some days duck came in a highly reduced sauce made from chicken stock, veal stock and wine vinegar. The light but intense sauces, the minimalist plating, the hyperdramatic focus on a single ingredient, the ironic refurbishing of cliché classics (fricassee, green bean salad)—all the elements of the new cuisine were there at Le Pot au Feu, the future ready to roll out and roar.
Back in New York, my food-alert readers barely stirred at this momentous news. Paris was far away. They would latch onto the nouvelle cuisine only when it came to their doorstep. But that wouldn’t happen for several years. In 1972, in New York, the big news in food wasn’t French; it was Chinese, because a revolution in Chinese food was happening right in New York City.
All of a sudden, it seemed, restaurants serving non-Cantonese food—the food of Sichuan, Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai—were popping up all over Manhattan. Word would spread among the food-alert and lines would form outside the newest hit address. Then the chef would decamp, quality would fall and we’d head for the next voguish installment of exotic dishes we’d never seen in Chinatown. It was almost as if some mad Chinese genius were making up one regional cuisine after another.
I can remember Julia Child puzzling over all the unfamiliar spicy Chinese food she was seeing. “We never had anything like it when we were over there during the war,” she said to me.
She must have been too isolated in the U.S. intelligence community to experience the full range of local food. And like almost every other American after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, she couldn’t travel in mainland China. To her and most other Americans who experienced it, the sudden explosion of “exotic”Chinese eating places in our midst came as a surprise, a mystery, an ethnographic puzzle.
But there was a perfectly good explanation for it: a pivotal change in U.S. immigration law. That was the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known, when it was known at all to the general public, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law revoked a forty-one-year-old immigration law that had strictly limited immigration by quotas that gave preference to applicants from the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the Hart-Celler Act abolished what was known as the principle of “Oriental exclusion,” which had made it virtually impossible for Chinese to obtain U.S. immigrant status.
In the first ten years after Hart-Celler, the number of new immigrants doubled by comparison to the previous decade. Large numbers of them came from Asia and Latin America. And among this new wave of greenhorns were ambitious Chinese who invigorated the restaurant world of New York with regional specialties that made their fortune.
Of course, Hart-Celler did much more than improve the Manhattan restaurant scene. It literally changed the face of America. Arguably, along with Medicare, it was one of the two most important pieces of legislation of the postwar era. Yet few people are aware of it even now. In 1972, in the community of epicures, it hardly ever came up as a factor in the abruptly improved state of our gustatory happiness. We just wanted to know who the latest hot chef from China was.
In the days when a Chinese meal was nothing more than chop suey, chow mein, one from Column A and one from Column B, probably nobody in America ever stopped to think about who the chef behind the food was. But after more or less authentic Chinese food from several regions, notably Beijing and Sichuan, gained a serious following, Chinese chefs emerged as figures of the sameimportance as French chefs—but the Chinese chefs
loup
) baked inside a fish-shaped pastry crust he served me adorns his restaurant’s “classic” menu. ( illustration credit 3.1 )
Guérard’s
ris de veau Club des Cent
presented a sweetbread in one imposing lobe chastely topped with matchstick truffle slices and a clear, light brown sauce.
Some days chicken, some days duck came in a highly reduced sauce made from chicken stock, veal stock and wine vinegar. The light but intense sauces, the minimalist plating, the hyperdramatic focus on a single ingredient, the ironic refurbishing of cliché classics (fricassee, green bean salad)—all the elements of the new cuisine were there at Le Pot au Feu, the future ready to roll out and roar.
Back in New York, my food-alert readers barely stirred at this momentous news. Paris was far away. They would latch onto the nouvelle cuisine only when it came to their doorstep. But that wouldn’t happen for several years. In 1972, in New York, the big news in food wasn’t French; it was Chinese, because a revolution in Chinese food was happening right in New York City.
All of a sudden, it seemed, restaurants serving non-Cantonese food—the food of Sichuan, Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai—were popping up all over Manhattan. Word would spread among the food-alert and lines would form outside the newest hit address. Then the chef would decamp, quality would fall and we’d head for the next voguish installment of exotic dishes we’d never seen in Chinatown. It was almost as if some mad Chinese genius were making up one regional cuisine after another.
I can remember Julia Child puzzling over all the unfamiliar spicy Chinese food she was seeing. “We never had anything like it when we were over there during the war,” she said to me.
She must have been too isolated in the U.S. intelligence community to experience the full range of local food. And like almost every other American after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, she couldn’t travel in mainland China. To her and most other Americans who experienced it, the sudden explosion of “exotic”Chinese eating places in our midst came as a surprise, a mystery, an ethnographic puzzle.
But there was a perfectly good explanation for it: a pivotal change in U.S. immigration law. That was the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known, when it was known at all to the general public, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law revoked a forty-one-year-old immigration law that had strictly limited immigration by quotas that gave preference to applicants from the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the Hart-Celler Act abolished what was known as the principle of “Oriental exclusion,” which had made it virtually impossible for Chinese to obtain U.S. immigrant status.
In the first ten years after Hart-Celler, the number of new immigrants doubled by comparison to the previous decade. Large numbers of them came from Asia and Latin America. And among this new wave of greenhorns were ambitious Chinese who invigorated the restaurant world of New York with regional specialties that made their fortune.
Of course, Hart-Celler did much more than improve the Manhattan restaurant scene. It literally changed the face of America. Arguably, along with Medicare, it was one of the two most important pieces of legislation of the postwar era. Yet few people are aware of it even now. In 1972, in the community of epicures, it hardly ever came up as a factor in the abruptly improved state of our gustatory happiness. We just wanted to know who the latest hot chef from China was.
In the days when a Chinese meal was nothing more than chop suey, chow mein, one from Column A and one from Column B, probably nobody in America ever stopped to think about who the chef behind the food was. But after more or less authentic Chinese food from several regions, notably Beijing and Sichuan, gained a serious following, Chinese chefs emerged as figures of the sameimportance as French chefs—but the Chinese chefs
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