Photo via Ed Schoenfeld’s Twitter/ Evan Sung

RedFarm’s Ed Schoenfeld Talks Dumplings, History Of Chinese Food In NYC

Ed Schoenfeld may not be a household name, but to anyone who’s paid attention to the city’s dining scene over the past 40 years, he certainly is. “Eddie Glasses,” as he’s nicknamed, is one the city’s (really, the country’s) preeminent food experts, particularly in Chinese cuisine, and he’s made a career for himself since the ’70s as a restaurateur/host/consultant/food-world insider of formidable authority. Schoenfeld’s first taste of fame was for running the front of the house at the four-starred Uncle Tais Hunan Yuan on the Upper East Side in 1973, and over the years he’s been involved with everyplace from Shun Lee to Chinatown Brasserie. Years ago, Gourmet magazine dubbed him “the curator of Chinese food in America,” and it still holds true today.

Most recently, Schoenfeld’s been in the spotlight with RedFarm, his new and ragingly popular West Village restaurant with chef Joe Ng. We sat down for dinner with the gregarious, opinionated, and impressively candid restaurateur to talk about everything from the history of Chinese food in America to his family. What we’ve printed below is a small selection of our two-hour meal, which was filled with enough food to feed a small army, and enough interruptions from well-wishers and passerby to exhaust even the most seasoned celebrity. Here’s a small taste of what it’s like to eat with Eddie.

How did you first get interested in Chinese food and decide to pursue it as a career? As a kid growing up in the city in an intellectual, middle class family, my parents never went out to a French restaurant. And being a New York Jew, we would go eat Chinese food all the time. I had realized early on, when I was a little kid, I loved going to restaurants. I loved eating. So I thought it would really be fun to have a career like that. I started pursuing food in a thoughtful kind of self teaching pedantic way when I was about 16 or 17. And I decided to start taking cooking lessons, when I was about 18 or 19—

[Answer interrupted by the arrival of steamed vegetable and chive dumplings]—[Pointing to garnish] This is the tip of a flowering chive, as opposed to a garlic chive. When a plant bolts it grows quickly and develops a plant or a flower. So this is a chive that bloted. When a garlic chive bolts, the stem becomes crunchy and crispy, when a regular chive bolts the stem becomes woody and inedible. So in Chinese cooking, flowering garlic chives are a really unique vegetable. Something you don’t see so often.

Anyway, to get myself educated in Chinese food in particular I started setting up Chinese dinner parties at different restaurants throughout the city. At the time I was going to NYU, but when I was 20 I dropped out to support my cooking habit. I started driving a taxi to support myself.

So how did you end up working in restaurants? Well, through these parties, I met a lot of restauranteurs and I became friendly with one of them and made a joke to him that if he ever wanted to hire a nice Jewish boy he should call me. Six months later he called me up and I became his assistant and we did the opening of Uncle Tais Hunan Yuan, the first Hunan restaurant in the United States. I was 22 or 23 years old.

To run a four star restaurant in New York, the kind of clientele you get is kind of amazing. We had crazy customers, iconic people. When Norman Mailer came in, who looked like a crazy guy, they stuck him near kitchen like was he a street person. When Warhol came in, they had no idea what to make of that. The whole Sulzberger family who owned the New York Times, really big time people. Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Warren Beatty, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Harmon. For me it was enormous fun. I really loved that.

A spread at RedFarm (Courtesy Red Farm)

Do you think that New Yorkers have a different relationship with Chinese food than other Americans do? I think yes and no. I think that when I started in the business, Chinese food was the exciting Asian food. We had all these chefs coming into the country in the ’60s and that’s when we started getting all this authentic Szechuan and Hunan food. We moved away from Cantonese-American food. Szechuan food exploded and spread like wildfire.

Do you think the average diner recognizes the variation? Or are they just like, “that’s Chinese food”? Chinese food became so popular that it morphed into the main home replacement meal. There’s this enormous appetite for delivery and take-out. For the last 40 years people have been ordering in Chinese and it supplanted the Chinese restaurants with a kind of taken-for-granted experience. Then Japanese food became the hot cuisine. Chinese restaurants couldn’t keep up with the Nobus. And when they tried to do something out of the ordinary they were so provincial that it was very hard to do something different.

Seems like now people get excited by going out to Flushing to eat offal or some obscure dish. In your generation, by and large, you prioritize authentic over delicious. There’s a big difference now from the food I knew in the early seventies at Uncle Tai’s. When I go to the best Szechuan restaurant in New York City and eat their best dishes, every single time without exceptions, I think that I am eating the B- version of that dish. If I go and eat shredded pork with garlic sauce or Kung Pao chicken which are really classic dishes that have a pretty set way of being made, to my palate they’re almost all inferior, one after the other. If I go to Grand Szechuan and have the best food on the menu, I think its C+ to B-.

Are you telling me you don’t think you’ll ever be able to replicate the A+ level? No, I think we are able to replicate that, it’s just that just most people don’t.

‘Pac Man’ shrimp dumplings at RedFarm (Courtesy RedFarm)

So what are you trying to do with RedFarm? It’s pretty dissimilar to most Chinese restaurants in the city. What we set out to do was to showcase Joe’s cooking and to put it in a more modern format and to do something that was more of a market-to-table Chinese restaurant which is something that is lacking….When I really sat down and had a heart-to-heart talk with [Joe] he said, “I want to make food that surprises me and my guests.”

So are you prioritizing the delicious over the authentic? You know, I told Florence [Fabricant] at The Times that our food is unabashedly inauthentic and that we’re interested in making food that’s delicious, and we don’t feel like we have any boundaries here. We’re not trying to make something that’s authentic.

Do you get any Chinese customers in here? Many.

What’s the feedback? They love it?. We had a big, big piece on the cover of a Chinese-language newspaper, a two-page piece?.It’s nice and you know what’s going on is that, as I said to you before, we’re in a business where we’ve been stagnant for decades, certainly in the United States. Chinese food in the United States, and especially the Chinese food in the United States that’s oriented towards the caucasian community. There’s a lot of regional ethnic food in Chinatown and Flushing, or if you go to Vancouver, but…

What do you mean—that Chinese food for white people is boring? It’s not that it’s boring, it’s the stuff all over the country. If you look at the menu at the “best” Chinese restaurants and at the local take-out place, I bet you 70 percent of the items are the same. And this is an industry where creativity has been at a standstill.

[Answer interrupted by the arrival of sauteed black cod with yellow leeks]: This is black cod. Are you familiar with black cod?
A little bit, you don’t see it on menus all that often anymore. Do you know why?
Is it un-environmentally friendly? No, it costs three times as much as lobster.

Do you think Chinese food, has it ever been cool? It was very cool in the 60’s and 70‘s. It’s cool here. That’s one of the biggest achievements of this restaurant is that it’s cool and it’s a business. This is the first Chinese restaurant to open in the New York market in 30 years that is exciting dining public and where people are like, clamoring to go out cause it’s something different.

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Real Chinese Food

When I was a child, “Chinese food” at my house consisted of some chunks of chicken and a can of limp vegetables poured over crunchy chow mein noodles — from a can. It was pretty dull, and it wasn’t really Chinese, but we all cleaned our plates.

Years later, I visited a Chinese restaurant that did not feature American-style Chinese food. I ordered a hot, sweet, crispy Sichuan fish dish. Chinese food seemed a whole lot more interesting after that.

These days, one can order regional Chinese food from menus in many American cities. However, I imagine the most authentic Chinese cooking here in Columbia is happening in home kitchens, as I learned when I was recently invited to sample Arthur Du’s cooking at Hsiao-Mei and Ray Wiedmeyer’s home. Du’s multicourse meal is the subject of this week’s food cover story. Watching Du and tasting his food inspired me to experiment more at home. Because I don’t have a fabulous Chinese chef like Du at my house, I turned to a new cookbook called “Feeding the Dragon, a culinary travelogue through China and Hong Kong with Recipes” by Mary Kate and Nate Tate. (Andrews McMeel, 2011, $24.99) The book is written and photographed by a sister-brother team who embarked on a 9,700-mile eating and cooking trek through China. The Tates share what they learned about the people and the diverse regional cooking in China and Hong Kong. They also provide a fun-to-read cultural and historical context for the 100 recipes they have adapted for the home cook.

The book includes a glossary of terms and some of the basics on how to make staples such as rice, dumpling wrappers, good stock and hand-torn noodles. I plan to try many of the recipes, but I was first drawn to lemongrass chicken wings from Yunnan. After making them — and eating a few too many — I determined these wings would fly off the serving plate at a holiday party.

LEMONGRASS CHICKEN WINGS

3 stalks lemongrass, tender sections only, minced (see note)

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Zest and juice of 1 large lemon

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons Asian fish sauce

2 pounds chicken wings (about 20) tips removed

20 leaves peeled from lemongrass stalks

Use a mortar and pestle to mash the minced lemongrass, garlic, ginger, salt and lemon zest into a coarse paste. Whisk the lemon juice, sesame oil, sugar, Asian fish sauce and lemongrass paste in a small bowl. Place the chicken wings in a large resealable plastic bag with the marinade and toss them well so they’re well- coated. Place the bag in the refrigerator and marinate for 3 to 4 hours. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Remove wings from refrigerator and wrap a lemongrass leaf around each wing a couple of times, tying the ends together in a knot.

Marcia’s note: This looks pretty on the plate, but my son called it “slightly impractical.” Place the wings on a prepared baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes, or until cooked through. Serve warm, as finger food.

Note: Lemongrass is available at Hong Kong Market, Kea International Market and Chong’s Oriental Market.

Makes: 20 wings

— From “Feeding the Dragon” by Mary Kate and Nate Tate.

Marcia Vanderlip is the Tribune’s food editor. Reach her at 815-1704 or [email protected].

Reach Marcia Vanderlip at 573-815-1704 or e-mail [email protected].

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Chinese food in Italy, you are kidding me!

Americans are open to different cultures’ music, customs, and mainly, food.

Mexican, Italian and Chinese restaurants have become mainstream favorites — one of their biggest customers being college students.

Some colleges even have similar-type restaurants as eating alternatives in their food courts.

Many afternoons and nights are filled with delivery orders to college students — from pizza and wings to Chinese food.

 How long can students resist the coupons that come directly to the campus mailbox, the student discounts, and the lunch and dinner specials?

“When a food item is on special for less than $10 and your roommate or friend wants to split the difference, it is almost impossible to not take advantage of the deal,” said Simone Alcorn, a senior music education major from Maryland.

“I feel that we are lucky to be in a place where we have availability to different cuisine and get to sometimes experience [their] traditions,” Alcorn said.

In the college town of Urbino, Italy, many students rarely try different cuisine other than Italian.

For example, beyond the walls of the city of Urbino lies the Chinese Ristaurante — the only Chinese restaurant in town. The Likang family left Southeast China with a mission to find a more marketable location and open a restaurant in 1996.

“[We] traveled around half of Italy, and saw none in Urbino and chose here,” Liu Likang said.

They arrived in Urbino, Italy in 1997 and opened the restaurant in 2001.

According to Likang, there are other Chinese restaurants in Italy, but theirs is the only one in Urbino and the surrounding locations.

For the Likang family, it has not always been easy to reach their Italian neighbors.

Likang said their main customers are tourists.

“Not many people that I know go to the restaurant,” said Alice Bertaccini, a student at the University of Urbino.

The Likang family also acknowledged the Italian tradition.

“Some accept, some have not adapted,” Likang said.

“Many [Italians] just prefer their own foods,” Bertaccini said.

What Americans consider as the traditional Chinese experience is different in Italy.

In Chinese Ristaurante, one would not find the condiments Americans enjoy such as duck sauce and white sauce.

Chinese American food plates like sweet and sour chicken with rice is served on separate plates.

At the Chinese Ristaurante, delivery is not an option, but customers are able to carry-out their order.

On average, Chinese Ristaurante has 30 to 40 customers daily, depending on tourists.

The restaurant is open everyday.

Likang said he has no knowledge of the Chinese American culture and no relatives in America.

Likang said there is no Italian influence to the traditional Chinese [food].

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Don’t Like Chinese Food? You’re Eating it Without Even Knowing It

Everyone knows how common the “Made in China” label is on manufactured goods.  A trip to WalMart  in search of something, anything, made in America is a fool’s errand.  And one can even understand, without necessarily supporting, the economic forces that lead to mouse traps, underwear and toasters being made there instead of in Cleveland, OH or Rochester, NY.  But most people, I think, have a general assumption that when it comes to food, in most cases, the economics and logistics are such that most of the stuff you toss into your shopping cart at the grocery store may come from another state, or another coast even…but probably doesn’t come from China.  Who would think, for example, that it’s less costly to buy honey that was produced and packaged in China, transshipped to India (where it is repackaged in new barrels and relabeled as “product of India”), and then shipped across the ocean to a port on the West Coast before making its way into our food chain?  

But in the decade that has passed since China’s acceptance into the WTO, food imports from that country to the US have more than tripled.  As a result, according to an eye opening paper published by the group Food and Water Watch,

Unfortunately, it’s not just China’s food that’s reaching American shores — it’s also China’s food safety problems.  

They further note that

There is no indication that China’s food safety situation is improving. The Wild West business environment in China encourages food manufacturers to cut costs and corners. Even Chinese officials have publicly acknowledged their inability to regulate the country’s sprawling food production sector.  U.S. food safety inspectors have been overwhelmed by the surging food imports from China since the country joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, (and) The FDA inspects less than 2 percent of imported food and barely visits Chinese food manufacturers. The FDA conducted only 13 food inspections in China between June 2009 and June 2010.

The entire report, A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports From China, along with their recommendations to Congress for addressing this problem, is an important and interesting read about a subject many of us are perhaps only vaguely aware:
http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/…

How pervasive are Chinese food imports on the shelves of US grocery stores?

Almost 80% of Tilapia fillets and 50% of all Cod consumed here comes from China.

70% of all apple juice consumed here is made from Chinese apples (laced with pesticides that have been banned in the US)

Almost 22% of all frozen spinach comes from China.  

China is now our 2nd largest source of US processed fruit and vegetable imports.

China exported 88 million pounds of candy to the US last year.  Happy Halloween.

The problem with this is at least twofold. China’s agricultural producers are heavily dependent upon agrichemicals, which they overapply, and many of the chemicals they use have been banned or severely limited here in the US.  Banned pesticides sell in the Chinese Black Market for as little as a third of the cost as legal ones.  Their fish farms make heavy use of veterinary drugs and fungicides, which remain in the fish destined for US tables.  Industrial pollution in China is so bad that most of the waterways that are used to irrigate fields there have high levels of heavy metals and toxins which are subsequently taken up by the crops.  

There are so many individual actors in the Chinese food production system, from growers to processors to exporters, that regulating and policing the system is virtually impossible.  The good news for Americans is that China mostly exports the best quality food that results to other countries, even though the FDA has found that of the few food items it does reject after inspection, more than a quarter of it contains unsafe chemicals and/or unsafe levels of chemicals or other additives.  That also means that the Chinese themselves are left with the worst of the worst in their own food chain.

The impact of global trade of food has also had an impact upon the face of the American farm economy.  Michigan, for example, is the third largest US producer of apples.  Yet the glut of cheap, low quality Chinese apples has virtually eliminated the juice market for domestic growers.  As a result, Michigan has seen the demise of some 200 family orchards in the face of the onslaught from China.  Washington and New York have experienced the same thing.  California, which once supplied 90% of the garlic consumed in the US, has seen many growers exit the business for the same reason.  If one food source was simply replacing another, with the same quality at a lower price, it would be one thing.  But such is not the case.

American agriculture, overall, is doing pretty well in the global market, even though there have been many casualties in the specialty crop or fruit vegetable sector.  Grain producers are doing quite well, however.  Interestingly, however,  

While China is increasingly feeding Americans, America is feeding China’s animals.  Soybeans comprise almost the entire volume of U.S. food exports to China, which feed Chinese livestock and fuel the growth of factory farms.

…and therein lies the next big trade skirmish.

U.S. food giants like Tyson, Cargill, KFC, Kraft, General Mills and PepsiCo are heavily invested in China’s food production sector.  Goldman Sachs has purchased 10 huge poultry farms in China, so you know they are expecting to reap some large rewards down the road.  Who knew that Lays potato chips are made with Chinese potatoes?  And you thought it was hard to make an unhealthy product worse.  

American agribusiness giants very much want to open the U.S. market to Chinese poultry.  In 2006 the USDA, with George Bush’s urging, approved a proposal to open up our markets to Chinese processed chicken, even though their own internal research found that

Chinese poultry facilities showed egregious food safety problems, including mishandling raw chicken throughout the processing areas, failing to perform E. Coli and Salmonella testing, and routinely using dirty tools and equipment.

(emphasis mine)

When these reports surfaced, Congress blocked the Bush proposal on Chinese chicken imports.  American food giants howled in protest, and China filed suit in the WTO accusing the US of unfair trade restrictions.  In 2010, not surprisingly, the WTO concurred.  China slapped a high tariff on US poultry products, but sine American food companies are so heavily invested already in production facilities inside the country, they were still able to tap the countries domestic market.  Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that KFC alone opens a new restaurant inside China every 18 hours, purchases one quarter of all chicken thighs produced in the country, and its parent company (YUM brands) earns 36% of all its operating profits from just the KFC and Pizza Hut outlets it operates in China.

I don’t know about you, but chicken is a little sketchy as it is, even when it comes from Arkansas or Tennessee.  I don’t want to be eating chicken raised and processed in China anytime soon, especially without knowing about it.  But it’s hard to doubt that it will eventually come to that.  The rules by which members of the WTO operate, and the way trade disputes are arbitrated by that body, almost guarantee that member countries sacrifice public safety and national autonomy in the name of Free Trade and unfettered access to foreign markets.  Meanwhile, the FDA has seen its budget shrink over the years, and as a result, its ability to inspect anything more than a tiny fraction of the food imported into this country.  

2:36 PM PT: Update:  If you are interested in food issues, you might find this article from Fortune about Cargill worth checking out.  Cargill is, by far, the largest privately held company in the U.S., and rules the food industry:

http://money.cnn.com/…

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