SHORT PUMP, VA. — Peter Chang was in the house.
"Did you see Chang up front?" one of my guests asked, taking a seat around a big glass lazy susan in the back of Peter Chang China Café in this suburb of Richmond. "By the register?"
There he was, just hanging out in civilian clothes, the chef whose devotees will travel hundreds of miles on a rumor that he may be cooking in some far-off town. Mr. Chang's unpredictable appearances in the kitchen are at least as famous as his Sichuan-style dry-fried eggplant. He used to have a habit of quitting any restaurant where his food had attracted a fanatical following or, worse,! a good review.
This, of course, made his followers all the more fanatical. He hopscotched around Chinese restaurants in Virginia, turned up at several in Georgia and was briefly sighted in Virginia again before surfacing in Tennessee for a minute or two. He must be the only chef in America whose Wikipedia entry contains a section called "Disappearances and movement."
The current, stable period of his career began when he struck up a business partnership with Gen Lee, a Chinese chef in semiretirement. Three years ago, they opened Peter Chang China Grill in Charlottesville, Va. An owner at last, Mr. Chang did not quit this time. Not that he stayed put, exactly. He and Mr. Lee quickly began colonizing the rest of the state, pla! nting Peter Chang restaurants in Fredericksburg, Williamsburg,! Virginia Beach and here. They hope to open one in Fairfax, outside Washington, later this year.
Now, instead of worrying that Mr. Chang's menu will disappear overnight, his admirers play a different kind of shell game. On any given day he will probably be cooking in a Peter Chang restaurant, but which one?
Before coming to Virginia with a plan to eat at three of his places in 24 hours, I asked one of my operatives in the state to gather intelligence from a source inside Chang headquarters. "The betting on Chef's whereabouts — and he generally informs no one of where he intends to pop up — is Monday-Tuesday in Virginia Beach, Wednesday-Thursday in Richmond, and Friday-Saturday in Fredericksburg," my informant wrote. "I'm assuming it's! subject to change on a whim."
In fact, when I got to Virginia Beach that Monday, I learned that Mr. Chang was in Fredericksburg. But the night before in Short Pump, where I hadn't expected to spot him at all, he was lingering casually by the front door. At some point, he slipped into the kitchen.
Scallion pancakes led off. These were not the flaky pancakes I knew, though. They were air-filled puffs, as round and light as a beach ball. I tore off a patch, dipped them into a dish of warm curried broth, and wondered how the puffs still kept their shape. A minute later there were spring rolls, green leaves of cilantro showing through the wrappers, with an airy filling of flaky ginger-seasoned flounder. It sounds too simple to be as delicious as it was! .
Then we were given a piece of woven cane, the kind used for chair seats, bent into a cone and pinned with a skewer. Inside were chunks of crisp, nearly greaseless fried flounder tossed with a small salad of cilantro sprigs, sweet onions, dried chiles and cumin. Cilantro, chiles and cumin appeared again with dry-fried eggplant, float-away sticks that made me think of eggplant marshmallow.
There were Sichuan standards, too: spicy dan dan noodles with an expertly gauged sweet-sour ratio and a numbing blast of Sichuan peppercorns; outstandingly crisp and tender twice-cooked pork; beef with tofu-skin noodles lightly scored on one side to catch the searing chile oil; and, to tamp down the fires, cooling chunks of firm raw cucumber dressed with garlic.
This was Chinese cooking with true finesse. The muscular Sichuan dishes were unusually well balanced, while the charm of some others was arrived at through subtle and delicate means.
The United States has any number of very skilled Chinese cooks. It has far fewer who put their skills in the service of the imaginative leaps we expect from major chefs. By the end of my dinner in Short Pump, I had no doubts that Mr. Chang is one of them.
At one time, talent like Mr. Chang's was not so rare in this country. After the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, many of the country's top chefs fled. After the federal Immigration Act of 1965, a number of them moved to New York, which was expos! ed for the first time to extraordinary Sichuanese and Hunanese cooking.! In 1971, Raymond A. Sokolov wrote in The New York Times that "Chinese chefs have emerged as figures of the same importance as French chefs."
The most famous of all was probably Tsung Ting Wang, the chef of Shun Lee Dynasty on Second Avenue in Midtown. Ed Schoenfeld, the operating partner of the two RedFarm restaurants in Manhattan, began his career in Chinese restaurants during that era. He recalls T. T. Wang as "world class, a Ferran Adrià. Just an incredibly great chef."
"I met a group of people like that," Mr. Schoenfeld said. "When they died, I didn't come across any others." The profession of chef nearly vanished from mainland China, and with it the apprenticeship system through which highly trained chefs! passed on what they knew.
Peter Chang was born in 1963 in a poor village ("not even a village" Mr. Lee said) in Hubei Province, next door to Sichuan. By the time he was a teenager, China had begun to value its cooking traditions again, and he was sent to culinary school in Hubei. He worked in hotels and on cruise ships on the Yangtze River, where the woman he would later marry, Lisa Chang, was his supervisor. In 2000, after auditioning for the government, he was dispatched to Washington as chef of the Chinese Embassy.
After two years, he left that job and began his suburban wanderings, as chronicled by Calvin Trillin in a 2010 New Yorker article. The restaurants where he alighted were as unlikely as the ones where he has now settled down, in his r! estless way. He has a special affinity for strip malls in cities that a! re not particularly known for the vibrancy of their Chinese restaurants. When he opens a new place, local newspapers tend to tell readers that it is not affiliated with P. F. Chang's.
Sean Brock, the chef of McCrady's in Charleston, S.C., and the Husk restaurants in Charleston and Nashville, estimated that he had eaten about 15 meals in Mr. Chang's restaurants, and said that each time, "I feel like I'm sitting in a roomful of people who don't know how lucky they are. He's got legions of fans, but you can tell that not everybody in the dining room knows where they're sitting."
Peter Chang's servers, most of whom look like local college students, do not push too hard when they inform customers that the kitchen m! akes familiar dishes like General Tso's chicken along with more adventurous, chile-laden items. Pointing to the list of cold Sichuan appetizers, one explained: "They tend to be a little more out of the box. I like a lot of them, but that's just me. The other menu has some more Americanized dishes. It's not as weird as the other stuff."
In Williamsburg, before I could eat pigs' feet stir-fried with dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns, I had to overcome my server's gentle concern. As I had hoped, the feet were fantastic. The Sichuan hot-and-numbing effect put an electric charge in the sticky, crunchy bits of skin, but the spice never overpowered the deeply flavored pork. Tea-smoked duck stir-fried with sticks of ginger, another high point of that meal, was more restrained, but just as flavorful.
A couple of other dishes there did not have the same sharp focus. That was true in Virginia Beach, too, where I ate crispy pork belly that looked like the great bamboo shrimp I'd had in Short Pump but didn't have nearly the same impact.
Other dishes, though, were remarkable. Cold cucumber with garlic and cilantro outraced the Short Pump version; noodle soup with brisket seemed to get better as the meal went on; and a kind of pan-fried ravioli called Golden Marble, filled with soft tofu seasoned with shrimp and cilantro, was a subtle knockout. Virginia Beach also had a dim sum menu devised by Mr. Chang's wife. I would return just to find out whether it is all as delicious as the domed, pan-fried bun stuffed with lightly sweetened pork I tried.
The fans who say that the best Peter Chang restaurant is the one where Mr. Chang is cooking may be on to something. The best of my three meals, start to finish, was the one in Short Pump. But the others still offered cooking of unusual power and subtlety, and introduced me to dishes I'll remember for a long time. In fact, I could make a strong case that the best Peter Chang restaurant is the nearest one, as long as you order so many things that the server starts to act as if you might be insane. And then eat until you think you can't hold any more.
For that, Mr. Brock has developed a strategy: "You run outside, you go to the parking lot, you run around, you go to the bathroom, you splash cold water on your face until you can eat again." When that stops working, he said, he orders it all again, to take home.
Peter Chang China Café, 11424 West Broad Street, Short Pump, Va.; 804-364-1688; peterchangrva.com.
Peter Chang China Grill, 2162 Barracks Road, Charlottesville, Va.; 434-244-9818; peterchang-charlottesville.com.
Peter Chang Chinese Restaurant, 1771 Carl D. Silver Parkway, Fredericksburg, Va.; 540-786-8988; peterchangschinese.com.
Peter Chang Restaurant, 1203 Richmond Road, Williamsburg, Va.; 757-345-5829; peterchangrestaurant.com.
P! eter Chang Restaurant, 3364 Princess Anne Road, Virginia Beach, Va.; 757-468-2222; peterchangvirginiabeach.com.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/dining/where-peter-chang-cooks-they-will-follow.html
