Dinner with Cecilia Chiang

Star anise peanuts; bok choi pickle

Dungeness crab spring rolls; red cooked pork belly

Cecilia's minced squab in lettuce cups

Steamed Pacific rockfish with ginger and green onions

Sichuan crispy duck with Chinese pancake, plum sauce, and asparagus

Duck broth with sizzling rice

Coconut tapioca pudding with orange sherbet and mango

FIRST OF ALL, LET IT BE NOTED that I don't eat Chinese cuisine. I don't know anything about it; I'm not drawn to it; I haven't been in a Chinese restaurant in probably thirty years.

Tonight, though, Chez Panisse was honoring Cecilia Chiang, best known as the owner of the late and lamented Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco. Mme. Chiang was an early influence on Alice Waters, who recognizes passion about perfection and obsession with detail when she sees it. Mme. Chiang (there are people so august, so impressive, that one doesn't refer to them by surnames alone) has just published a book, part food and part memoir: The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2007), and Alice wrote the foreword. At eighty-eight, Mme. Chiang has seen a lot, and I look forward to reading the book.
Cecilia Chiang watches Alice Waters take a photo of Lindsey's Chinese dress


One doesn't read dinner, though: one sees it, smells it, tastes it, eats it. I did not look forward to a Chinese meal. I am extremely glad I was led to it.

The kitchen team at Chez Panisse often demonstrates its ability and its willingness to stretch beyond its own cuisine, which I suppose you'd have to say is French and Mediterranean (in terms of original inspiration and general address) modulated by California (in terms of provender and terroir). Recently we've had dinners honoring, and designed by, Scott Peacock, who brought the down-home deep South to Shattuck Avenue, and Niloufer Ichaporia, who reacquainted us with Parsi Bombay. (Like Mme. Chiang, each of them had also recently published a book. Alice, and Chez Panisse, honor books and respect their authors; the printed page is as close to the restaurant's household muse as is the silver screen.)

Tonight the full kitchen team, with Jean-Pierre and Philip at the helm, brought recipes from The Seventh Daughter to the Chez Panisse style, and it was a fascinating, stimulating, continually building sequence. The peanuts are unroasted and delicately flavored; the bok choi mild and supple. I can't report on the crab, alas; but the pork belly! An exact mediation of Italian lardo, Southern sowbelly, and something Chinese…

The squab was rich and earthy, a taste and texture I associate with ravioli filling; it wouldn't have been out of place in Bologna. The rockfish, flaky and mild, offset by its ginger and onions, was to me the most characteristically Chinese dish of the evening to that point; it introduced the duck with plum sauce beautifully.

Then, almost the culmination except that the other courses had been so fine themselves, the duck broth. Served simply in a cup you could lift to your lips, the better to inhale its aroma, it seemed to me utterly Parisian, a perfect consommé, in spite of the crisp rice floater.



Dessert: I've loved tapioca pudding since I was a little boy, perhaps especially because my father detested it and so we rarely had it. This was a quite refined version, with the sherbet and mango set atop, and accompanied by Chinese peanut-caramel cookies and candied kumquats. Truly an extraordinary dinner, among friends and acquaintances and many faces never seen before. And, of course, wines from the list that worked perfectly well:

Grüner Veltliner 2006

Morgon 2007

(a special treat brought by an acquaintance) Loal 1920