857: Cha Chaan Teng with Lucas Sin and Nourishing Networks with Dr. Ashley Rose Young

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

This episode explores the deep historical and cultural roots of street food in two iconic cities: Hong Kong and New Orleans. Chef Lucas Sin

Key takeaways

• Lucas Sin explains that Cha Chaan Teng dishes like baked pork chop rice rely on techniques like using baking soda and pineapple to tenderize meat.
• Hong Kong milk tea is a product of socioeconomic necessity, utilizing tea dust and evaporated milk to create a robust flavor profile.

Main topics

• Hong Kong Cha Chaan Teng culture
• New Orleans street vendor history

Notable quotes

The best Cha Chang Ting is the one that's closest to you.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how the most enduring culinary traditions often

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Support for this show comes from Feeding America. Great things are not built alone. They require the right pieces coming together for a purpose. And right now, as families face rising food costs, it's important to come together and end hunger, hand in hand. Farmers, advocates, donors, volunteers. When we connect our actions, we aren't just separating parts. We are a movement building a system that feeds millions. This Hunger Action Month assembly is required. You can give now, volunteer, or speak up at feedingamerica.org slash hungeractionmonth. Speaker 4 (0:38) Hey, it's me, Will Anderson, host of the new Music History Podcast, Monday Music Club. And on this week's episode, we're talking about pop music with the boys from one of my favorite podcasts, Switched on Pop. Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan are two of the smartest and sharpest minds chatting about music right now. And we got into how they got their start, what they love about pop music, and some recommendations on what we should be listening to. It's a great conversation. These guys are just... brilliant and you can find it by searching for Monday Music Club wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:12) I'm Francis Lam and this is The Splendid Table from APM American Public Media. Speaker 5 (1:26) When you're looking for a food that defines a place's cuisine, where do you look? Of course, you look at what's on grandma's table. And maybe you'll also want to look at what's happening at the chef's table and boundary-pushing restaurants. But one place you can never skip on your search is the street. Pretty much every place there are cities, street food shows up as a way to feed busy people and as a low-barrier way for people to make a little living. Today, we're talking to two people who take this very casual food very seriously. Later on in the show, we'll talk with Dr. Ashley Rose Young, an historian at the Smithsonian, whose book, Nourishing Networks, is about the street vendor culture of New Orleans. And like everything having to do with food in that city, it's rich with flavor and history. And we're going to start with Lucas Sim. Lucas is, to me, one of the most thoughtful and interesting people working in food today. He's a chef who had pop-ups in his native Hong Kong as a teenager. He came to the U.S. for college, where he fell in love with Chinese-American food he'd never seen General Tso's chicken before, and helped start a company that would take over local Chinese takeout places when the owners wanted to retire and sell the restaurant. And then he moved back to China. starred in a James Beard award-winning video series on the food of Hong Kong, and now is back in America with a magnificent cookbook about Hong Kong's diners. Yes, places where you can get a cup of tea or coffee, a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. But in Hong Kong, these places, called cha chan teng, or in English written as cha chan teng, which means tea meal room, are a fast-paced... delicious, multicultural microcosm of the city itself. Speaker 5 (3:18) Lucas, thanks so much for coming by. Thank you for having me, Francis. Okay, so you grew up in Hong Kong, which is the city where most of my family is from. I think even without bias, I can say it is truly one of Speaker 3 (3:30) the Speaker 5 (3:30) great food cities in the world. Absolutely. Cantonese cuisine is magnificent. And, you know, you can find incredible French food, unbelievable Italian food, incredible food from all over Asia. As a chef, I think it's a place where you can be... truly endlessly inspired. But you've dedicated yourself to what is basically the corner diner of Hong Kong. Speaker 3 (3:55) Yeah, the Cha Chan Tang, absolutely. The Speaker 5 (3:57) Cha Chan Tang. Yeah. Do you remember going to them as a kid? Yes. Describe what Speaker 3 (4:02) that was like for you. The hungriest moments of my life were spent waiting for, you know, macaroni and soup or instant noodles at the Cha Chan Tang. And those moments are after swim practice. You know, it's after church. It's like after school. And you've just like been a kid all day. And you go to these restaurants and you have a choice of whatever protein, whatever noodle, whatever you'd like for the day. Sometimes there are sets. It's the one place where you're allowed to have French fries because they come with every afternoon tea order. You have French toast that's deep fried. It's very sort of like guttural, childish, like lovely, like soul nourishing food. But for me, first and foremost, I think this is. a nostalgic, like the most nostalgic form of restaurant from Hong Kong. Speaker 5 (4:48) What do you mean by that? When you talk about form of restaurant, why does that matter? Speaker 3 (4:52) So the easiest way to understand restaurants in general in Hong Kong and in many parts of Asia, I think, are as genres. Restaurants that specialize in certain things. The rice noodle shop does the rice noodles with these certain types of toppings. The wonton noodle shop does this. The barbecue shop does that sort of thing. A cha chan teng is a genre of restaurant where when you walk in, you expect a certain number of things. And those things usually is... an all-day restaurant, mostly comfort food. So breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. For breakfast, it's mostly, I guess they tend towards the Western-style breakfast, so to speak. So eggs and a little bit of a noodle, sometimes toast on the side, milk tea. Lunch and dinner is a lot more of stir-fries, things over rice, stir-fried noodles. And then for afternoon tea, you have a variety of snacks, fried items, French toast, stuff like this. Speaker 5 (5:42) Yeah. Speaker 5 (5:45) When you think of your after-school swim practice, when you think of being there, when you're remembering that right now, take us into a scene. Describe what it looks like, what it sounds like. Describe the scene of being there. Speaker 3 (5:57) So the Cha Chang Ting, the best Cha Chang Ting is the one that's closest to you. It's also the one where you go to the most often because when you walk in, you're greeted by name. If you go there often enough, you don't have to tell them what you order and they'll send you the regular thing that you like. It's tiled floors. It's Formica tabletops. Menus underneath a thick piece of glass. All of the plateware is melamine. It's all sort of plastic with stainless steel forks and knives and spoons and things. And there are a bunch of guys wearing a white T-shirt. They're wearing white sort of what we might call dishwashers. It looks a little bit like what I'm wearing now. Like standing at the back. Just tell them what you like. The person will yell the order to the back of the kitchen and the food will come out within, like, I'm talking like 90 seconds. for the first drink to hit the table. Oftentimes, even by the time you finish saying what your order is, the milk tea will be coming out. It's super quick. It's very affordable. You can customize anything you want. It's a very sort of community type of place, but it's filled with a lot of human energy. But the pace is very, very quick. And the aesthetic of these spaces is sort of a mix of whatever materials they had sort of lying around or whatever the industrial, you know, had made into signage, that becomes sort of the font that they use. And so it's sort of a cobbled, it feels like a cobbled together space. And the menu feels that way too, because when you really sort of sit down and look at it, you'll see Cantonese influence, you'll see Chinese influence. And then you'll also see, obviously, a lot of Western influence, Southeast Asian influence. And it feels as if a lot of these flavors and these dishes are adopted, or if not adapted for the Hong Kong palette. Speaker 5 (7:37) Yeah. Okay, when you... Speaker 5 (7:40) Let's talk about, why don't you actually list off some of the iconic dishes you might find, and then I want to talk about how they got there. Speaker 3 (7:46) Yeah. The first couple that come to mind is what I think of as a Hong Kong-style scrambled egg, oftentimes served as a sandwich. So the scrambled egg sandwich, untoasted, is my most favorite thing out of a cha-cha thing. There's also the baked pork chop rice, which is in effect. a pork chop parmesan, so tomato sauce. As in like chicken parmesan, eggplant parmesan. And then fried rice underneath instead of your pasta or whatever it is. There's the egg tarts of different textures. There's a flaky crust egg tart. There's a cookie crust egg tart. There's French toast in very many variations. Stir fries like beef with tomatoes or beef with bitter melon or fish with tofu in a clay pot. Those are sort of the, I think, the type of iconic dishes that you would find. Speaker 5 (8:31) Yeah. So already you're talking about a menu that... that spans both like stir-fried bitter melon, which is like an intensely local taste. And like you said, macaroni and chicken soup with spam on top. Right, right, right. Yes. So this is really, it spans many cultures. It spans like, you know, multiple time zones, many time zones. And like, when I think about Chao Speaker 4 (8:57) Chan Speaker 5 (8:57) Teng, The easy shorthand, I think most Americans, if you've not been to this kind of place before that you'll think of if you're an American, it's like, oh, it's like a diner. Yes. In a lot of ways, it serves the same function. It's like you said, it's like the best diner is probably the diner that's near you. You know the people there. They're going to top up your coffee for you. The menu can be like a thousand pages long. Why is there eggplant parmesan on this menu? I don't really know. Speaker 5 (9:22) But the Tatan Teng, I feel, at least for Hong Kongers, and if you take one step back and try to look at the culture of Hong Kong and ask what is the culture of Hong Kong, the Tatan Teng to me feels like a... It's sort of more symbolic of the place as a whole than even a diner is of America. Speaker 3 (9:40) I think the reason that the Tatan Teng feels so iconic in the Hong Kong context and it feels such a... it feels as if it's such a good representation of Hong Kong is because not only are these kind of diner-like cha chan teng spaces putting menus... It's not as if the... I'll start this again. So I think the reason why the cha chan teng feels so representative of Hong Kong is because it not only puts other countries or other cuisines, dishes on the menu, but it sort of meaningfully and significantly... changes them. Yeah. Right. So the talk with like tomatoes, for example, this big pork chop rice, usually a tomato sauce is sort of a stew tomato sauce. You're developing a lot of like deep umami flavors. It takes a long time to do. And then you're covering it and stuff. But in the birth of the cha chan teng in the 1950s, kind of post-colonial Hong Kong, a lot of these Hong Kongers are striving to make what feels to them as high-end Western food with a limited pantry, oftentimes shelf-stable. So the primary ingredient, right, in this ketchup sauce is ketchup and tomato paste. And upon first blush, I think there can be a lot of allergies to the sort of cost-cutting, shortcut type of cooking that happens in the cha chan teng. But from a chef's perspective, when you sort of study it, you start to understand what each and every... One of these decisions and what each and every one of these ingredients actually does to the flavor of the dish. One of my, I was hanging out with an Italian chef, Davatorio, the other day. And one of the most famous Italian restaurants, three mission stars, all these things. And he was describing their famous tomato sauce. And the process is you take some tomatoes, you cook them down. And then once they've broken down, you blend them into a little bit more fresh tomato. And then you take that, you cook down a little bit more, and you blend it again a third time. So you're layering these three levels of cooked tomato-ness. Yeah, yeah. I'm doing the exact same thing in this big pork chop rice with tomato paste and ketchup and some cherry tomatoes, right? It's really the same philosophy, but done. in the 90 seconds or whatever it takes to get the dish out there. And as you're studying the chat, you see these techniques over and over and over again. These sort of creative decisions, oftentimes spurred by some sort of lack of time or lack of money or whatever, that has produced such classic dishes for us Hong Kongers. Speaker 5 (12:14) Yeah, it's Speaker 3 (12:15) like the ultimate Speaker 5 (12:15) kitchen hackery. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 3 (12:17) But Speaker 4 (12:18) before Speaker 5 (12:18) there was a word for it, and this is just what we had to do. we literally will feed people within eight minutes and they're out of here in eight minutes. I mean, we can deep Speaker 3 (12:25) dive into the pork chop, the baked pork chop rice even more. When you're thinking about pork chops, you know, it usually is cut from anywhere between the shoulder and the loin. And so you have a good variation on tenderness from the marbling and stuff. And so you have a couple of agents, you have a couple of things you can reach for to tenderize that pork chop. The most common is baking soda to make it a little bit more alkaline. At small quantities, I think it does wonders. But also the other, important component of the baked pork chop rice is pineapples because pineapples have these enzymes in them that sort of like actually break down the meat a little bit to get a little bit more tender you're really hammering the cook right you're marinating it you're deep frying it and then you're baking it again like chances are this pork chop is well done so you need something to keep it soft