4 days ago
Fast, Fresh Lettuce Wraps Feel Special Wherever You Are
At Golden Leaf, a classic Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong, an onyx lazy susan inlaid with gold leaves spins on each table, circled by gold-rimmed jade plates. Last summer, I took my college-age kids to Golden Leaf, part of their first trip to the place where their grandparents grew up and where I spent much of my childhood.
Recipe: San Choy Bao (Pork and Water Chestnut Lettuce Wraps)
After days of wobbling on small stools in noisy restaurants for chicken-slicked clay-pot rice, shrimp wonton noodles, Hong Kong-style French toast and roasted goose, I wanted them to experience food that was just as flavorful but in a fine-dining setting they had seen applied only to Western or 'modern' Asian cuisine. At Golden Leaf, I ordered the dishes I loved most as a child and told my kids they would experience Cantonese cooking as they never had before. When our first course was set down, my kids, all dressed up, looked at it and said, 'Ma, those are just lettuce wraps.'
It somehow hadn't occurred to me until that moment that this banquet dish I remembered as the pinnacle of classic Hong Kong haute cuisine was, essentially, a dinner I had thrown together for them all their lives. Its Cantonese name, san choy bao, literally translates to 'lettuce wrap,' and its contours are wide: cold iceberg lettuce, a stir-fry of finely diced anything and sweet Chinese bean sauce like hoisin. (Deep-fried noodles or wonton wrappers aren't essential, but they add a fantastic crackle to the juicy filling.)
At Golden Leaf, it was particularly elegant, with a perfect Lego-dice of squab and fresh water chestnuts and lettuce trimmed into uniform cups. But it wasn't exponentially greater than my homey ground-meat version, because the fundamental appeal of san choy bao is the contrast between the hot filling and cold wrapper.
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