Huang Xin Yu scooped up a sea bass – head, tail, and all. Its flesh bore deep cuts, marked in the skin to absorb the chef’s signature red soybean sauce. A wok flared with bubbles as Huang placed the fish into its new sea of oil.
Huang, who’s 45, is head chef and partner at New Haven’s Taste of China, a Sichuan-style restaurant that opened in mid-May on Chapel Street. The restaurant is the “city” version of the original Clinton location, which owners Hu Ping and Jonathan Dolph opened in 2000.
New Haven patrons – including Yale professors, doctors from Yale-New Haven Hospital, downtown businessmen, and Chinese families – used to make the drive to eat Huang’s food. Now they have a location closer to home. “They kept saying, ‘We need you. We’ve been waiting so long,’” Hu Ping Dolph said. “They asked us to move to New Haven.”
Brianne Bowen Photo
Huang (pictured) came to the United States 13 years ago to work in the couple’s original restaurant. He has long enjoyed cooking, he said in Chinese (Dolph translated). Before bringing his family to Connecticut, Huang opened his own restaurant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China, and taught at Sichuan’s cooking school for ten years.
To create the new restaurant’s menu, Dolph and Huang drew inspiration from their Chinese hometowns and newer trends in Sichuan cooking. The goal is to present authentic food, just like in China, Dolph said. “If you eat here, you feel in China. You feel at home,” she explained.
That means the dishes emerging from Huang’s kitchen differ from the takeout many Americans have come to expect. At Taste of China, chefs prepare meals like lobster with scallion and ginger, salt pepper shrimp, and twice pork – a dish with leeks and chili peppers.
Dolph in the restaurant.
For the sea bass, Huang added a plethora of ingredients into the wok. Flames burst up around the pan as he swirled in each addition: garlic, vinegar, sherry, sugar, salt, special chili peppers.
Except for fresh ingredients – which arrive four to five times a week – the restaurant gets all of its ingredients from China via a supplier in Boston. Horsebean sauce with red peppers, made in a tiny town and stored in dark drawers to allow the flavors to develop. Black bean sauce. Vinegar chili peppers. Dolph listed the range of ingredients. “You can’t find them anywhere in America,” she said. The fish comes from a market in New York City.
Some guests are surprised to see seafood on the menu. “People think Chinese food is cheap,” Dolph said. “But for me, in China, it’s high quality.” White table cloths cover the restaurant’s tables. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Waiters wear crisp white shirts, while Dolph opts for a gray dress. Even after cooking the restaurant’s lunch service, Huang’s white apron was pristine.
Dolph aims to introduce New Haveners to authentic flavors in order to reveal the depth behind Chinese cooking, she said. “In China, food is not only food. It’s a history. It’s so important.”
Duck sauce, sweet sauce, and chicken with broccoli don’t reflect that history. Even when dishes at Taste of China have the same name as those at Americanized Chinese restaurants, Huang emphasized, the recipe is different. While other restaurants use the same sauce in each dish, Huang said, each of his dishes has a different sauce, a different flavor.
The sauce for the sea bass was a dazzling, vibrant red. Huang took a traditional recipe for the dish and made it his own. After adding in ingredients with a ladle – he worked instinctively, without measuring – Huang covered the fish with a hood. For 10 minutes, he let the sauce’s vapors cycle to cook the fish and infuse it with flavor. He later added scallions.
Cooking the fish this way makes the skin soft, Huang said. “The meat is very delicate. It’s a special dish.” He has prepared the meal for a panel of judges in China and twice on TV in New York City.
Though the soybean sauce is a traditional one, Huang and Dolph said, they strive to stay at the forefront of modern Chinese cuisine. “Chinese people love to eat,” Dolph said, “so the food changes fast. … China keeps going up, up.” Huang returns to China each year to get inspiration and to draw upon the new Malaysian, Japanese, and Taiwanese flavors working their way into Sichuan cuisine.
Huang and Dolph also find ideas in the fine-dining of non-Asian cultures. After a meal at a French or Italian restaurant, Dolph said, she may collaborate with Huang on a new recipe that use traditional Chinese flavors in non-traditional ways. This approach has led Huang to create vegetarian recipes, which aren’t part of typical Chinese cuisine.
After 10 minutes, Huang emerged from the kitchen with the completed sea bass. Picking up a knife and fork, Dolph gently carved the fish, removing the head and tail with the spine in between.
It was time to eat. The flesh was as delicate as Huang had described. The chili peppers brought a gentle warmth to the back of the throat, rather than an aggressive, reach-for-water kick.
Dolph had talked about the complexity of authentic Chinese food. In one dish, a diner might taste several flavors all at once: sweet, spicy, vinegar, chili peppers. Describing the flavor is hard, she said. The only way to understand it is to try it.
That was certainly the case with Huang’s sea bass. Transcendent might be the best word.
“[Huang] can get anybody so happy,” Dolph said. “He gets it right.”
