After college, Chen thought his restaurant days were over, immersing himself instead in the world of finance. Times food critic Lois Dwan wrote a front-page story about the enterprising waiter, praising his knowledge of Chinese cuisine and its flavors in all their complexity. Before Chen left Los Angeles to attend UC Berkeley, the L.A. And while he worked in the front of the house, his waiter's-eye view of the kitchen afforded an intensive education in techniques and ingredients. "Back in those days," said Chen, "even though we came from a privileged family, I started working to help with expenses." By the time he completed high school, he'd worked in a dozen restaurants, all of them Chinese. When his father was sent back to Taiwan, Chen, then 15, stayed in L.A. "Being in a diplomatic family," he added, with a degree of understatement, "I got to see some food." When Chen was 10, his family moved to Los Angeles, where his father was posted. "I spent my first 10 years in Taiwan," said Chen. In a way, it's a perfectly natural role for Chen, who was born in Taiwan, the son of a career diplomat, and the grandson of a provincial governor in mainland China. Until recently, I knew nothing about si fang cai or the cuisine of the Song Dynasty, deficits remedied in the course of a conversation with Eight Tables' owner, executive chef, and China Live cofounder, George Chen.Īt Eight Tables, and more broadly at China Live, which he founded with his wife and longtime business partner Cindy Wong-Chen, George Chen is not simply serving food he's serving as a kind of culinary-cultural ambassador. so much as it resembles the kind of food you might have enjoyed had you lived in China during the Song Dynasty. Nor does the food at Eight Tables resemble the kind of food you typically find at Chinese restaurants in the U.S. Because just as Sichuan peppercorns aren't true peppercorns-in fact, they're the dried rinds of the fruits of trees in the citrus family-Eight Tables isn't modeled on a restaurant in the traditional sense of the word, but rather, on a Chinese dining phenomenon known as si fang cai. If I had to put a finger on it, I suppose I'd say that the difficulty of describing Eight Tables to someone who hasn't eaten there is not entirely unlike the difficulty of describing the flavor of a Sichuan peppercorn to someone who's never tasted a Sichuan peppercorn. In the week or so following a dinner at Eight Tables, the five-month-old restaurant at China Live-the culinary and cultural destination that opened last March in Chinatown-I found myself struggling somewhat to sum up the experience for my friends.
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