What’s considered real Chinese food? Is it the nuggets of fried chicken glazed in a sweet orange sauce from a steam tray at the airport? The fried egg rolls and chow mein at your favorite takeout restaurant? My grandmother’s fried rice?
For chef Bryant Ng, it’s all of the above. And then some.
Ng and his wife Kim Luu-Ng are behind the new Jade Rabbit, a counter-service restaurant in Santa Monica that serves scallion garlic cheese toast, orange mango chicken, beef and broccoli and Almond Roca chocolate chip cookies.
The restaurant setup is similar to a Chipotle or Sweetgreen. Make your way down the counter and build a bowl of rice, salad or noodles with a selection of prepared proteins and vegetables.
It may seem like a bold pivot to those familiar with Ng’s culinary trajectory. He was the opening chef at Nancy Silverton’s Mozza, then went on to helm his own kitchen at the Singaporean-influenced Spice Table in downtown Los Angeles. He was named one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs in 2012 and has been nominated for a James Beard Award multiple times. Cassia, the sprawling Santa Monica restaurant known for Ng’s syncretic style of cooking, blended influences from all over Asia and Southern California.
He and Luu-Ng decided to shutter Cassia earlier this year, shifting their focus entirely to Jade Rabbit.
“For the cost of one cocktail at Cassia, you can eat an entire meal at Jade Rabbit,” Ng says. “We wanted to create something more democratic and more convenient and more value-involved.”
And as far as the style of cuisine, it had to be Chinese American. Ng spent much of his childhood in his family’s restaurant kitchens. In the 1950s, his grandparents opened a Chinese American restaurant called Bali Hai in Culver City. For years, his parents ran Wok Way in the San Fernando Valley.
“For us, Chinese American food is a regional type of Chinese food,” says Ng. “If you look at China, each regional cuisine is influenced by the people and the accessibility of everything there. Here, with Chinese American food, it was built upon the hard work and dedication and necessity of the Chinese Americans who came before us. Many of them weren’t even cooks, but they had to open a restaurant to survive.”
Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese immigrants applied for merchant visas eligible to restaurant owners and workers. A Chinese restaurant boom in the U.S. soon followed, and dishes like chop suey and General Tso’s chicken became household names.
In her book “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” Jennifer 8. Lee writes: “Chinese cooking is not a set of dishes. It is a philosophy that serves local tastes and ingredients.” One could say the same about a myriad of world cuisines, but the sentiment rings especially true for Chinese food in America.
Like many Angelenos, Ng grew up visiting restaurants like Panda Express and P.F. Chang’s. And he’s acutely aware of the stigmas associated with Chinese American restaurants.
“There is this racist idea of Chinese American food not being ‘real’ and that if I embrace native Chinese food, that makes me more authentic too,” he says. “To say it’s not real Chinese food flattens Chinese people as a whole and flattens how Asian Americans are viewed in society. We should be taking pride in what it is. We all love it. I’m not ashamed of it.”
At Jade Rabbit, Ng is embracing Chinese diaspora cuisine to create his own style of Chinese American food. His beef and broccoli is a re-imagined lomo saltado, with beef and broccoli stir-fried with tomatoes, onion and fried potatoes. The accompanying “Jade sauce” could be mistaken for aji verde, with the same vibrant green color and a subtle heat from Bird’s Eye chiles.
Spicy Sichuan chicken is heavily inspired by la zi ji, with diced dark meat chicken marinated in fish sauce, buttermilk and white pepper. The chicken is fried in a light batter then tossed in a hot wok with chile oil, Sichuan chile peppers, mushroom powder, sesame, garlic and scallions. You can order it as a “50/50 combo” alongside the orange mango chicken, with big chunks of fresh mango mixed with chicken coated in a light citrus sauce.
For dessert, Ng turned his family’s love of Almond Roca into a chocolate chip cookie, crushed and mixed into the dough with dark chocolate, ground almonds and a healthy pinch of sea salt.
Those missing Cassia will be happy to learn that the chickpea curry, the best-selling dish at the restaurant, is also available at Jade Rabbit (without the flatbread). The creamy coconut base originated from Ng’s family recipe, incorporating influences from both Singapore and China.
Ng’s greatest triumph at Jade Rabbit may be a golden slice of toast inspired by one of Los Angeles’ great chain restaurants.
“My family grew up going to Sizzler as our special occasion dinner,” Ng says. “We would go for the salad bar and all you can eat shrimp. It’s one of those taste memories that sticks with you for your entire life.”
Ng’s scallion garlic cheese toast is a nod to the Sizzler garlic cheese toast, only merged with a scallion pancake. He starts with thick slabs of sourdough bread, slathering one side in a compound butter with scallions, garlic, garlic salt and both Parmesan and Pecorino cheese. The toast is griddled until a golden crust forms. If you’ve sampled the original at Sizzler, the taste memory is immediate. The bread is crisp and ultra buttery on one side, then pillow-soft on the other. And there’s enough butter to leave your fingers shiny.
“We take the toast in the back of the house and we pile on the spicy Sichuan chicken,” Ng says. “And then if you get the kale salad, you pile that on top and then you put the Jade sauce on it.”
As he continues to list the dozens of possible combinations, my mind races, and I eagerly plot my next visit. Even without a fortune cookie, I can predict a scallion cheese toast hodgepodge fried chicken sandwich in the near future.
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