Imen Shan, owner of Tea Habitat in Alhambra, and I were catching up recently. Topics of conversation drifted around at first like lazy clouds. We talked work and her niece’s graduation. Shan was born in Guangdong province, and she keeps up with local dining news, so we both knew I’d eventually start quizzing her for fresh intel.
“Any great new Cantonese restaurants in the SGV?” I finally asked.
“Not really,” she said. “But a whole lot of boba shops.”
“Well … any Cantonese restaurants that have been around for a while and are making you really happy?”
She thought for a minute.
“Bao Kee Cafe. The owners are from Toisan. People go for the healthy soups.”
Bao Kee was unknown to me, but her words, I soon learned, point straight to the restaurant’s two specific, thrilling strengths.
The soups are special: Their spectrum of ingredients mine the precepts of traditional Chinese medicine. Deliciousness is a common side effect.
Chef Kevin Liao also distinguishes the kitchen with his illuminating Toisanese specialties, a regional subgenre of Cantonese cuisine either rarely seen in Los Angeles or so deeply assimilated into more generalized Cantonese menus that its distinctions are hard to parse.
In that vein, Bao Kee has its share of Cantonese standards: shrimp-wonton noodle soup, the peanut-laced French toast and breaded pork chops over rice that are staples in Hong Kong cafes. Chongqing-style chicken rustling with red chiles, mapo tofu and gentle Hainan chicken rice check boxes for mass appeal.
Toisanese is a rustic-leaning style of cooking, often punctuated with cured meats and salted fish, from an area of Guangdong about 75 miles west of Macau where the first wave of Chinese emigrants departed for the United States beginning in the 1850s.
Liao opened Bao Kee Cafe in South El Monte with co-owner Bonnie Chen in 2022. Last fall, the pair debuted a second, larger outpost with a rangier menu that includes Hong Kong-style roast meats and braised goose in clay pot, a Toisan specialty.
Shan mentioned she preferred the soups at the original location, its small dining room decorated with images of waving lucky cats on white walls. When we met there a few days later, she directed me to her favorite way to start a meal: “ranch chicken tonic soup,” an elixir otherwise translated into English as “chicken essence.”
A white tureen arrived with a cup and a half’s worth of concentrated stock, flecked with a few threads of meat. We divided it into two bowls we lifted to our lips. The consommé was liquid poultry, literally. A whole, minimally seasoned chicken had steamed for several hours, with no water added to the vessel. The heat underneath had slowly coaxed the juices from the bird. Only a shimmer of chicken fat glistened on the surface.
You know the coursing, full-body jolt that comes after taking a shot of strong alcohol? This is its opposite: instant, intravenous nourishment. The serving is far more about potency than quantity.
A server also brought out the chicken’s carcass, studded with a couple jujubes. Most of the remaining meat was dry, really just further evidence of extracted lifeforce.
Two other soups with more complex flavors followed: duck, lighter in texture yet possessing a dark richness, cut with bittersweet orange peel, and silkie chicken, its murmur of gaminess offset by herbal, almost smoky red ginseng.
We needed some solid foods to round things out. Among a selection of steamed dishes, threads of ginger united the strong flavors of silvery-skinned salted fish and squiggly hunks of pork belly. Fresh cilantro brightened a plate of pulled chicken and rice. Garlicky snow peas shined in their simplicity.
When I detailed the meal to my editor the next day, she remembered that L.A. photographer Dylan Ho had brought up Bao Kee to her a couple years back. Ho’s family is from Toisan, alternatively spelled as Taishan or Hoisan. He and his mother, Bessie Ho, agreed to join me for dinner in South El Monte (and Dylan returned later to take the photos for this review).
Right away, Bessie wanted me to know about the Toisan-style lap cheong, asking one of the owners to bring out a package and show me its suppleness, how different it was from other Chinese sausages that can be as dense as salami. The restaurant serves it in slices, paired with spiced, bacon-like lap yuk over steamed rice, which captures their entwined, distinctly unctuous qualities.
They steered me toward a specialty I would have otherwise overlooked, a dish that translates from Cantonese as “five-willow fried eggs” and listed on the menu as “deep-fried eggs with pickled vegetables.”
Chefs cook the eggs in scalding oil so the whites crackle and turn wispy around the edges, resembling the laciness of puffed taro, while the yolks remain jammy, gradually turning opaque in the residual heat. Shredded vegetables — carrot, ginger, papaya, shallot and cucumber, some pickled and some fresh — are arranged, per the original name, over top in willowy repose.
Toisanese sweet and sour sauce finishes the dish. A vinegary ketchup twang dominates, but there’s also a cranberry-apple note lurking that might be hawthorn berry juice, a traditional Cantonese ingredient, though no one in the restaurant would confirm.
“This is country cooking,” Dylan said with approval. Bessie nodded. She recalled the dish from her childhood. We talked about how immigrants from Toisan and the surrounding area, then called Sze Yup, arrived in the U.S. during the California Gold Rush (and before the government’s blatantly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and made up the majority of the laborers who built the Central Pacific Railroad. And how Toisanese traditions, like sweet and sour sauce, undoubtedly informed the dishes that twisted, turned and codified into the Chinese American culinary canon.
We delved into soups, too. Watercress curled like a dragon’s tail through a broth infused with the pleasantly medical earthiness of chuan bei, an herb in the lily family known to help stem a cough. A duo of conch and sea coconut (also purportedly good for the lungs) tasted as tropical as it sounds.
A specifically Toisanese stew highlighted tang yuan (marble-sized glutinous rice balls) with threads of chicken, sliced mushrooms and bits of preserved pork in milky, pointedly salty broth. Every spoonful delivered satisfyingly chewy contrasts.
For dessert? Soupiness of a different sort. A cored and poached snow pear bobbed in cool, floral-scented syrup swimming with goji berries and jujubes. A spoon easily slid through the fruit. This time it was sugar I felt pulsing through my veins. I can’t speak to the health benefits, but I finished my bowl and went back for seconds.
The post Toisanese cooking shaped Chinese American food. At this must-try SGV cafe, taste why appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
