High on my list of dream trips: a couple weeks roaming and eating through China’s Guangdong province with friends born in the region.
Hong Kong and Macau are the most obvious famous touchstones around Guangdong (previously in the West called Canton, which was a corruption of its name in English first begat by Portuguese traders in the early 1500s), though both those cities are technically their own Special Administrative Regions. The province covers nearly 70,000 square miles, and its recorded history stretches back at least 2,200 years. It’s safe to say — at the source and in the diaspora — that the monolithic umbrella of “Cantonese cuisine” hardly covers variations between Guangdong’s zigzagging coast along the South China Sea, its port city capital Guangzhou on the banks of the Pearl River Delta and its many inland communities.
L.A.’s regional Cantonese cuisines
A few years back, I wrote about running around Los Angeles seeking out the specific, light-handed, seafood-rich specialties of Chiu Chow, one Pinyin term for Chaozhou, or Teochew, the name referring both to the city about 180 miles northeast of Hong Kong and its cuisine. My guide was Lee Man, a food writer and scholar of Cantonese cuisines (really, they’re plural) who lives in Vancouver. Among our stops: Seafood Palace in Monterey Park for “Chiu Chow special porridge” infused with the flavors of oyster, dried shrimp and preserved vegetables.
This week, The Times published my review of Bao Kee Cafe, a four-year-old restaurant in South El Monte with two destination-worthy strengths: delicious soups that also happen to emphasize ingredients from Chinese medicine traditions, and Toisanese dishes that reflect the owners’ origins.
A spread of dishes at Bao Kee Cafe in South El Monte
(Dylan James Ho / For The Times)
Toisan, alternatively spelled as Taishan or Hoisan, is on the other side of Guangdong, about 75 miles west of Macau, and is notably where the first wave of Chinese emigrants departed for the United States beginning in the 1850s.
I had three guides through Bao Kee: Imen Shan, owner of Tea Habitat in Alhambra and long the primary supplier in my oolong habit, and photographer-writer Dylan James Ho, who brought his mom, Bessie, to one of the meals. All three of them have Toisanese heritage.
The review focused on the original Bao Kee location; owners Bonnie Chen and Kevin Liao also run a second, larger Bao Kee in Hacienda Heights with an expanded menu. My curiosity around the slightly more rustic style of Toisanese cooking hadn’t yet quelled, so Shan and I met there for lunch this week.
The dining room of Bao Kee restaurant in Hacienda Heights.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Shan first nudged me toward the tiny South El Monte cafe for her love of the soups, and at the Hacienda Heights location I saw why: The soups at the original are superior, with a wider selection and more concentrated broths, gripping in their pure-chicken or pleasantly bitter-herbal flavors.
Hacienda Heights, though, is where one finds a very Toisanese specialty for a group: a clay pot full of deeply seasoned rice tossed with sliced eel, earthy and faintly sweet and mimicked in slippery textures with slivers of shiitake.
Eel claypot rice, a Toisanese specialty from China’s Guangdong Province, at Bao Kee in Hacienda Heights.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Stir-fried green beans flecked with minced pork also included a distinct condiment that’s often translated as “olive vegetable” in English. It’s known in Cantonese as laam choi, a mixture of preserved olive and mustard greens that adds the expected brininess but also mushroom-adjacent umami. A dish of resonant, sustaining elements that brought appreciated contrast to the meal.
Our favorite part of the meal
A clear winner on the table: tiles of steamed pork belly smeared with shrimp paste, which led with a knuckle-sandwich pungency but quickly mellowed to a stereophonic sort of shrimp flavor.
Shan swooned. “I love this over white rice with nothing else.”
The menu goes in plenty of directions we didn’t follow: Chinese American classics like fried shrimp and walnuts or ginger beef, Hong Kong-style meats like five-spice goose best ordered ahead, the obligatory incorporation of Sichuan dishes so in line with restaurants’ desire to please the broadest tastes. Easily, the biggest joys came from zeroing in on Toisanese specificity, which, if you’re hunting, tend to be labeled as “Taishan.”
It was heartening to see the dining room mostly full around noon, and then the midday crowd disappeared by 2 p.m. Leaving the empty restaurant, I noticed a basket near the register filled with zongzi (or jung, in phonetic Cantonese), the glutinous rice bundles wrapped in bamboo leaves. Shan, deciding to buy a couple, pointed out these were stuffed with preserved egg and the more pliable, winey-sweet Toisanese sausages.
Stir-fried pork belly and green beans with minced pork and olives at Bao Kee in Hacienda Heights.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
“These are especially popular now because it’s Dragon Boat Festival season,” she said. “It’s amazing to watch the super-intense rowers in these elaborately decorated boats race down the Pearl River.”
Yet another reason to book a ticket to Guangdong and to appreciate what we have here.
Bao Kee Restaurant: 2111 S. Hacienda Blvd., Hacienda Heights, (626) 333-2168, baokeecalifornia.com
Also …
