Ancient stigma around Chinese food is vanishing rapidly in top restaurant scenes: ‘we are trying to break this bias’

“‘Oh, God, what are you eating? That’s gross,’” Chen recalled during a recent busy lunch hour at his San Francisco restaurant and bar, China Live, on the edge of the nation’s oldest Chinatown. “And now everybody wants the braised pork and Chinese sauerkraut. Hopefully, perception of Chinese (food) has now come a long ways.”

The immigrant kid who felt like he had to hide his food has built a reputation for serving Chinese fine dining in the Bay Area. At China Live, Chen is like a circus ringmaster overseeing a dumpling-making station, a stone oven roasting Peking ducks, a noodle station and a dessert station churning sesame soft serve.

With all this, he hopes to one day revive his upstairs restaurant, Eight Tables, where course-by-course dinners ranged from $88-$188. In addition, he and his wife Cindy Wong-Chen are getting ready to launch a similar concept, Asia Live, in Santa Clara.

The Chens aren’t the only ones elevating Chinese cuisine. They’re within walking distance of the equally established Empress by Boon, Mister Jiu’s, and the newer Four Kings.

Upscale Chinese American restaurants, from San Francisco to New York City, have sprung up in recent years, garnering buzz with their refined tasting menus that soar far beyond Chinese takeout-food staples. Many will put special spins on traditional Lunar New Year dishes for the Year of the Fire Horse, which starts Tuesday. Doing creative deconstructions of Chinese foods is part of their culinary hallmark, as many chefs are hungry to showcase their own culture.

But in an industry where diners rarely question high prices of French haute cuisine or Japanese omakase, Chinese restaurateurs often contend with resistance in getting customers to pay fine-dining tabs. Still, these owners and chefs insist their food, labor and cooking techniques are just as worthy.

“Why shouldn’t I?” says Chen about his prices. “Just because we’re in Chinatown? Or just because people’s perception of Chinese food is that it’s only good if it’s cheap? It’s not true.”

Being a Chinese chef who gets to cook Chinese

Since husband and wife Bolun and Linette Yao opened Yingtao, named for Bolun’s grandmother, in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 2023, they have been up-front about their mission: “contemporary” Chinese food as an elegant dining concept. Their Michelin-starred restaurant offers a $150 chef’s tasting menu.

“We are trying to break this bias, this boundary of people who only think about like Sichuan food, Cantonese food, the takeout box,” said Bolun Yao, who has nothing but respect for casual Chinese takeout restaurants.

After earning a master’s degree in food studies at New York University, Yao knew he wanted “to build a bridge between traditional Chinese and the fine dining scene that New York people are familiar with.”

Emily Yuen, who was a James Beard Award semifinalist last year for her Japanese American fare at Brooklyn’s Lingo, is helping Yao achieve his goal as Yingtao’s new executive chef. For Yuen, a Chinese Canadian whose culinary education emphasized French cooking, the importance of representation — from who’s in the kitchen to what’s on the plate — has always stayed with her.

“I want go back to like, who I am, and kind of explore that,” Yuen said. “I was really like struck by his (Bolun’s) mission statement and it just really struck a chord with me of wanting to elevate Chinese culture and Chinese food.”

She is eager to play around with typical recipes like the Cantonese custard egg tart, “dan tat,” with a savory makeover with caviar and quail eggs. “Egg on egg on egg,” Yuen said.

Similarly, Ho Chee Boon, the Michelin-starred chef who transformed the long-dormant Empress of China in San Francisco into Empress by Boon in 2021, is pushing for Chinese cuisine to be considered fine dining in the U.S. The Malaysia-born restauranteur was accustomed to seeing high-end Cantonese food in China and India.

“I try to do something for the Cantonese cuisine and for the culture as well, for the young people and to know about and for other people to know about it,” said Boon, who has opened a chain of his Cantonese Hakkasan restaurants from Dubai to Mumbai and in the U.S.

“We can try to something better here,” he said, “and let people come back to Chinatown.”

Chinese food’s stigmatized US history

Chinese culture and food has had its ups and downs when it comes to its reception in the West. More than 200 years ago, Europe highly desired Chinese silks, ceramics and tea, said Krishnendu Ray, director of NYU’s food studies PhD program.

China’s defeat by the British in the 19th century Opium Wars led to a view of China “as a poor country,” Ray said. Racist myths that Chinese people and their cuisine were strange and dirty persisted when Chinese railroad laborers came to the U.S. and were segregated to enclaves.

Even today, Asian American restaurants have been impacted by tired stereotypes.

Ray says the rise in an “ethnic” food’s prestige tends to correlate with its country of origin rising in economic power. In Michelin’s New York City guides — which highlight between 300 and 400 restaurants — Ray found the percentage of Chinese regional cuisine went from 3% to 7% of mentions between 2006 and 2024.

“I think it’s wonderful that there are these restaurants now” in Chinatown, said Luke Tsai, food editor for the San Francisco Bay Area PBS station KQED. “It’s fine also if you don’t think it is worth it. But at the same time, I’m really glad that these restaurants exist.”

Don’t call it ‘fusion’

Many Chinese chefs want to make it clear they are not serving fusion, or food tinged with Asian influences. Their food is “more East to West rather than West to East,” said Chen, of China Live. Yuen, of Yingtao, agrees that kind of characterization puts the “fusion” in confusion.

“I think fusion food is in a lot of those places where it’s dimly lit with the trendy cocktails,” Yuen said. “What we’re trying to do is just Chinese.”

What also matters to these chefs is incorporating Chinese cooking techniques and not defaulting to European ones. At Empress by Boon, chef Boon and his staff maintain four wok stations with woks shipped from Hong Kong.

“We want to do exactly everything the same operation,” Boon said. “We want to keep the traditional, but we can look in a modern way.”

Chen takes pride in having an open kitchen where customers can see woks and clay pots being utilized. They represent techniques from various regions of China.

“You actually look at the greater culinary disciplines of China and because you have the space, you can showcase the cuisine,” Chen said. “I think that’s really served us well.”