“Sometimes the food is so good, I cry a little,” says chef Simone Tong, thinking back to the research trip she took through China’s Yunnan province before opening Little Tong Noodle Shop, a sunny corner restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village devoted the rice noodles of the region.
In Lijiang’s Old Town, a village of canal-lined alleyways lit by red lanterns and a trading post since the 12th century, Tong discovered a tiny restaurant where a fourth-generation Bai cook prepared just one dish: chicken mixian (rice noodles; pronounced, more or less, mee-shee-en) topped with fermented chili and pickled vegetables. “Big, black, turkey-sized chickens—I think they only have them in Yunnan,” recalls Tong, who returned to the woman’s stall maybe half a dozen times, where stock simmered over a coal fire outside the restaurant and chopped herbs were set in bowls on tables spread with traditional blue-and-white cloths.
Back in New York, that dish sparked Tong’s Grandma Chicken Mixian, one of a handful of rice noodle soups on her restaurant’s streamlined menu. Tong’s version incorporates the thin, white, slightly chewy noodles, chicken confit, black sesame garlic oil, tea egg, Chinese broccoli, pickled daikon, and fermented chili in a rich chicken-and-duck broth that’s simmered overnight with aromatics and Chinese spices.
Yunnan, in China’s southwest, has long captivated travelers—National Geographicaccounts from the 1920s and 1930s inspired the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon—for its unspoiled natural landscapes, distinct ethnic cultures, and singular cuisine, which shares elements with its neighbors: Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam to the south, and Sichuan province and Tibet to the north. Even the name, which translates to “south of the clouds,” evokes a can-this-be-real beauty. Although restaurants specializing in the cuisine are popular in cities all over China, and the band Shanren achieved domestic renown preserving the musical traditions, Yunnan—and its food—is still mostly undiscovered in the U.S.
Until recently, diners had to seek out a few places in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park (Western Yunnan Crossing Bridge Noodle, Yun Nan Flavour Garden) or in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley (Yunnan Restaurant); San Francisco’s Bib Gourmand–recognized Z & Y or Vancouver’s Flower and Horse in Spring. But Little Tong, which opened in March, joins student-friendly takeout spot The Rice Noodle near NYU, opened by a Columbia grad who’s a native of the province, and Deng Jiunder the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown in putting the dishes in front of more New Yorkers.
“Even in the rest of China, Yunnan cooking was not common until the 1990s, and most people did not discover Yunnan as a destination until the 1980s,” says Kian Lam Kho, a food writer and consultant specializing in Chinese cooking and author of Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees. “But I think the bold flavors and fresh approach of the dishes made it a very appealing cuisine. I do believe Yunnan cooking can be readily accepted by the American public because Americans are already familiar with Indochinese cooking, and many of the dishes have very similar roots.”
Like Southeast Asian cuisine, the food balances spicy, sweet, and sour, punctuated by fresh herbs and fermented sauces and pickles. In Little Tong’s cucumber appetizer, the fire of the bang bang sauce is offset by cooling mint.
At Toronto New Asian restaurant DaiLo, Chinese-Canadian chef Nick Liu often features his take on the classic Yunnan dish crossing the bridge noodles (so named, according to legend, because an ancient scholar’s wife crossed a small bridge every day to bring her husband the components of noodle soup), filling a bowl with truffled rice noodles, pork, beef tendon, a sous vide egg, and pickled seasonal vegetables. “After all the garnishes are placed on top of the noodles, we pour hot broth over all the ingredients and place a dollop of roasted garlic, fermented chili paste on top and Chinese chives and coriander,” says Liu.
Inside Little Tong, as deliveries arrive for dinner service, Chef Tong explains that she grew up in China, Singapore, and Australia, moving around with her parents, art dealers from Sichuan. When she came to the States for college, she cooked her favorite dishes for friends, earning the nickname “Noodle.” Later, she enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education and went on to work for Wylie Dufresne at his highly inventive WD-50 and Alder, as well as for Masato Shimizu at 15 East.
Ready to set out on her own, the precepts of the New Nordic and farm-to-table movements as well as wanting to spotlight Chinese cuisine, inspired her. “I was thinking, Chinese cuisine is so old. We are peasants first; we are farmers first,” says Tong, who also staged for a month at Beijing’s high-end Colourful Yunnan. “Even now, if you go to China, there are still a lot of wet markets, where you go and you buy something and you stir-fry it at home, and there’s not much left over in the fridge.”
And Yunnanese food is one of the most ingredient-driven of Chinese cuisines: Traveling across the province, from the subtropics to the Tibetan Plateau, there are delicate jasmine flowers, prosciutto-like ham produced in the northeast, pu’er tea, edible ferns, all manner of wild mushrooms, and on and on. It’s one of the only Chinese cuisines to incorporate cheese, particularly a fried goat cheese dish that evokes Greek saganaki and cheese made from yak’s milk.
At her restaurant, Tong doesn’t strive for strict re-creations of the dishes found in Yunnan. “I’m getting the inspirations and the spirit of what kinds of things you put in your food, and I source it in New York,” she says. A recent mini stir-fry, an appetizer, included shrimp, white asparagus, thyme, peanuts, red chili oil, and chive flowers—a dish you’d never see at a restaurant in Yunnan but the mix would make intuitive sense there.
“There’s another place—oh! Now you’re bringing back all the memories,” she says, pulling us back to Yunnan again. In Dali, a mountainous town with a hippie feel that draws in backpackers and Chinese artists, she walked to an open-air market far from the tourist district, where villagers sat on low stools and spread their wares on sheets on the ground: herbs, mushrooms from the surrounding hills, clay pots for making plum wine.
In one corner, she discovered a Uighur man making black sheep mixian. “Giant bowls of really aromatic noodles, a lot of pungent cilantro and almost milky, gamey flavors with dry chili oil,” Tong recalls. “Ahhh! I would go there now.”
source: http://www.vogue.com/article/yunnan-chinese-cuisine-food-guide-simone-tong