A Cantonese Comeback

Cha Cha Tang can be frustrating, but it offers moments of excellence.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

ALTHOUGH A RICH diversity of Chinese regional cooking is always available within the five boroughs, popular favor tends to fix on one O style at a time. For the past several years, that spotlight has fallen on Sichuan food, the lip-tingling spicy-peppercorn cuisine of the southwestern province, which has risen to enough prominence that schoolchildren now know what má là means. "Who's been anywhere good that isn't Sichuan?" a colleague of mine moaned, having gone numb to the numbing.

Lately, though, I've noticed that Sichuan's dominance is waning. Cantonese is once again on the rise. Cantonese cooking-at least, Cantonese American cookinginforms what most Americans reflexively think of as "Chinese food." Cantonese immigrants came to this country in numbers in the late-19th and early-20th century and shaped their cooking to suit American palates, while Cantonese cooks in Hong Kong absorbed the influence of British and international tastes. Cantonese-style Chinese is both an eminent regional cuisine and an evolving amalgam. Dim sum is Cantonese; but so, without too much stretching, is the cha siu "McRib" Calvin Eng serves at Bonnie's in Williamsburg, which helped usher in the renewed taste for haute Cantonese in 2021.