Shang

Tables for Two – The New Yorker

patrick — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:16:40 +0000

Susur Lee has been called one of the best chefs in Canada….
newyorker.com
by Andrea Thompson

usur Lee has been called one of the best chefs in Canada—a bit of a backhanded compliment, and a characterization that accounts, perhaps, for his decision last year to shutter his eponymous restaurant in Toronto and head for New York. The result, in the Thompson Hotel LES, is named Shang, and its menu takes in Lee’s early years in Hong Kong, where he lived until he was twenty, the multicultural influences of Ontario, and his three-year sojourn in Singapore. Even if there’s a sense that many of the diners are hotel guests, it’s still a pretty chic crowd—girls with eyelid-skimming bangs, men with kaffiyehs wrapped around their necks. Only the odd towheaded toddler gives the game away.
Back in Toronto, Lee was famous for his tasting menu, which turned the concept of course progression upside down. If you start with small things, Lee reasoned, people will be too full to appreciate the heartier courses at the end. So meals at Susur went from main dish to appetizer to fish to soup to dessert. At Shang, the menu is à la carte, and the sense of progression, in either direction, appears absent. The philosophy, instead, seems to be to stuff them early and late. Sizable dishes included the Singapore Slaw, billed as the restaurant’s signature, a towering mountain of julienned vegetables, fried taro, and hazelnuts, mixed table-side, with an addictive salted-plum dressing. A thin cap of crispy potato hid golf-ball-size vegetable dumplings, packed with rich, flavorful greens, mushrooms, and corn.
The fact that most of what arrived was delicious became a double-edged sword—it took an iron will to try to save room. It was worth it, though, since by far the best dish on the menu came late: rosy lamb chops that could be cut with a butter knife, with a peanut sauce good enough to spoon up by itself. At the end of a recent dinner, Lee himself, tall, elegantly slim, with his hair pulled back into a ponytail, stopped by the table to remark on how much remained of an order of duck, breaded with taro and served with savory pillowy pancakes. (“We just ordered too much,” the table protested. Lee replied, “I noticed.”) He happily shared his technique for producing a gorgeous octopus salad. “We take the tentacles, and wrap them tightly, and leave them overnight. And then, like a sausage, we slice them very thin.” He paused for a moment, and asked, “Do you cook at home?” (Open daily for breakfast and dinner. Entrées $12-$25.) ♦

Iron Man Susur Lee

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:26:56 +0000

Canadian master chef Susur Lee matches culinary wits and will with Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. Secret ingredient: killer instinct.
McLeans Magazine
By Shanda Deziel
February 03, 2006

They didn’t dare say it, but you could see it in their eyes that Susur Lee and his two sous-chefs thought they were going to mop the kitchen floor with Bobby Flay. Lee, one of Canada’s most celebrated chefs — known for his innovative combinations of Asian and European cooking styles — was in Manhattan last week to tape an episode of Iron Chef America, in which he went up against Flay, the brash New York-based grill and BBQ master. It was a brilliant matchup: two chefs with vastly different styles but similarly competitive spirits. Flay is famously arrogant and serious about winning. And Lee, in his own words, was “going for the kill.” This episode of the popular series — in which competing chefs each make a five-course meal in 60 minutes using a secret ingredient revealed to them at the beginning of the show — will air on the Food Network sometime in the spring. We’re not about to divulge the secret ingredient or the winner, but let’s just say the show’s a nail-biter.
After nervously flubbing his lines during the introductions, Lee eased into the kitchen with grace, dazzling with his fast and obnoxiously loud vegetable chopping, and moving so beautifully in sync with his sous-chefs they resembled ballerinas. He introduced at least two ingredients that had never been used on the show before: culled fat wrap and edible orchid. And he came in with plans to make seven dishes instead of the required five. “I’m showing no mercy,” he said to the audience.
Outside of the competition, Lee’s a different person, the ego and killer instinct giving way to a curious, gentle nature. At a photo shoot in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he followed the photographer’s lead on where and what to eat, complimenting him on his recommendation of green papaya salad topped with BBQ beef at a local Vietnamese spot. Walking around Chinatown with Dustin Gallagher, 24, and Bartosz Murawiecki, 26, his sous-chefs for the show, Lee pointed out ingredients his mother would use to make Chinese New Year dinner: black moss, Chinese olives, wood fungus and burdock root — whose long brown stalks are thought to be an aphrodisiac. He was most excited by ginkgo nuts. “Oh, this is so good, one of my favourites. My mom uses it to make soup. This is especially good if someone’s pregnant, for the production of breast milk.” And he was drawn to an old man cobbling shoes on the sidewalk: “When I was in Singapore, I took my shoes to a very old man to fix. Two days later I went back and he was dead, so I lost my shoes.”
Over the past seven years, the Hong Kong-born chef has opened and presided over two of Toronto’s hottest, best-reviewed restaurants: the upscale Susur and the more casual Lee, which sit side by side on King Street West. He’s been celebrated in Food & Wine, Saveur and Gourmet, and praised for creating the backwards tasting menu, in which the courses move from heaviest to lightest. “It’s very unorthodox,” he says. “It’s very hard for Europeans to accept the idea — turning the culture upside down. I don’t really think that a lot of chefs agree with me — but people enjoy it, the customers, and that’s what is most important.” These days Lee is more relaxed than ever. According to his PR manager, Rhonda Peebles, he’s become less reserved and more comfortable in the spotlight. And though he gets anxious when away from the restaurants, he is learning to let go. Gallagher echoes that sentiment. “He’s getting softer,” he says. “It was harder those first years. He was a lot more hands-on and a lot more aggressive. It’s changing, he still has his standards by all means, and he’s still always there and creating the menus — but he’s learning to trust his baby with someone else.”
Except for the overly wrinkled knuckles on his somewhat scarred hands, Lee does not look 49 years old. The father of three boys(Levi, 16, Kai, 14, and Jet, 7)with his wife, Brenda Bent, Lee is in great shape. He plays tennis three times a week, sometimes with his older sons, both national team members. “Of course, they beat me,” says Lee. “They have me run from side to side to side.” He pauses a minute and then sighs, “I love them.” His middle son, Kai, has begun to take an interest in food. “The other day I made a pear gratin with him at home,” says Lee. “And he said, ‘Wow, it took you only five minutes.’ They’re starting to understand what it takes to do something really well.” Lee claims one of his main reasons for participating in Iron Chef America is that the boys watch the show and wanted him to do it. He didn’t bring them along. “I know they would joke around, make faces, make me laugh. And I would laugh, of course, and break my concentration.”
While in New York, he skipped the world-class restaurants of the chefs he knows, like Jean-Georges Vongerichten(Jean Georges, Mercer Kitchen)and Thomas Keller(Per Se), in favour of smaller establishments. He wanted to try The Spotted Pig, a Greenwich Village gastro-pub famed for its roquefort burger, or Fatty Crab, a tiny Malaysian restaurant in the same neighbourhood. But neither was taking reservations. Peebles, who made the arrangements for a table of seven, didn’t drop Lee’s name or the fact he was in New York for Iron Chef America. Instead, Lee settled for a steak house near the hotel. After the taping he was content to fill up on Doritos and red wine — though he eventually made it to Sapa, a chic Asian-fusion restaurant in Chelsea, for a long night of drinking and blowing off steam with Gallagher and Murawiecki.
Lee started life in humbler circumstances. He grew up in government-subsidized housing in an impoverished part of Hong Kong. His father was an accountant and his mother a tea lady for the British army. “When the sergeant rang the bell, she made the tea,” he says. “When the sergeant wanted to have his uniforms ironed nice and straight, she’d get out the starch. She worked really hard, her hands are all rough.” Asked if his parents are still alive, he answers, “They’re still in love! They are in their 80s — in their 60s they rediscovered themselves and fell in love again. Now when you see them, they are holding hands walking down the street. It’s very cute.” He says his oldest sister(he’s the youngest of four)helped raise him and she was a good cook. He started in the kitchen at 14, washing woks at a Peking-duck restaurant — eventually moving on to the venerable Peninsula Hotel and rising in the ranks to chef saucier.
In the late ’70s, Lee met a Canadian, Marilou Covey, who was teaching English in Hong Kong. They married and moved to Toronto, where he worked three kitchen jobs to help put her through graduate school. After she died on the 1983 Korean Air Lines flight that was shot down by the Soviets, he grew even more serious about his profession. He opened his first restaurant, Lotus, in 1987; he and his second wife, Bent, then a fashion designer, lived upstairs. After a decade of success, he closed the place and moved the family to Singapore, where he took a position of consulting chef for the restaurants of Andrew Tjioe, who was determined to reinvent Chinese cooking in his dining rooms. After that, Lee came back to Toronto. He opened Susur in 2000, and Lee in 2004.
The kitchen at Susur is jammed with 15 or so mostly young cooks, who carry out Lee’s vision as he stands off to the side, stretching his back against the wall. “He hires with heart and soul,” says Len-Jinn Liang, Susur’s maître d’, “not necessarily based on experience.” Lee jokes that it was aesthetics that got Murawiecki the job. “When I met Bart,” says Lee, “I couldn’t take him seriously because he brought his beautiful, beautiful girlfriend with him to the interview. I said, ‘Are you looking for a job? Or are you looking for a job?’ ” Gallagher was 19 when he started with Lee four years ago. “He’s a friend now,” he says. “Yes, he is my boss, my chef — but also, I’m sure he’d agree, we’re peers.”
During the Iron Chef taping, Gallagher was given star treatment by the show’s commentators for the way he sliced and unrolled a scallop, while Murawiecki brought in TV’s Red Green ethic when he frantically wrapped his finger in duct tape after a pear-peeling accident. At the end of the 60 minutes, the two sous-chefs shared a sweaty hug with their mentor — the emotional high point of the show.
Next up was the judging, and Lee wowed the panel of three experts with his succulent meats and gorgeous plate presentations. Comedian Mo Rocca took a particular liking to the fourth dish: a stuffed Chinese pancake, topped with a quail egg and caviar. “In my dreams, there’s a drive-through window where I can get one of these every morning. It’s McDelectable.” They were impressed by Flay as well, who seemed more adventurous than usual. “We saw an excited Bobby Flay today,” says Kevin Brauch, the Canadian-born floor reporter on Iron Chef America. “He raised his game. We saw new dishes — he’ll usually do variations on a theme, but we saw some stuff today that let you know he was inspired.”
During the judging, Flay sneaked a bite of one of Lee’s meat dishes, shaking his head in disbelief. He said later, “It was outrageous. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re cooked, because it was so good.’ ” There was no argument from Lee — who felt confident he’d triumphed. “Today I pushed beyond the limit,” he told journalists after the show. “The food I cooked takes time, I used the pressure cooker, slow cooking, a lot of processes — not just grill and put on the plate.” Still, Brauch(who’s on an 18-0 streak for guessing the winner)thought the judges were leaning toward Flay.
When Lee ordered champagne that night at dinner, there was a lot to celebrate(though that’s not to say he won)– Lee and his chefs had made six dishes on Iron Chef instead of the usual five, the whole ordeal was finally over, he got news that his son, Levi, just won a tennis tournament back in Toronto. Best of all, it was time to eat.

10 TOP TOQUES

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:25:54 +0000

Boldface culinary talents—and the foodies who adore them—are defining features of this city. Where Toronto celebrates the brilliant chefs whose outstanding fare rates as some of our main attractions
January 2007

SUSUR LEE

THE RESTAURANTS Susur and the neighbouring Lee (603 King St. W., 416-504-7867).

THE CHEF Born in Hong Kong, Susur Lee received his early training in the kitchens of that city’s major Western hotels. But “east meets west” is too facile an analogy. The man sees and tastes food like Bach and Mozart imagined music: revolutionary, but so fundamentally right. This past spring, the judges of TV’s Iron Chef America robbed Lee of a win he deserved, instead awarding him a draw against New York chef Bobby Flay. His book, Susur: A Culinary Life—part bio, part collection of Lee’s most sought-after recipes—was released in 2005.  THE FOOD “Susur is elegant but not pretentious, and very wine-friendly” is how the chef explains the more haute of his two restaurants. Gastronomes invariably choose the five- or seven-dish tasting menu, which is served in reverse: heaviest dishes first, lightest last. Perfection of ingredients—Lee goes to market personally each day—and whimsical pairings dictate all the cooking. Creations range from a spiced shortbread tart with duck confit and foie gras reduction, to tomato water spiked with anise and dill weed, served as a palate cleanser. “At Lee, it is a different type of cuisine altogether. It’s southeast Asian with a European background. It’s an urban style of eating—you don’t have to commit to several hours for a meal.”

Susur Lee’s Magical Mystery Tour

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:24:20 +0000

Susur Lee’s Magical Mystery Tour
www.insatiable-critic.com
By Gael Greene

It says a lot about the souped-up speed of gentrification in New York and even more about Susur Lee that he was willing to close his rocking hit restaurant Susur in Toronto for Shang, a hotel dining room above Orchard Street. It must have seemed quite a lure at the moment of commitment: The Thompson LES hotel with a world class restaurant in Manhattan’s hottest new zip code. Now, with escalating financial wipeouts and even crazed nocturnal nomads pinching dollars, there’s more riding on Lee’s back than just his ponytail.
Yes, he looks like a movie star and talks like a poet, flashing briefly through the dining room with its big round booths and giant crushed fabric parachutes casting a rosy glow. Lee clearly knows it’s his to lose. From the look of the Saturday night crush in the dining room – the preferred age group, vogueish but not slavishly so, masters-of-the-universe-in-waiting, still dancing on the edge – Lee’s already got an audience that could build a buzz. Two longtime veterans of hip, one from Nobu, one from Matsuri at the entrance obviously have the required Rolodex. Tonight’s early responders are not just peripatetic first-nighters but also Saturday daters and even locals, a good-looking stew skewing young that might build the vital word of mouth if they like the food as much as we do.    What is it like? “What are the Beatles like?” you might have asked before hearing the Liverpudlian four. Like no one, would have been the answer. Susur Lee’s magical tour has taken him from Hong Kong, to Toronto, to Singapore with its triangle of influences – Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia – back to Toronto and now he hopes to woo New York with these lyrical inventions. His food is unique, unlike anything I have tasted here, often thrilling, endlessly inventive, whimsical and traditional in the same dish, daring and delicious. His passion for design almost never overwhelms his mastery of texture and layered flavors. He counts on a trusted second from his days in Singapore as he drives the kitchen to his astonishing tune, is his own pastry chef (and also fields room service). Be warned. Come with friends you like. In this first ten days, the kitchen can be slow.

You don’t have to know that the chef wants to honor the Chinese Diaspora. “Wherever Chinese food goes, it changes with each country. I want to honor that tradition.” Call it fusion, I suppose, but look for more at Shang. From time to time, a notion seems totally Chinese. Crispy taro puffs – four of them lined up without embellishment on a plate – are a dim sum you might encounter in Chinatown, except for that velvety surprise of curried egg salad inside. (Taro is a special weakness of mine that not everyone shares.) A big tangle of chickpea sweet onion fritters on puddles of ginger-mango chutney and minted yogurt – orange on one side, green on the other – links to India and possibly Japanese tempura. Splendid lobster croquettes filled with salty duck egg, lemon balm, shallot and the tang of chili-lime juice is a generation removed from China, reminiscing.
Lee’s signature Singapore slaw is the perfect opener (one order is more than enough for four, no matter what your server says). Toasted hazelnuts and a puckery taste of sour plum dressing add to the crunch and flavor of 19 ingredients. Sashimi of madai with pickled daikon, celery sprouts and lemon purée, plus caramelized wild sablefish, then lobster-shrimp croquettes with Malay black pepper sauce have us raving on our first visit. Dishes arrive two or three at a time with a clean round of rectangular plates for tasting, white with a tiny red rabbit on the rim – the chef’s astrological sign. I’m a fool for turnip cake, including this one, rife with eggplant, Cantonese-preserved black bean and shiitakes. With so many exotic notions, it would be easy to overlook steamed potato dumplings. They sound so ordinary. Don’t be fooled. Carved away with a triangle of their almost-veil-thin crust attached, the dumpling is marvelous and full of surprises. Crisp-skinned young garlic chicken with sweet-and-sour onion marmalade is remarkably juicy.
Less thrilling is the Beijing cucumber salad, a too thick-skinned oxtail soup dumpling in chicken-coriander broth, and coin-like slices of octopus with tomatillo and tomatoes. Cardamom-scented carrot and chili-mint chutneys plus glazed bananas can’t save bland Mongolian lamb chops. But the triumphs blur the flubs. And even though we’re all groaning from the excess, our host, a legendary gourmand, can’t stop ordering. I am still able to appreciate the saving grace of orange and lemongrass granité on lemon curd with passion fruit gelée and bitter orange sorbet. I didn’t really need the lemon tart with lemon parfait and raspberry coulis in tea sauce or the coconut crème caramel with Chantilly and black rice pudding at the bottom, but I tasted – loved them both – and survived.

I can’t wait to share this revelation with Chinese friends and taste more dishes even though it costs $30 one way and takes forever to creep and lurch through traffic from the Upper West Side. It’s my second visit this week. We must repeat the slaw, the potato dumplings, the taro puffs and my favorite dish of all – steamed tofu custard with crab, shrimp, lobster, baby mussels and air-dried scallops in Tanjin bouillon, a superior stock of duck, pork and ham – sheer umami. The black hairy stuff is desert moss (not “dessert” as typoed), a green that grows outside Beijing. Thin slices of pork loin wrapped around green beans with mustard and almonds should provide safe haven for tofuphobes and finicky eaters but I won’t waste my calories again. I love squab and foie gras in wrappers imitating Peking duck but the lotus crepes are leathery by the time they reach our table. Spicy slow braised beef cheek, fatty and luscious, is perfect. Served with soft brown rice and olive preserved vegetables, one portion is enough for four to taste, especially, if like me, you’ll eat too much anyway. And with so many options $12 or less, and everything else (except Kobe beef) $25 or considerly cheaper, you can spend a little or a lot. Include a $3 order of mantou whole-wheat Chinese bread to sop up sauces, and you probably won’t want to stop for a burger on your way home

Shangalicious

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:23:32 +0000

Chef Susur Lee is from Hong Kong. His food sure isn’t.
men.style.com
By Alan Richman

Unless you’ve lived in Toronto, where Lee worked before moving to New York, it’s unlikely you’ve had cuisine anything like his. Not only isn’t it Hong Kong, which is basically seafood in light sauces, it’s also not really Chinese. There are hints of curry, lots of frying, plenty of color, a bit of wagyu beef, exquisite plate decorations, and so many decadent sauces I’d be shocked if the kitchen doesn’t use butter by the tub. If you think Chinese food consists of a bunch of ingredients tossed into a wok, pushed around, then dumped on a plate, you’ll reevaluate the genre after dining here.
Lee is the chef at the oddly named Shang, located on the second floor of the new Thompson LES Hotel on the Lower East Side. The space isn’t very Hong Kong, either. No gilded dragons, high ceilings, or remote waiters.
The staff dresses in black—the basic downtown, cat-burglar look—and the service is quietly accommodating, with lots of changing of plates and cutlery. Should you be able to manage Shang’s multi-dimensional, deeply-layered cuisine with the restaurant’s slippery, non-wooden chopsticks, you’ve got me beat in the dexterity department.
The look of Shang is minimalist—a few nonflowering cherry blossoms in vases, a couple of peculiar bronze chandeliers that appear a little like dirigibles and a little like papier-mâché breasts. Our oversized table had a built-in, absolutely flat Lazy Susan, a nice touch if you’re eating family style, although I can’t see many families gathering here. Shang seems more like a place for posses and canoodling, although I concede that I observed only the latter.
My friends and I tried about half the dishes on the oversized, well-priced menu, and there was only one I didn’t like, steamed turnip cakes obliterated by an avalanche of toppings. In fact, almost every plate comes with an onslaught of extra-added items, some mentioned on the menu, some a surprise, and they add plenty of zing to food that is already extremely flavorful. My favorite was a vivid pennywort relish, made from a medicinal plant, that accompanied an octopus terrine.
You won’t be bored eating here, but you might be overwhelmed. I preferred the dishes that were simpler and more focused. All the soups are exceptional, particularly a curried lobster bisque topped with a milk foam and containing a “soft scallop,” which was really extra-firm scallop mousse. (That dish, by the way, passes for unfussiness at Shang.) Excellent, too, was the chicken broth enlivened by coriander and served with a slice of madai, a white-fleshed fish. Just don’t allow it to steam for two minutes as the waiter recommended to us, or the fish will turn to mush. A Shang signature item is Singapore slaw, a crunchy, colorful, slightly sweet, somewhat spicy, totally addictive, composed salad with 19 ingredients, something Wolfgang Puck might have put together in his Chinois days.
A friend tried to convince me that the food, although rich, wasn’t heavy, and I bought into that hypothesis until we got to the meat dishes, particularly the pork belly, multiple logs of glistening, gleaming, fatty pork stacked up to look like a Mayan temple. Possible symbolism: Eat the whole thing and you’ll moan like a human sacrifice.
The best bargains on the wine list are half-bottles, and there are plenty of them. We tried four and loved three, an unusually rich 2007 Lagar de Cervero Albarino ($17), an apple-sweet 2007 Selbach-Oster Riesling Kabinett ($19), and a 2007 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc ($21), a tasty bottle of lively red.
Desserts follow form, and I again found comfort in the straightforward: the tong yuan, a sticky rice-flour dumpling stuffed with sesame seed and peanuts; and the crème caramel, accompanied by sweetened black rice. The almond panna cotta, too intensely almond for me, was nevertheless a nice play off the traditional Chinese almond dofu.
Chef Lee is ponytailed, pleasant, and on-premises. (According to one of my female guests, he is also “so hot,” which I probably wouldn’t mention had we been north of Houston Street, where such dining attributes are considered superfluous.) His food is being promoted as “global Chinese,” but I think it’s absolutely the opposite, totally individualistic, one man’s admirable and elevated version of Chinese.

High on Shang

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:23:05 +0000

For the first time in years, there’s a superstar Chinese chef in town.
New York Magazine
By Adam Platt

Sushi snobs have their Masa, rotund Italians have Mario and Mike White, and the Greenmarket aristocrats have Dan Barber, Thomas Keller, and the ubiquitous Tom Colicchio. So you can forgive certain members of the city’s long-suffering, increasingly cranky band of Chinese-food nuts for treating Susur Lee, who landed in our midst a couple of months ago from Canada by way of Hong Kong, as that most elusive and longed-for New York food demigod: the Chinese superstar chef. And Lee, who runs two successful restaurants in Toronto, has certainly embraced the role with gusto. He has chiseled, telegenic Bruce Lee features and a long warrior’s ponytail. He’s enlisted the services of an aggressive PR agent (“the Nobu of Toronto” is the phrase I heard), has at least one glossy cookbook to his credit, and has made numerous celebrity-chef TV appearances, including an epic encounter on Iron Chef America (the theme was pork), where he fought the mighty Bobby Flay to a draw.

Shang is the name of Lee’s new Manhattan restaurant, and by superstar-chef standards, it’s a relatively simple setup. The dining room is located on the second floor of the just-completed Thompson hotel, a looming, vaguely brutalist structure that has sprung up among the scruffy bars and bodegas on the block between Orchard and Allen Streets on the Lower East Side. To enter, you ascend a drafty set of stairs from Orchard Street or shuffle through the hotel’s second-floor lobby bar, which is decorated all in black like the tunnel entrance to an old disco. The room is low-slung and haphazardly lit, and as you sip your brightly colored fusion cocktail, generic club music plays endlessly on the stereo. The space is decorated with a few scraggly sprays of cherry blossoms and oversize lanterns made out of what look like rumpled old stockings, giving it a temporary, half-built feeling, like you’re dining in one of the hundreds of freshly minted boomtowns of coastal China.

Luckily, Lee’s aggressive Iron Chef style of cooking is more lively than these dreary surroundings. There’s an overworked, almost nostalgic Asian-fusion quality to the menu at Shang, which means that some dishes succeed and others do not, but also that dinner is rarely boring. In the space of about ten minutes, our little table was inundated with bowls of curried, lemongrass-scented lobster bisque (excellent), oxtail-dumpling soup sprinkled with tapioca (bland as dishwater), and crunchy little Cantonese-influenced taro puffs filled with curried beef (delicious). I dimly recall platters of fat fried oysters drizzled with bits of fresh mango and kung pao sauce after that, followed by a series of tall, intricately constructed salads (try the soy-miso-and-avocado-flavored Beijing cucumber salad, and the delicious Singapore slaw, made with nineteen ingredients), and a cool little terrine of foie gras and chicken-liver mousse designed to be spread, with a kind of teatime delicacy, on little crinkly scallion pancakes.

“Evolved fusion food with a Chinese heritage” is how my friend the China Expert describes this kind of cooking, and that’s about right. I tended to like the smaller, dim sum–size dishes better than the larger ones, and the closer Lee hews to classic Chinese ingredients and technique, the better the results. Among the small-plate items, everyone approved of the classic Cantonese turnip cake, which Lee dressed with an artful mixture of baby eggplant, preserved black beans, and shiitakes, as well as the soft “steamed and crusted soft potato dim sum,” which are basically dumplings drizzled with spicy Swatow chile sauce. The large, clunky garlic shrimps I sampled were overwhelmed by a combination of spicy Indian jam and XO sauce, but the chef serves his excellent diver scallops wrapped in bamboo leaves, with sticky “eight treasure” rice and little disks of chorizo, and his slow-cooked, faintly caramelized version of sablefish is a subtle updated take on that old Nobu favorite, black cod glazed with miso.

Since Shang is a Western hotel restaurant, there are approximations of Western hotel meals on the menu, and despite Lee’s diligent efforts, they’re generally bad. “When it comes to Kobe beef, no chef can resist the temptation to gild the lily,” declared the Steak Loon as he picked morosely at greasy bits of Wagyu mingled, unaccountably, with polenta and wrapped in kelp. The spiced beef cheeks I sampled were curiously flavorless, the Mongolian lamb chops were underdone, and the magret-duck breast tasted bland, despite the strange presence on the plate of burdock root. If you want poultry, try the smoked squab, which Lee inserts, like Peking duck, in diaphanous pancakes, or try his elevated version of crispy chicken, that Chinese classic, presented in a pool of sticky sweet-and-sour onion marmalade. For something more robust, the Steak Loon recommended the braised pork belly, which is garnished with puréed apples and lily bulbs and served, in the now sacred manner of David Chang, with a complement of steamed buns.
Is Shang a great restaurant? Not really. The setting is too prosaic, and the location too far off the beaten track. But in this cold, recessionary winter, when established dining empires are pulling in their horns and new ones are desperately turning out glorified cheeseburgers and bowls of noodle soup, it’s refreshing to see the arrival of an experienced and talented chef who’s not afraid to reach for the stars. Unfortunately, Lee’s talents don’t extend to the jumble of cloying Asian-fusion desserts. The banana-chocolate cake I tried was chalky, despite the presence of jackfruit, pineapples, and warm butterscotch sauce, and the coconut crème caramel did not meld either with the Chantilly cream on its top or the gummy layer of sticky black rice. For gumminess that’s at least authentic, try the glutinous rice balls called “tong yuan” that are filled with black sesame and crushed peanuts. Or do what experienced Chinese-food experts do whenever dessert time rolls around: Order a pot of tea and call for the check.

Platefuls of Prosperity

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:21:42 +0000

The Big Apple’s hottest new chef rings in Chinese New Year on the Lower East Side.
Page Six Magazine
By Claire Willett

Susur Lee, the man behind hipster hot spot Shang, has come up with a delectable way to celebrate Chinese New Year this month: a haute Chinese feast that will make diners rich. For the month of February, the eatery located in the Thompson LES hotel is offering a five-course Year of the Ox menu with dishes like pork cooked with desert moss and air-dried mussels, and sablefish accented with crab meat, sausage and chrysanthemum flowers (below). “When you close your eyes, you taste Asian, but when you open your eyes, it’s more European,” Susur says of his delicious dishes, designed to induce a healthy and prosperous 2009. Susur himself knows the secret to success: He’s the chef behind some of Toronto’s most innovative eateries, and he brought his French-trained, Asian-influenced cuisine to Gotham when he opened Shang last December. The restaurant’s food is what Susur calls Global Chinese—a fusion of Far East flavors and haute Western presentation—served in an opulent interior of gleaming mahogany and burnished bronze. “These are recipes for success, for upgrading, for making bad things go away,” he explains. “Some dishes could make their consumer win a lot of money.” At $65 for all five courses, you certainly won’t be wasting any.

Shang at the Thompson LES, 187 Orchard St. (between Stanton and Houston Sts.); 212-260-7900.

Grub To Club

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:57:35 +0000

After-Dinner Parties Happen Just Feet from the Table
New York Post
By Justin Rocket Silverman
March 29, 2009

An even newer kid on the block is Above Allen, the swank outdoor lounge on the seventh floor of the Thompson LES hotel. Getting into the bar can be tricky, but not for those who partake in the Asian fusion delights offered a few floors below at Shang, where Toronto’s celebrity chef Susur Lee serves wildly tasty Asian creations like a 19-ingredient Singapore Slaw. A loyal following of Canadians, who seem to have made the trip down just to enjoy more of Lee’s cooking, populate the restaurant. But upstairs is pure New York City, with the requisite mix of celebrities, like Ed Westwick of “Gossip Girl,” and nightlife kingpin Noah Tepperberg of Marquee.

Susur Awards

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:26:21 +0000

CAA – Four Diamond Award: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
Ontario Hostelry Institute Fold Award: 1998
Chef Culinary Conference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Guest Chef: 2007
American Academy of Hospitality Services, 5 Diamond Award: 1998 “Selected as one of the World’s Best Chefs”
World Gourmet Summit, Singapore: 2006
At-Sun Rice, Global Chef: 2006
James Beard Foundation: 1997
Best of the Best Culinary Awards, Hong Kong Tourism Board: 2007
Grand Gourmet Summit, Dubai, Certificate of Appreciation: Nov 2006
World Gourmet Club, Dubai, Honorable Member: Nov 2006
Wine Council of Ontario, Award of Excellence: 2004

From the North, He Brings Secrets of China, and Some of His Own

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:25:09 +0000

By FLORENCE FABRICANT
September 2, 2008

THE difference between Susur Lee in Toronto and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the New York-based chef with whom he has been compared, is that Mr. Lee has no competition. For more than 20 years he has been the face of high-end culinary dazzle in his adopted Canadian hometown.
In a couple of months, he will open Shang at the Thompson Lower East Side hotel, his first restaurant outside Toronto, and may discover that New York has dozens of top chefs it is capable of chewing up and spitting out.
“I don’t feel nervous,” Mr. Lee said in a telephone interview from Toronto. “I feel the time is right for me. The time is now. New York is a pedestal for the world of food. It’s a place of sophisticated tastes.”
But in his view, when it comes to Chinese food, the underpinning of all of his cooking, New York’s sophistication needs work. He says most of the Chinese food he has tried here is “old school,” unlike the food in Toronto, where, he said, more recent immigrants bring authenticity.
For New York, he is developing dishes like winter melon with salted duck eggs and fish, and a pork dish steamed in broth with spices, preserved vegetables and rice wine. Shang will also feature what the chef calls Silk Road seasonings and food that expresses how Chinese cooking is interpreted in other countries: Jamaican jerk chicken in small pieces with a black bean sauce, for example.
Mr. Lee, 49, is a native of Hong Kong. After emigrating to Toronto, he opened Lotus in 1987. That minimal 12-table pan-Asian debut was enough to catapult him to renown and began to make the dimpled smile on his broad face and the signature black ponytail familiar in food circles beyond Canada.
After a three-year sabbatical in Singapore, he opened Susur in 2000 and Lee in 2004, serving high-end, Asian-accented food. Lee is the more experimental of the two. He closed Susur a few months ago and turned it into Madeline’s, with a more European menu and family-style service.
Mr. Lee can project an intimidating presence, as Bobby Flay discovered on “Iron Chef America” on the Food Network. “He’s intriguing as a chef, and in the heat of competition he becomes quiet, almost stealth-like,” Mr. Flay said. The competition using Canadian bacon ended in a draw.
Shang, short for Shanghai, will have a sweeping bar, a dark and intimate lounge area and a dining room trimmed in Asian carved latticework screens. Rippling golden brass mesh fixtures seem to float. Mr. Lee’s wife, Brenda Bent, is designing the waiters’ uniforms.