In Praise of Chop Suey (2/2)

Ming Tsai is perhaps the ultimate expert in Chinese-American fusion cuisine. As a boy, he rolled spring rolls on the family ping-pong table in Dayton, Ohio. His grandmother, who lived in Iowa City, would put scallions and hoisin sauce on the kids' frozen pizza, 20 years before Wolfgang Puck. When he was 14, his mom opened the Mandarin Kitchen. "At 7 a.m. I'd go make all the rice," says Tsai, now owner and chef of Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Mass., and star of Simply Ming on PBS. He fried mu shu pork and sweet-and-sour pork and pushed the egg-roll cart his engineer dad designed. "I'd peddle them to people eating lunch out on the square, next to the hot dog cart, the gyros cart." Although Tsai went to Yale to study engineering, a few summers spent in Paris convinced him that his fate lay in food, not formulas. His cooking is noted for synthesizing Chinese and Japanese flavors with French and American technique--Asian lacquer poussin, say, or shiitake-leek dumplings. And he still cooks his mother's Asian sloppy joes, made with hoisin sauce in place of ketchup. "This is not fad food. This is food that will stay in America." Until, that is, the next wave of immigrants reinvents it. (Source: http://www.usnews.com, U.S. News and World Report)