My family comes from Jamaica
and we go back three generations.
And before that my family came from China.
What a lot of people don't see in Caribbean cuisine
is that there was a huge influence from the Chinese
when they arrived.
Back in the days when they first started making jerk,
they would slaughter an entire pig,
and they would drain all the blood from that pig,
and that would be the basis for jerk paste.
Fast forward to today, soy sauce has become
a key part in the jerk paste.
[upbeat music]
Jerk Chicken Chow Mein to me was just a natural fit.
At my family gatherings we would have
real tasty jerk chicken,
and then right beside that
would have my grandmother's chow mein.
When I was developing the menu for Patois,
I wanted to draw on my fine dining French background
and pair that with my lifetime of eating
and enjoying Chinese food, Caribbean food.
It's the food that I grew up eating,
and it's also the food I cook at home.
I wanted a noodle dish and wanted to have something
that would evoke a lot of memories from my childhood.
You can't have the Jerk Chicken Chow Mein
without the oyster sauce.
[food sizzling]
This is gonna give it that nice dark complexion,
and it's also gonna have that real umami flavor.
A bit of straight up Scotch bonnet.
So we blend our Scotch bonnet,
and we make this really spicy sauce
that we can control how much we put in.
[upbeat music]
I knew that I wanted to have the best jerk chicken
that I could possibly make.
So what we did was took influence
from the French rotisserie chickens
that I really enjoyed eating
at Saturday morning markets in Paris.
We have some blanched egg noodles.
So we toss that into our deep fryer,
and then we let that fry.
We get that crispy noodle, super saucy,
and you get to actually like mix up some of that sauce,
and get the noodles a little bit more tender if you'd like.
The mix of Asian cuisine, Jamaican cuisine,
it just really blends really seamlessly.
When I started on my career I was almost always
the only Asian in the kitchen.
What I really loved about what I'm doing right now
is that I get to be myself, and that was something
that I wasn't too comfortable doing early on in my career.
When it came time to do my own restaurant,
I knew that I had to break all of that.
I wasn't in this to cook somebody else's dishes,
and we're going to do food
that we're really proud of, that really speaks to us,
something that really speaks my language.
[gentle music]
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