I'm sitting here with Steven Wong in actually Chapters Bookstore so we have to talk a little quietly so we don't disturb everybody else. But maybe it's quite appropriate that we meet in Chapters Bookstore because Steven is an author, he has written books on food and cuisine, and wine. Let me ask you Steven, what made you get interested in the world of food and cooking and Actually I've always been interested in food. I grew up in a family that really likes food and probably you might even be able to say that they are little obsessive with food. And so I started cooking probably when I was about seven or eight, just you know, noodles and things like that. Coming home from school, being a hungry, growing boy, running home and my mom had always, at that time actually, always left marinated meats; beef or pork or chicken in the fridge so that I could just come home, get the dry noodles, throw it in some broth and make that up.
At the age of seven?
Seven or eight, something like that - probably as early as I could learn to boil water and felt safe about boiling water by myself. And then, since then I've always been interested in food. My brother and I used to go out for dinner, we used to go actually to about four or five places for dinner.
The same evening?
The same evening, yes. Because a lot the Chinese restaurants This was in Hong Kong? Yes, and the smaller restaurants that we frequented really most of them had the usual menu as it were, but then there was always one or two things that they, the chef have, did particularly well, so we always found out what those were and then we would go there and seek out those dishes and then we would go to another place and have another couple of specialties somewhere else. And then just move on like that until we were full! So I guess that sort of sets the background of how I got really interested in food. And I got into the restaurant business really in '78 when I got married and moved to Vancouver. I see. So when did you first come to Canada?
In 1973.
And where did you move to?
I landed in Calgary September fourth. And it snowed on September sixth.
My goodness, you were wondering what were you doing here?
Well, actually it was fascinating I think. I was eighteen and I had this, I really had this "I have the world by the tail" feeling. As soon as I got on that plane I just had this overwhelming feeling of the vast possibilities out there. And that feeling is still with me to a certain extent. Whenever I get on a plane to go anywhere, even if it's just a five-day business trip, I still get that same sense. The world is your oyster.
Yeah. It's just terrific! Right, and did you then go to university or you started working right away?
I went to university. I studied philosophy actually at U of C which was somewhat odd for a Chinese person and I guess that circuitously led to my being in the restaurant business, because otherwise I would not have been gainfully employed in any way.
So the philosophy course led to an interest in writing or being analytical?
Probably, likely both actually. Especially being analytical. I have always been, you know, a great reader - I always enjoyed words. I think the philosophy courses really led me to think about things a bit more clearer and we were dealing with a fair amount of linguistic analysis at the time so that really helped increased my interest in words as well I think and eventually it led me to sort of dabble in writing. And I still think that I'm dabbling in writing. But you say then you moved to Vancouver and you started a restaurant?
No actually I didn't start a restaurant; I started working in a French restaurant. My wife was actually working as a waitress at a restaurant called Le Couscous and, on Robson Street. And so, I was, before that, before I moved, actually, I was a train controller. It started out as a part-time job in university, and then after I finished university it grew into a full-time job for about a year. And when I moved, I couldn't really transfer my seniority from that job so I ended up sort of hanging around while my wife supported me for little while. But we would have staff parties and I've always enjoyed cooking, so on days off and so on I would invite a few people over. So the staff always talked about my cooking I guess.
At that time you were cooking Chinese or Western or French?
In those parties, I've always cooked a bit of both. And so I guess the things that were more unusual for her colleagues were probably Chinese. And then I, so when the chef wanted to go for holidays for about three months, the owner asked me At the Couscous At the Couscous, and the owner asked me if I wanted to actually jump in the kitchen and fill the lunch shift for awhile. And I said sure. So I jumped in and I started in the restaurant business in that way.
Very interesting! So how did you actually get into writing about cooking?
Well, that was some years after that. After having owned about three restaurants.
So you were actually in the restaurant business? You said, "After having owned three restaurants." I didn't really start writing until probably early nineties and from the years between 1978 and early nineties I owned three restaurants. One was a coffee shop actually, called Key Largo, the first one, basically, at English Bay right on the beach, where Milestones actually is now, the same location. And I probably could have sold to Milestones if I had played my cards right but I didn't. And then I owned a restaurant called Cherry Stone Cove in 1985, which is sort of, in my mind, the beginning of the "fusion" movement, as it were, of food in Vancouver. I really picked the location because it was where all the French restaurants began their popularity as well it's about a block and a half from Chinatown. So to me marrying the two disciplines, cooking disciplines, has really worked there.
When you say the "fusion" movement: maybe it would be worthwhile explaining what you mean by the "fusion" movement. Well, fusion in culinary circles now is probably a dirty word: a lot of people are now veering away from that particular label. But essentially it's really about combining methods and ingredients from different traditional cuisines and then coming up hopefully with something new and interesting. My take was really French and Chinese with a little bit of Japanese thrown in for the presentation and so on. And that was what I was doing at Cherry Stone Cove, primarily with seafood. And it gave me a lot more latitude to do things. I had a salmon tartare that a lot of people really liked, based on the French tartare recipe and then, but using salmon with sort of a Japanese sashimi kind of take on it and things like that. So that was quite a bit of fun.
And then I had another restaurant called Sheena along the same lines of style of cooking in 1990-91 I think. This was at the west end of Gastown at the Landing Building. Great restaurant with a bistro, and a side serving tapas, at that time which was relatively new at the time, and then a dining room on the other side with a great view of the North Shore. And after that I sort of got a little bit burned out. The restaurant business is always hard and was actually getting harder. Throughout the years, since I've entered the business it has actually grown progressively harder, as the years have gone by. So I, and I met a food editor for the Pacific-Northwest magazine, which is now no longer, it's now defunct, and he wanted to cover some of the Asian restaurants in Vancouver and so he asked me if I would write something for him. He met me and we talked about food and we talked a little bit about writing and other things. And so I started writing a few restaurant reviews for him at the Pacific-Northwest magazine. And then, I guess that stuff got read by other people locally actually and so I was asked by the Vancouver Sun, for example, to write some features for their food pages and then it just sort of started out that way. And then, after that, I was asked to do a book called Heart Smart Chinese Cooking for the Heart & Stroke Foundation and so the books came along that way and so that sort of developed into a pseudo career. Amongst other things that you do, you are also a wine writer. Here's another thing that again is obviously more of a French cuisine tradition than a Chinese tradition because we're talking not rice wine, but we're talking grape wine. So how did you get into that specialization?
That really is, the interest was started as part of what you need to know in a business I think. I've always tried to take a reasonably serious attitude. And I suppose it helped that I'm interested in flavours overall. So I started getting interested in wine because the industry demands it really. More and more it's not just about food, it's about having food and wine together. And wine ultimately being an agricultural product could be considered food, really. So I started tasting wines a little bit and I went through the whole gamut of progression in, on palate in wine. Started with, like Baby Duck in college, Black Tower, Blue Nun, what not, and then got progressively drier. I'm sure for people of my age, all of us remember things like Kressman, and San Giovanni, Blanc de Blanc, so I started there and then when I got in the restaurant business a wine agent, actually was doing a tasting, sort of a technical tasting one day and it was all about why and how you taste wine. And you know the whole sniff, gargle, slosh, and spit thing. And so it really opened my eyes: it was almost like a revelation. All of a sudden, to me it was fascinating to see a wine made from grapes having flavours of apples and pears and lychees, and aromas of tobacco and things like that. And so it was just fascinating to me. Almost overnight I went, "Wow, there's a whole world of flavours engendered in wine." And basically that's how I really got into it. And I still get into it, not so much from the historical and business point of view in terms of wine writing. My wine writing is really all about flavours, it's all about flavours intrinsic in the wines and how the wine would work with food, and pair with food or interact with food. How serious is our wine industry here in British Columbia?
I think actually it's getting pretty serious. Since probably about 1980, the mid-eighties, when the Free Trade Agreement was first signed, etcetera, the industry basically woke up and realized that quality is going to be important if they ever want to be a serious industry and if they ever aspire to compete on the world stage. And so it went from you know, a very subsidized grape-growing industry that produces a huge amount of tonnage of juice that you know, gets turned into really mediocre if not almost really low-grade plonk wine, into a varietals program and into even development of an appellation controlling kind of system. And especially in the last probably 5-7 years the quality is really beginning to emerge. I think they are quite serious and there's quite a bit of money being invested into the industry. We're still at the dawn, somewhat just post-dawn, of the industry. But it's going to be quite interesting. But I think it's fair to say that with a variety of culinary traditions in Vancouver and lots of ingredients from our farming sector and a hopefully increasingly serious wine industry in the Interior, it's quite an interesting place to be involved in the whole world of cuisine. Yes it is actually. I think it is fascinating. Just from the point of view of the multi-cultural aspect of the city. We are for example regionally very, very different from someplace like Toronto, even though that is also a very multi-cultural city. But we have a different mix of population. We have a great deal of people coming from the Pacific Rim who prefer this location because of proximity, because of similarities it has with the home countries, etcetera, and that has really driven the food industry here. It penetrates, from not just the cooking style, but actually to things that are being grown and ingredients being developed here. And that's really terrific. And interestingly enough the flavours of wines that are being produced here because of the northern climate, actually work really well with some of the Asian cuisines, etcetera. A lot of people think of Asian cuisines as being somewhat spicy and having a chilli element, and in truth a fairly large part of that is actually so, even though most people probably think of it as more spicy than European-based food because of the exposure or preferences to it. But some of the northern climate wines that we grow in B.C. which typically is higher in acid, and some of the varietals that we have may actually end up with having a little bit more residual sugar, like Rieslings and Gewurztraminers, for example, and lighter in alcohol to a certain extent because of the ripeness of the grapes. You know so the conversion to alcohol is a little bit lower. And those are perfect characteristics for some of the hotter flavours of Asian cuisine. So it is actually, it does have an almost inadvertent, kind of synergy to it and it's great and it's wonderful to be here at this time. I really have to thank you for taking the time to talk with us. I think they're going to chase us out of Chapters shortly, so with that, thank you very much. And thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you.
