Won Ton Soup and Other Essential New York Tastes, Updated at Bonnie’s
The New York Times
Cantonese cuisine is deeply woven into the city’s identity. Its old flavors are brought into this century by Calvin Eng’s new restaurant in Brooklyn.
When generations of New Yorkers talked about going out for Chinese food, they were almost always talking about Cantonese food.
It was what the city’s early Chinese immigrants ate as they tried to recreate meals they once knew in the southern province of Guangdong, when it was still called Canton.
Adapted for non-Chinese palates, it was the basis of what Chinatown’s first restaurants served, starting in the 1880s, and of what later Chinese restaurants would bring to neighborhoods north of Canal Street. Cantonese food became more or less synonymous with Chinese food in New York until the 1960s and ’70s, when a handful of remarkable chefs who had made it out of Mao’s China woke the city up to the glories of Hunanese and Sichuanese cuisine.
