Sixteen Chefs
Dim sum to perfection from the Peony Seafood Restaurant Kitchen
By Anna Mindess | Photos by Scott Peterson
Most of the hundreds of diners who come to the elegant dining rooms at Oakland Chinatown’s Peony Seafood Restaurant each week sit in groups—large and small—around tables covered with white damask tablecloths. They relax, chat, and share a wide variety of dim sum delights that come piping hot from the Peony kitchen. Here’s a peek into that extraordinary culinary workshop.
“Everything is made by hand,” says Ming Zhu, Peony’s owner for the last 11 years. He opens the doors to the vast kitchen and the immediate sensation is of being inside the studio of an artists’ collective, where each skilled artisan works in deep concentration. On a busy weekend, you may find a half dozen chefs who fashion and fill a range of dumplings under focused lighting, while another six chefs stir fry in huge woks over dancing flames, and two more tend meats at the barbecue ovens.
General Manager Chris Xie, who brought 34 years of experience in dim sum restaurants when he came to Peony 11 years ago, says the key to success in Peony’s kitchen is teamwork and timing. His 16 chefs work together seamlessly to create over 100 different items for the menu including the 700–800 pieces of dim sum served on the busiest days. None of Peony’s dumplings are brought in frozen from outside commissary kitchens (as is all too common at many dim sum spots), and great skill is needed to make the precise number of folds on each of Peony’s tiny har gow shrimp dumplings or larger xiao long bao soup dumplings.
At one of the kitchen’s large steel tables, Chef Benny Fok skillfully forms siu mai by deftly pinching a small scoop of the finely minced pork and shrimp filling and tucking it into a pale-yellow dough wrapper. The key, says Fok, is squeezing the compact bundle just right. Too tight and the morsel will be stiff; too loose and the packet falls apart. If they are just right, they will have a bouncy texture when you bite into them. Fok finishes by sprinkling the siu mai with orange fish roe. When a customer orders the dish, the morsels will be packed into a bamboo basket and set over the steamer.
Zhu is a believer in using fresh seasonal ingredients. Before moving to the United States, he worked as a chef in a five-star Cantonese hotel restaurant in Guangzhou, where he experienced the superior qualities of food handcrafted by highly skilled chefs. Zhu requires that the pork, shrimp, and mushrooms for Peony’s siu mai filling be chopped by hand to achieve the ideal texture. The quicker way would be to use a grinding machine.
Year-round, Peony offers dim sum classics like steamed shrimp dumplings, barbecue pork buns, and egg custard tarts, but Zhu says that seasonality rules the kitchen. Winter’s hearty, spicy selections are now making way for spring’s lighter fare with its nourishing ingredients like lily buds and mushrooms.
“Simple dishes are the most difficult to prepare well,” Zhu says as he describes a vegetarian stir fry of celery, carrots, morel mushrooms, and lily buds. “My goal is not only to provide good tasting dishes but also those that nourish health. For example, spring is the time for a range of mushrooms that not only taste good but also carry health benefits.”
At one hot wok, a chef throws a large handful of rice vermicelli noodles into the oil and deftly transforms it into a crunchy pancake that will encase a mixture of beef filet and mushrooms. At another wok, the chef uses wider rice noodles to stir up a comforting dish of chow fun.
Toward the back of the kitchen, poultry and pork cuts dangle from hooks as chefs work through the hours-long process that gives these meats their delectably crisp skins. It involves 30 minutes of basting with “crispy skin water” (a solution of honey and wine vinegar) and several hours of drying on hooks before the meats get roasted. The birds might also get stuffed with a mixture of ginger, scallions, salt, sugar, dark soy sauce, cooking wine, and five spice powder that’s sewn up inside. There is an art to knowing exactly when the perfect crispness of skin has been achieved. Cooking times are not governed by the clock as they depend on many factors, including the weather. “An experienced chef can tell when the skin is perfectly crisp just by looking,” says Zhu.
Due to popular demand, Peony serves its dim sum throughout the day, not just for brunch, and one won’t see waiters pushing dim sum carts laden with towers of steam baskets, since Peony has removed the carts to ensure that dishes arrive fresher and hotter directly from the kitchen.
Peony features many fish specialties at dinnertime, and guests can see the seafood still swimming in tanks in the dining room before a chef scoops out their choice and carries it to the kitchen. Ordering on iPads allows customers to see images of dishes they may never have tried elsewhere. That’s how this writer discovered one of Peony’s special desserts: a warm, green, pear-shaped pandan mochi with a creamy filling. ♦
Peony Seafood Restaurant | 388 9th St Ste# 288, Oakland | 510.286.8866 | peonyrestaurant.com
Find convenient free parking on weeknights in the underground lot of the Pacific Renaissance Center where Peony is located.
Anna Mindess is an award-winning journalist who writes on food, culture, and travel for numerous publications including the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Berkeleyside. Follow her on Instagram @annamindess and find her stories at annamindess.contently.com.
Scott Peterson is an East Bay photographer with a passion for images, food, music, and lately… motorcycling. He is also a busy video producer looking for calm in a crazy world. Find a range of his work at scottpetersonproductions.com.
