Three Dishes with Belinda Chang of the Modern| Recipes Articles

Articles

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

- James Beard

Three Dishes with Belinda Chang of the Modern

This new column by Anjali Kumar invites you on a monthly adventure to great restaurants around the world to meet the amazing chefs, mixologists, restaurateurs and sommeliers behind them and the foods that inspired their work today. She sits down with Sommelier Belinda Chang of The Modern in New York City to find out which dishes shaped her cooking style and outlook today.

What is the dish that:

1. Inspired your love of food?

Everything that my Mom cooked while I lived with my parents. She attended cooking school in Taiwan, and her food is the bomb. She would cook nine course meals for her friends and even though I didn't know at the time that she was preparing mise en place, I now know that I used to love to watch her preparing ingredients for dishes like: Egg Rolls, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Hot Oil Cooked Fish, Oysters with Black Bean Sauce, Red Cooked Beef and more. She would have the mise for each dish labeled in Chinese, sometimes with a Post-It note and wrapped in plastic on a separate shelf in the fridge. My job was to set the table and polish the glassware (go figure!). My little brother would look on. My Dad made Piña Coladas for our guests and opened up the Lancer's!

2. Is your signature?

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup. Every Friday, one of the cooks in The Modern's dining room kitchen makes breakfast for the team. We have so many cooks from different parts of the world, and often they make something from their native country or region: Southern Fried Chicken, Kimchi, specialties from Trinidad, etc. I made these noodles for this very discerning and tough crowd and it went pretty well!

3. You cook on your night off?

I love to play "Ready...Set...Cook!"(I loved that show with Sissy Biggers on the Food Network) with the contents of the bag filled with all of my purchases from the Union Square Market. I will just buy whatever looks delicious, with no thought as to what to do with it, and then I will hunt through all of my cookbooks looking for a recipe that will use what is in the bag. Sometimes the resulting dish becomes a new standard, sometimes it does not! But because the ingredients are so pristine, the results are always tasty.