Eating with Chef Sin
By Chi Siegel
This interview was originally published in Issue #7 “MUD (泥)”. Get it now on BLURB.
A conversation with Lucas Sin, founder of Junzi Kitchen
When I walk with my cousin into the Junzi Kitchen at the corner of 113th and Broadway in New York, Lucas doesn’t immediately notice. It’s a half hour until our assigned time slot at Chef ’s Table, Junzi Kitchen’s premier one-week-a month dining experience of an experimental and meticulously planned five-course gourmet meal. I can see Lucas over the counter that divides public and private at Junzi, keeping the cheerful, bustling front end of the restaurant from the frantic symphony of the kitchen. His head is bowed over a pot, his expression flat and deeply concentrated on the simmering contents.
Chef Lucas Sin has a somewhat reserved, but clearly excited look about him in the kitchen. But that’s because he is young, a Class of 2015 Cognitive Science major from Yale who has been chasing down good food and great kitchens since even before his bright college years. “It all started at 16,” he told us as we sat down after dinner at one of Junzi’s many tables. The store was gradually being closed down for the night around us, the decor collapsed and the chairs moved onto the tables. He sips at a Vita (weita) Lemon Tea juice box. “It was the last summer before I came to college, and I opened a private kitchen.”
‘Private kitchen’ was a term with a specific Chinese meaning: 私房菜, according to Lucas, was an en vogue Sichuan and Hong Kong phenomenon.
“Because rents are so high, chefs would host people in their apartments, or in their non-restaurant spaces, with small tables and tasting menus,” he said. “They would be putting out some pretty creative cuisine. I started doing sifangcai when I was 16 in this abandoned newspaper factory in Chai Wan. I taught a bunch of friends [to help], and spent a bunch of months that summer asking [chefs] how to make things. That’s the first time I took myself a little seriously, and I did a fifteen course meal three or four times a week for a table of between 12 and 20, in a wine cellar that was attached to a semi professional kitchen within the old abandoned factory of Mingtao.”
He kept up the trend in his first summer after college, maintaining a “laundry basket private kitchen” that was a mobile version of what he and his friends had done the summer before.
At the Chef ’s Table that I’m attending — a bright, intimate, and most of all red celebration of Lunar New Year — Sin’s inventive verve that no doubt started back during his sifangcai years has obviously found a home, and one that suits it well. He’s cordoned off a third of Junzi Kitchen for the event, setting up an elaborate place setting and table decor that bathes this side of the room in scarlet. He served us five courses that night, each one more impressive than the last, with experimental spins put on some dishes that I recalled from other more traditional restaurants or even my grandparents’ home cooking. This was Lucas’ eighth Chef ’s Table he’d designed ever since Junzi first started in 2015.
But before there was Junzi Kitchen, there was Y-Popup at Yale. Lucas founded Y-Popup along with a friend, recreating the experience of sifangcai for his fellow Yale students out of a residential college basement.
“We were putting together three concepts a weekend. So, Friday we’d serve 80 people a night. And then on Saturday we would do a gastro-pub that [served] around 20 to 30 people, and that had another chef, too. On Sunday we would do a cafe in a residential college’s art gallery, or in the courtyard or something. It was three days’ worth of pop-ups, and then we’d go back to school and do the Monday-Thursday thing, and then start cooking again on Friday,” he said. “We started doing it every semester with different teams, different restaurant concepts. You know the drill. It got super fun… almost-got-shut-down-by-the-government kind of fun.”
Lucas emphasized that he didn’t get involved with the restaurant industry itself until his sophomore year of college, distinguishing his informal sifangcai gigs from the work that happens in an industrial kitchen at a major restaurant.
“What’s convinced me to really be in kitchens all the time is ‘Kitchen Culture,’ which we didn’t have at all when we were doing this at 16 years old,” he said. “The way chefs behave, and the camaraderie, as well as the dedication to craft and technique in putting something together, and the relationship with the guest in generating some sort of customer experience that genuinely extends beyond the restaurant… the culture of food is absolutely what has gotten me to dig deeper.”
His sophomore summer, he worked at a restaurant called TBLS in Hong Kong,
which he insists is still the best restaurant he’s ever been to. He worked under a chef named Quay. “Within just a month and a half of working with him, I was ready to work in any kitchen,” Lucas recalled fondly. Following his stint at TBLS, he took on Japan. “I backpacked from Tokyo downward, after a two-week stint at an izakaya in Tokyo. I just started traveling all the way to Nagasaki, stopping in cool cities on the way. I went to hostels asking people where the good food was, and then going to restaurants and knocking on the door, asking, ‘Can I work for you for free?’”
The following summer he returned with a job at fine dining restaurant Kikunoi Honten, where he “really got his chops” for cooking.
When it’s time to get introspective about why he does what he does, he cautions me against putting down any sort of magazine-easy answer for why he cooks.
“I wish there was a blanket statement for why I cook,” he said. “[Some people]
find out that my grandma was a cook, but she was a cook at a mahjong parlor… by any means she wasn’t a chef, she wasn’t coming up with new dishes. She was just making food, and that’s how she made a life in Hong Kong when her husband passed away.”
But the concept of Kitchen Culture was what kept him coming back to the chef’s table again and again. “I was cooking in kitchens during break and teaching people how to cook [at school], and the act of cooking really brought people together in a way that was really exciting,” he said. “I’d have to teach these waiters — these freshmen and sophomores — how to wash dishes, or how to hold a broom with one hand, or how to sautée something, and afterwards we’d go to a sushi restaurant and drink, and it was so much fun.”
That night at Junzi, every time a new course came to our table, he was right out after it, explaining the intricacies of a certain dish or an unorthodox twist he gave to an otherwise orthodox dish. Ever the teacher, he talked with his hands as he explained the process of giving the pork wontons a savory sauce that contained absolutely no soy sauce, or how the glutinous rice balls were dusted with osmanthus flower.
He related that spirit of imbuing others with the same love for food and cooking and creating that community through communication to the idea behind Junzi Kitchen.
“I graduated and started working for Junzi, and then the [aforementioned] comfort extended beyond the kitchen,” he said. “I found that our restaurant was tasked with this mission of telling a story about Chinese food to the U.S., to the American public, in a way that was bigger than I had imagined, because I didn’t know it was possible to reach so many people at one time.”
Junzi Kitchen became where his love for cooking, his roots, and pursuit of kitchen culture has brought him. Founded by several Yale graduate alumni, Yong Zhao, Wanting Zhang, and Ming Bai, Junzi Kitchen swiftly recruited Lucas as he graduated from Yale in 2015 as its founding chef. Lucas explained the reasons behind the restaurant’s start-up-like ethos, with Junzi Kitchen’s founders seeking to define Junzi Kitchen as a distinct brand more so than just a restaurant.
“When you have a brand, you have a platform to tell a story, and we want to tell a story about contemporary China,” he said. “We’re all just Chinese people who eat balanced meals, and we’re just trying to be real about our authenticity and who we are.” He also pointed out the linguistic origin of the term 君子 — “Junzi” — meaning the Confucian ideal and a community leader. “So— how do you act moralistically? But more importantly for us, how do you act as a community leader to tell a story about Chinese cultures through food?”
During Junzi Kitchen’s regular hours, they offer assembly-line-style preparation of two staple dishes: a chun bing with customizable filling, and a noodle bowl with customizable toppings and sauces. The offerings in line are a veritable smorgasbord of protein and vegetable bing fillings and noodle toppings, as well as sauces like fermented black bean and tomato egg that underscore the familiarity of the Junzi dining experience to many other Chinese people. At Junzi “After Hours” — late nights on Friday and Saturday— the cuisine swerves more towards comfort food (“Honest to God we’re definitely making drunk food. This is the stuff I’d want to eat if I was trashed.” Lucas grinned.)
But during regular hours and after hours, Junzi Kitchen’s take on the bing has become its most symbolically recognizable symbol to its customers. “It’s both a form of celebration and a form of sustenance,” Lucas said, invoking its traditional occasion — the first day of spring festival. “We’re making it just a little bigger than you’re accustomed to if you’re really from Northeastern China, and we’ve made them customizable, so you can pick what you want, whether it’s pork hock that’s been cooked down and braised or braised and sliced beef, or chicken thigh, all of them marinated or cooked the way we
would in Dongbei.”
In Lucas’s opinion, the true innovation of Junzi Kitchen’s standard fare lies within the delivery and presentation of the food rather than the content of the food itself.
“That’s important from a get-it-to-the- U.S. perspective because of the the demands that American consumers have formed out of habit, such as Chipotle-style ordering and customization, or transparency and seeing how food is made,” he said. “But the flavor of the food and the actual food itself is pretty honest to how I understand it to be eaten in my childhood and in Yong [Zhao]’s childhood and how it’s being eaten today in China. But in China, for
example, you would never see chun bing or noodles served in an assembly line.”
Junzi Kitchen has a contemporary, slick inside, with wall decor and branding that certainly matches the modern take on northern-style Chinese food but doesn’t do anything more to accentuate its Chinese-ness or play on the more exotic imaginations of its American audience.
“Our design and our customer experience make [non-Chinese Americans] feel like they don’t need to be putting themselves out on a limb in order to test out the waters for this new ‘ethnic food,’” Lucas said. “We don’t put gigantic pandas and bamboo and red all over the restaurant for that reason as well. We’re just trying to be a contemporary Chinese restaurant.”
“How do you act as a community leader to tell a story through Chinese food?”
”At one point, he took my cousin and me behind the counter, into the back rooms of the kitchen in order for us to see him plating one of the next dishes, a splatter of fuschia sauce coating a variety of sauteed mushrooms. He worked with his hands and a single spoon for the sauce-splashing, and the attention he paid to the exact angles of the taro chips or the distribution of grape- fruit chunks told me that the details made the dish more than the sum of its parts, the way an artist’s brushstrokes were meaningless individually but critical down to the smallest fleck of paint for the whole picture. And this was a dish that he was literally painting into being.
When I asked him about whether or not his cognitive science background influenced his cooking pursuits, he gave a measured response, cautioning me once again from ascribing any sort of magazine-easy answer.
“The most important thing about cognitive science is that you need to learn
from every single discipline, and there are no rules,” he said. “If you can strap a little tiny stick to the legs of an ant and therefore learn about how the human brain works, then absolutely you should be doing that. That’s how the Junzi Kitchen core management works: there’s a manager who went to art school, there’s an environmental science guy, there’s a lawyer, and the person who manages our brand is an architect, so everyone is bringing different disciplines and different ways of thinking.”
I wonder, then, at that mish-mash of disciplines, as well as the purposeful melding of American-style delivery with authentic Northern-style foods. But Lucas doesn’t immediately jump to the word “fusion” when describing Junzi Kitchen.
“The problem is that all food is fusion, and it’s important to think about the history and movement of food throughout time, as something that’s mobile and dynamic,” he said. “I personally don’t like that term fusion as much. However, it’s absolutely a good thing.” He referenced the changing landscape of the Internet as to why the term “fusion” has gone in and out of style over the past ten years — it’s become so commonplace that it’s now unremarkable. “That free flow of information between chefs is so wonderful. It allows me, as a fast-casual chef, to talk about high Chinese technique with other chefs. I’m getting so much information about permutations of pickling…and how would I have been able to do that if I was still reading Jamie Oliver cookbooks?”
Above all, though, as Lucas has been cooking from such a young age, with professional stints in Hong Kong, Japan, and America, as well as experiments with all kinds of cuisine at Y-Popup — he keeps coming back to Chinese food, as the main body of work for Junzi Kitchen as well as the intense and experimental multi-course meals that he brings to places like Junzi Kitchen’s Chef ’s table, or more widely to places like Rockefeller Center.
“I believe since [Chinese culture] has been around for such a long time, there are so many ways to talk about Chinese food almost at a theoretical level, and there’s always something to learn,” he said. “It’s not only food being passed on in homes, like generation to generation, but at a structural level like at courts when there’s a change in power, with chefs teaching other chefs. I personally am always interested in what Chinese food can be and can do. The Chinese food is always a nice anchor.”
These days, Lucas is experimenting with introducing certain new ingredients to the Junzi menu, including medicinal herbs, straight out of a 14th century cookbook he’s currently working with. I visit Junzi with my friends, sometimes for a quick and healthy lunch of assembly-line-customizable chun bings, other times on the weekends at an hour past my bedtime for what is essentially a 葱油饼 taco. Even as my non-Chinese classmates butcher the pronunciations of the dishes, they are saying them in the first place: the story of Junzi and its food is passed on, one hungry college student at a time. Junzi somehow remains constant even as it changes what it serves — one seamless story told about modern China through an ever-shifting line of ingredients and styles of preparations.
Original interview by Chi Siegel. Photography by Chi Siegel with thanks to Tiffany Chi. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
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