There’s been some excitement brewing in the Cantonese food scene over the past few years. Four Kings was the hottest restaurant opening in San Francisco this year, serving up Hong Kong-style street food. Bonnie’s by 2022 F&W Best New Chef Calvin Eng remains a definite trendsetter in Brooklyn. Manhattan’s Potluck Club and Phoenix Palace joined the Cantonese party in 2022 and 2024, respectively. And while the wave may have peaked in Los Angeles—Pearl River Deli emerged in 2020 and closed in 2024, and Needle opened in 2019 and closed in 2023—hot new Cantonese restaurants keep opening across the country. Rubato brought buttery bolo bao to the Boston area in 2022, MAKfam introduced dumplings and noodles in Denver in 2023, and King BBQ introduced barbecued pork ribs in Charleston in 2023.
Cantonese cuisine in the U.S. has a history of being deep-fried and greasy. It originally hails from southern China, specifically the Guangdong province formerly known as Canton, as well as Hong Kong. Since the gold rush of the 1850s, Chinese immigrants have flocked to the U.S., and the largest Chinatowns and neighborhoods are still in California and New York. For better or worse, Cantonese cuisine has been Americanized, often associated with white tablecloths and rotating round trays, steaming dim sum carts and roast duck swinging in windows.
But now, it seems there’s a new crop of young and hungry chefs tapping into Cantonese nostalgia. “There’s a whole group of chefs doing similar Americanized Cantonese food,” says Eng of Bonnie’s. “I think they’re another generation of kids who were born and raised in New York, who live in immigrant families with both parents from southern China. We grew up eating Cantonese food, but worked in different kitchens in addition to Cantonese restaurants. Now, the dishes we make are our own.”
Born and raised in New York, Eng’s grandparents were both from Toishan Village, and his mother grew up in Hong Kong. In their immigrant family, his mother would serve hearty, family-style meals that followed a specific combination—seafood, chicken or pork, steamed charcuterie, stir-fried vegetables, and, of course, rice. Eng remembers coming home from school around 3 and his mother already in the kitchen preparing meals. “Every night was a feast.” He did name his restaurant after his mother, and today Bonnie’s is one of Williamsburg’s largest restaurants, where he serves up super nostalgic and highly creative cuisine.
Eng describes his style as Cantonese-American, with an emphasis on order, and says every dish has a story. “Everything is something I loved as a kid…If it’s not sausage, it can’t be on the menu.” You can get a taste of his perspective with cacio e pepe, stir-fried in a wok with fermented black beans, a grilled squid salad featuring charcuterie, and a chrysanthemum salad served unconventionally raw. The most iconic dish is the BKRib, a marriage of Cantonese barbecue and a McDonald’s sandwich. He takes his mom’s steamed ribs, shreds them, tosses them in a sweet marinade, then piles a handful onto soft bread and tops them with homemade bread-and-butter pickles and spicy mustard.
For the San Francisco-based Four Kings team, chef Franky Ho grew up at the crossroads of San Francisco and Guangdong, while chef Michael Long lived in Los Angeles and visited Hong Kong. They met while working at Mister Jiu’s, arguably the frontrunner in this new Cantonese school (it opened in 2016). Ho and Long bonded over their shared love of Hong Kong street food and ’90s Cantopop. Together with partners Millie Boonkokua and Lucy Li, who are also of Chinese descent, they opened Four Kings in Chinatown in early 2024 and have been packing in ever since. “We’re unreservedly Chinese-American and Cantonese-American,” Li says. “You can see it in the food, the decor, the music. Everything is actively moving toward that.”
The menu is designed for drinking and snacking with friends, as if dining at a night market. The most personal dish is the deep-fried squab, inspired by a signature dish from Ho’s hometown of Zhongshan. The birds are marinated and smoked, hung on display in the open kitchen, and deep-fried to order, making them juicy and crispy. There’s a whiff of Cantonese nostalgia in smoky chow mein intertwined with the smell of wok, plump rice casserole with homemade sausage and bacon, and ingredients that challenge Western palates, like a jellyfish salad that tastes like a jellyfish salad. Other dishes aren’t Cantonese at all, like the mapo pasta—closer to Sichuan and Italian flavors—but that’s just what these good friends love to eat.
Laurence Louie of Rubato in Boston has a sweet family story, having taken over his mother’s old-school Cantonese bakery during the pandemic. Born and raised in the Boston area (Brookline, to be exact), Louie’s parents are both from Taishan and his mother grew up in Hong Kong. His mother is a public school teacher by day and still a rock star by night; at 72, she plays 90s Cantopop in a local band. Louie grew up eating lots of leftover bao buns and Cantonese home cooking. He worked in Chinatown for youth social justice and ate noodles for a year in Guangzhou before deciding to become a chef.
He reimagined Rubato as a retro-modern Hong Kong-style cafe, with green tiles and butcher-block curtains that cast a buttery yellow glow across the space. “Have you ever seen a Wong Kar-wai movie?” Louie asks, referring to the Hong Kong director. The menu is all Cantonese, with traditional dishes like the plain bao bun served with a slab of butter, congee with a century egg, and rice noodle rolls or rice noodle rolls.
But the hot new sandwich is the fried chicken da bao bun. He tweaked his mom’s bao recipe, making it crispier on the outside and softer on the inside, and baking the buns side by side (Hawaiian roll style). He soaks chicken thighs in a thick buttermilk and tofu batter, then coats them in a special cornstarch mixture that gives them a KFC-level crispiness. Then he tops them with sesame slaw and spicy mayo.
Louis says sometimes the aunties give him trouble. “They’re like, can you make this something normal?” he says with a laugh. Sometimes people ask if his restaurants are Chinese, American or “fusion,” a term he never uses. But he’s excited to be part of a new team that’s spreading across the country. “The more modern approach is led by a couple of Chinese-American chefs who are cooking some cool things that are authentic to our experience as Chinese Americans.”
Related topics: