AURORA – There are a few things to know before you dine at an authentic Chinese restaurant.
The eatery may serve sweet and sour pork, but that is a strictly American creation. They usually specialize in a regional Chinese cuisine – Szechuan, Cantonese, Hunan and Shanghai.
Next, there is a second menu available at most authentic establishments you may never know exists unless you ask for it. The list of dishes is often on green paper and sometimes printed only in Chinese characters.
Even if you DO ask, waiters may try to dissuade you. They may say something like: “That’s for Chinese people; you wouldn’t like it.” They assume, often correctly, that you might be scared to order intestine with pickled mustard greens.
You have to insist — the reward is tasting another whole world of food.
At Chef Liu’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine you never have to ask. The yin and yang — Chinese-American and Szechuan — come together on the dinner menu.
Zeng Qun Liu has faith that once you taste his fare, you’ll flip past the sesame chicken and choose deep-fried eggplant stuffed with shrimp instead.
Chef Liu sat down on a recent afternoon to talk about his journey from China to Japan to Aurora. His wife, Qi Meng, and daughter, Ning Ning Liu, acted as joint translators.
Growing up in Beijing, nobody in Liu’s family ran a restaurant. During the Chinese cultural revolution, he said, the Communist Party chose jobs for young people. The authorities told him he would be a cook but he got to choose the cuisine he would master.
Liu picked Sichuan — or “Szechuan,” as we call it, because the cuisine is more complex, has more flavors, and uses more ingredients than Cantonese and some of the other regional Chinese cuisines.
The authorities sent him to Chengdu, the Sichuan capital, where he studied and worked for three years under a master chef at a 5-star hotel. He said he aced his national cooking exam where he had to make two traditional dishes including whole braised fish and three dishes of his own creation.
Back in Beijing in 1981, Liu worked his way up to executive chef at Wanshu Hotel’s Sichuan eatery over the course of 13 years. Upon his return he met Qi Meng, who was also working at the hotel. She said that she liked Liu because he was hardworking and down to earth. Their daughter, Ning Ning, was born in 1986.
The turning point for Liu and his family came in 1994. At that time, it was very hard to leave China but he was invited to cook at a Chinese restaurant in Japan. There he appeared on a Japanese cooking show similar to “Iron Chef,” the sole non-Japanese competitor. He also encountered Johnny Hsu, an American restaurateur from Denver, who was so impressed with his cooking that he offered Liu a job at his Imperial Chinese Restaurant.
The family moved to Denver in 2000 and Liu worked at the Imperial for ten years where he experienced a learning curve. He had never made Chinese-American dishes before including sesame chicken, the signature entree at the Imperial.
The fare may be based on a Chinese preparation but was altered to fit “Western” taste buds. Liu said that he finds many of them are just too sweet, and require fewer of the skills he worked so hard to acquire.
Finally, two years ago, the family had the opportunity to own their own place when an existing Chinese restaurant near their home in Aurora became available. They opened despite a struggling economy.
The first part of Chef Liu’s dinner menu includes the familiar items, but he prides himself on making dishes like Mongolian beef as perfectly as possible.
Perhaps the most interesting Chef Liu’s selection is that old warhorse, kung pao chicken. It appears on both the regular and Szechuan part of the menu, and each is prepared differently according to the palate of the expected diner.
There are some zesty choices including “sliced beef in numbing chili oil,” but there is a misperception that Szechuan is only about being spicy, Liu said. It’s really about layers of flavor.
He’s happy to report that many of his regulars – both Chinese customers and adventurous foodies — are introducing their friends to must-tastes such as Szechuan cold noodles, sweet corn with salted egg yolk, spicy Dungeness crab, sliced lamb with cumin, and Shanghai braised duck.
Newbies may want to start with black pepper steak on a sizzling plate and work their way up to a hot and sour tendon hot pot.
Chef Liu plans new additions to the menu by early 2013. After all these years of cooking he still is driven to develop new dishes using new ingredients as part of a living, breathing ancient cuisine.
Chef Liu’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine
562 S. Chambers Rd., Aurora
303-369-2220