Chinese food takeout: Nostalgia drives wave of new restaurants, delivery shops to Palm Beach County
There’s a streak of nostalgia in a new wave of Chinese takeout spots and full-service restaurants across Palm Beach County. But it’s not the nostalgia of Chinese immigrants yearning for their homeland. Partly, it’s a New York state of nostalgia.
This is a wave of Chinese food restaurants and delivery operations opened by Chinese food fans who are not Chinese. But while their dishes may not offer Chinese authenticity, their collective appreciation for Americanized takeout and dim sum classics offer locals a chance to share in the yearning.
Consider chef Eric Baker’s new restaurant, Mr. Goode’s Chinese Takeout in Boca Raton. It’s inspired by “a little piece of my childhood,” says the New York native.
“When I think of Chinese food, I think of a familial setting, places where my family and friends used to get together to eat. Great egg rolls and dumplings and hot and sour soup,” says Baker, a French-trained chef and veteran of fine-dining restaurants.
He describes the menu at Mr. Goode’s, a full-service restaurant he opened with business partner David Bouhadana, as his vision of the Chinese-American food of his Long Island childhood. With a chef-fy twist, of course.
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Baker uses New York strip steak for the Mongolian beef, smokes the barbecue baby back ribs onsite and adds pastrami to his house-special fried rice.
“Right now, takeout is the majority of the business,” says Baker, who spent time in Xi’an, China, where he taught English during his college days.
The menu at Mr. Goode’s offers a nod to that time: Baker’s take on Xi’an-inspired seared cumin lamb bao.
Chinese takeout may seem like a departure for the chef who also owns the gastro-pubby Rebel House, Uncle Pinkie’s Jewish-style deli and AlleyCat global izakaya. But nostalgia’s a powerful thing.
Memories spark new Chinese restaurants
A yearning for unpretentious, Americanized Chinese food prompted another south county restaurateur, Burt Rapoport, to open Pagoda Kitchen in suburban Delray Beach in February.
When restaurateurs Angelo Abbenante and Scott Frielich brainstormed about Blackbird, their upcoming modern-Asian-inspired restaurant and lounge in Jupiter, both brought up similar childhood memories from a favorite Lake Worth area Chinese restaurant.
“When we started talking about this new concept, we both said, ‘Oriental Express!’ at the same time,” says Abbenante, who hopes to open Blackbird by early October. “It was a staple of the 80s and 90s. We said, ‘This is what we want.’ We wanted the red pork spare ribs and all the old-school dishes we remembered. For me, it was the ribs. You’d get them in the bag and they were so meaty.”
Says Frielich: “Originally our idea was to do old-school Chinese, the crispy egg rolls and the really red spare ribs and the chicken lo mein.”
That was before their partner Cleve Mash and chef/partner Tim Nickey presented a more modern view of Blackbird and, says Frielich, “we fell in love with what [Nickey] was doing.”
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Chinese food takeout is key
Still, the partners agree takeout will be a big part of the plan once Blackbird gets up and running.
“Chinese takeout is just that perfect Sunday night family dinner,” Abbenante says.
Chinese-inspired takeout is also the focus of chef Felix Ayala’s 6-month-old ghost kitchen, La Cajita China. In Spanish, the name describes the traditional “paper pail” boxes Chinese restaurants use for takeout and delivery.
What Ayala puts in the boxes may not be authentic Chinese but it is authentic to his nostalgia for the “Chino-criollo” flavors of Puerto Rico, where he grew up and lived until 2017. He adds Caribbean flavors to his fried rice and stir-fries as well as to his Latino take on lo mein.
La Cajita began as a brick-and-mortar restaurant in San Juan. But in September 2017, Hurricane Maria blew it away.
“We lost everything. Even the signs floated away,” says Ayala, who had been trained at the now-closed Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Las Vegas. “I moved to Lake Worth to live with my sister, with 200 dollars and a dream.”
After working other jobs, he and his wife Omayra Ayala opened La Cajita China in February. It’s a four-person operation that focuses its delivery on central and western zones including Greenacres, Palm Springs, Lake Worth Beach and parts of Wellington. They take their orders via direct message on Instagram @LaCajitaChina.
“We use good ingredients and cook to order. Nothing is pre-made or frozen,” says the New Jersey-born, San Juan-raised chef. “Right now, our regular customers are people who tried our food for the first time and went crazy for it.”
One of those repeat customers is Geoffrey Yao, who owns the popular Fortune Cookie Oriental Supermarket in West Palm Beach. That’s where Ayala shops for many of his Cajita China ingredients.
Yao, the American-born son of Taiwanese parents, describes Ayala’s food as having “more of a Spanish flavor.”
“I really like his food and order it a lot,” says Yao. “I’m willing to try other people’s styles. That’s how you become a foodie.”
But Yao also believes you have to know the rules before you can break them.
“You have to know what the original tastes like,” he says. “I meet newcomers who want to cook Chinese food and I say, ‘but you’ve never been to my country and you don’t know what it really tastes like.’”
He encourages new chefs who shop at his store to travel to cities with larger populations of Chinese residents and restaurants that are making more authentic Chinese food.
Yao approaches the more local Chinese inspirations as individual interpretations.
“You have a recipe. I have a recipe. The execution is always different,” he says.
Dim sum dreams
Born and raised in New York, chef Robbie Richter is quite familiar with the kind of Chinese cooking Yao refers to. But long before he opened the new Royal Palms Dim Sum Club, a 3-month-old, Cantonese-inspired catering company in Palm Beach County, Richter was a respected Texas-barbecue pitmaster.
He helped launch New York’s Hill Country barbecue restaurant in 2007. From there, Richter moved on to Brooklyn’s Fatty ‘Cue, a Malaysian-inspired barbecue restaurant, for about a year.
“Since then, I’ve been in love,” says Richter of East and Southeast Asian cooking.
His new catering company has a focus on dim sum and Americanized Chinese classics. He also applies his barbecue experience to dishes that include a 48-hour marinated char siu pork.
“It’s strictly a catering operation. I come to your home and try to re-create an authentic dim sum parlor experience,” says Richter, who caters parties of anywhere from four to 40 people.
When he first launched the business, locals thought it was a dim sum restaurant, he says.
“I was getting calls from people for restaurant reservations. They were so enthusiastic about it. I felt so bad,” Richter says.
Enthusiasm, nostalgia – call it what you’d like. But the wave of interest in Chinese-inspired food proved to be a good thing for the dim-sum caterer.
“I made a lot of contacts,” says Richter, “and a lot of them made reservations for catering parties.”
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New local restaurants serving Chinese food
Here's a guide to the restaurants and food businesses featured in this story.
Mr. Goode's Chinese Takeout: Full-service restaurant and takeout at 1159 S. Federal Hwy., Boca Raton, 561-931-2131, MrGoodes.com
La Cajita China: Ghost kitchen and delivery operation serving Greenacres, Palm Springs, Lake Worth Beach and parts of Wellington, 561-584-0958, on Instagram @LaCajitaChina
Pagoda Kitchen: Full-service restaurant with takeout and delivery at 14917 Lyons Road, No. 100, Delray Beach, 561-229-1770, PagodaKitchen.com
Royal Palms Dim Sum Club: Catering operation offering a dim sum experience at RoyalPalmsDimSum.com, 718-813-7404
Blackbird Modern Asian: Expected to open this fall at 1511 N. Old Dixie Hwy., Jupiter, BlackbirdModernAsian.com
Fortune Cookie Oriental Supermarket: Specialty East Asian market frequented by local chefs at 2700 Forest Hill Blvd., West Palm Beach, 561-433-5818
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: New Chinese food restaurants, delivery in Palm Beach County
