Lucky Garden
Menu Matters
By Chris Amirault
Photo By Kyle Borne

To really understand Chinese restaurant food in the United States, you must learn some nuanced definitions of a word you already know: American.

The most successful type of restaurant in this country by a long stretch, Chinese-American restaurants were for decades quasi-Cantonese establishments, remade through the lens of what the owners and cooks perceived would appeal to ordinary American taste buds. The proof is in the pupu platter: Barbecued pork, chicken wings, crab rangoon, pork fried rice and egg foo yung have been on menus for decades because customers order them by the shovelful.

Of course, the Chinese-Americans running those kitchens and dining rooms, just like most American immigrants, arrived on these shores looking for a way to work, raise kids, build a family, live a life. The Chiu family, a group of brothers and sisters from Hong Kong, did just that at Lucky Garden, a small, unassuming restaurant sitting in a strip mall off Route 44 in North Providence.

Recalling the restaurant’s history, owner Sherri Chiu sits back in her chair and smiles. “Just a couple days each week now,” she says. “I’m taking it easy.” She’s earned it: A regular for 15 years, I know that Sherri didn’t take it easy for most of the two decades since she opened the restaurant with her husband in 1991. When he died four years later, she and other family members toiled seven days a week for years and years, with brothers Kam-Tung Chiu and Kam-Chai Chiu helming the kitchen. Now it’s calmed down a bit. “The kids are out of college,” she jokes.

Lucky Garden serves up the American Dream, and you’re lucky for that. However, you might not know it if you’re unaware of a last, quiet definition of American.

Every Chinese restaurant worth its soy has two menus, known as the American menu and the Chinese menu. The American menu has standard Chinese-American fare appearing on printed, plastic-enclosed folios, which often appear at the table with sliced white bread—a clear sign that you have the wrong menu.

The Chinese menu is less predictable, perhaps appearing on a separate menu, a white board, even on handwritten signs taped to the walls; often, the server explains the menu tableside in Mandarin. Usually it’s built around seasonal or daily specials, winter braises and stews, sautéed vegetables or steamed fish they procured fresh.

Whatever its form, that Chinese menu is filled with intriguing delights, and the best time to explore those delights is at dim sum, the small-plate excursion that Lucky Garden does better than any restaurant I’ve tried in New England. Every weekend morning, the family sorts pea pod leaves and baby bok choi, makes and fills dumpling skins and preps more food by hand than most families do in a year.

As dim sum service gets rolling around midday, the woks, steamers and fryers present plate after plate of this wondrous food: Rich pork soup with cellophane noodles. Chive blossoms sautéed with garlic and a touch of chicken stock. Sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves encasing chicken, shiitake mushrooms and sausage. Homemade salt-and-pepper tofu, deep-fried and served crispy and meltingly hot. Deep-fried sesame balls, with sweet rice flour dough encasing a red bean paste. Shanghai soup dumplings ready to squirt rich stock on your tongue or shirt.

Chicken feet, shu mai, taro dumplings, steamed rice noodles, char siu bai: The list goes on and on, and you’ll eat a bellyful for sure. But save room, for one of the state’s great pastries awaits you for dessert: egg tarts warm from the oven, the quivering custards encased in a rich, buttery crust. In Hong Kong, where they were invented, they are known as dan tats, a Romanized name for the tarts that appeared around World War II, a delicious and tasty hybrid metaphor for all that is good about the authentic pleasures of top-shelf dim sum.

But don’t look for the egg tarts on any menu. Instead, you’ll find them tucked on the back of the dim sum ordering slip, unless you’re fortunate enough to be on hand when a tray of fresh tarts makes the rounds—or smart enough to become a Lucky Garden dim sum regular.

Just be sure to hold the white bread. eR

A regular contributor to Edible Rhody, Chris Amirault has written about food and drink for Rhode Island Monthly and Saveur and is the director of eG Forums, the online component of the Society for Culinary Arts & Letters.