Through my chef training, I've come to understand the value of ingredients that come from organic and biodynamic farms, and how using them in your pantry can transform the basis of your food. When you compare the prices to what the place down the street's charging for a lunch plate—I can't compete with that. But I hope people that come to Mister Jiu's can taste the difference."I have always felt that Cantonese food and California cuisine have a similar soul."
Part of my frustration with Chinese-American food was that everything was tasting the same to me. I'm positive that every restaurant makes a dish better than the next, but you don't know that when you walk in, because there's so many things [on the menu]. I'm sure the initial thought was, let's give so many options that people feel like they can find something they want. But I wish places would just tell you what they feel passionate about making, or which dishes they think are exceptional.WATCH: Brandon Jew Shares His Favorite Bay Area Eats on Chef's Night Out
Our XO sauce is made with shrimp that we dehydrate, and we reconstitute them by frying them with ginger, garlic, scallions and chili. XO sauce, to me, is always made from a mix of dried ham and dried seafood, so we use a mix of spicy salami. For other ones, we use nice prosciutto. We take time to build a pantry here with items we believe in.One of our garnishes is these tea eggs we make that look like eyeballs. Usually, tea eggs are hard-boiled and cooked in dark soy, spices, and heavily brewed black tea. I've always loved them, and we combined that idea with the eggs in gelée that I loved eating in Paris. We soft-boil quail eggs and set them in an aspic made of toasted barley tea, and serve them with an amaranth cracker and caviar."Even something like Peking duck—who the fuck thought to blow air through the skin of the duck, and then baste it with sugar and soy, and then hang it up and dry it with a fan for two days and then roast it?"
After I got my degree in 2001, I moved to Italy. I'd been cooking part-time while I was in school, and loving it every step of the way. I couldn't afford to go to culinary school, and I was still paying off my college loans, so I found apprenticeships—first in Piedmonte, then in Bologna, where I lived upstairs from the restaurant and worked all the time.RECIPE: Green Garlic and Egg Drop Soup
There's a lot of crossover between Italian and Chinese cuisines, too. There's such a pride for the regionality of the food. In Bologna, it was so intense how much they put into preserving their traditions. There's a monument there for tagliatelle, saying exactly how wide and how long it should be.After coming back here, the authenticity question comes up all the time. I'm trying to make food that's authentic to San Francisco, and to this neighborhood. This neighborhood was where people were creating dishes that attracted an entire city.Some of the dishes I wanted to do here are nostalgic to my parents, stuff they ate at home. The spelling of my grandfather's name got changed, which happened to a lot of immigrants, because when he arrived in the US, the processor figured, "This is how I spell Jew. J-E-W." (My grandfather used that name to get into America, but it wasn't even our real family name. I haven't really told people that, because it would probably confuse them even more.) But my idea with changing the spelling of the name was, if my name was "Jew," it should be spelled traditionally: "Jiu." Jiu has so many meanings to it, [depending on] the way you pronounce it.As the world becomes more globalized and homogenized in some ways, there's still a desire, at least for my generation, to hang on to some of these things before they get more and more diluted.
As told to Hilary Pollack. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.