By Staff Writer
Chef Hua Zhang’s plan to bring Shaanxi cooking to New York begins, by his own telling, under a bridge.
Before the awards and the apprenticeship, Zhang says there was more than a year without a proper room. He slept under a bridge while looking for kitchen work after leaving the countryside with little money and few connections. The jobs he eventually found were the lowest in the kitchen, with early starts, late finishes, burns and cuts. He stayed.
The cooking itself goes further back, to festival mornings in Shaanxi. He remembers older relatives at the stove, steam in the courtyard and flour being turned into food for a full house. More than any restaurant, that remains the reference point he returns to.
In 2002, Chef Hua Zhang apprenticed under Master Chou Qiming, whom he credits with teaching him that a cook’s character matters as much as skill. Recognition came slowly. By Zhang’s account, he won a special gold medal at a 2009 Shaanxi culinary championship and was named among the province’s top executive chefs. Further recognition followed, including a 2016 designation tied to Shaanxi’s intangible heritage food traditions.
What occupies him now is less about competition and more about what happens when a regional cuisine leaves home.
Zhang draws a clear line between what can change and what should not. Spice levels can shift. Supply chains can change. Portions and presentation can be adjusted. But some methods, in his view, lose something when they are standardized too aggressively.
He points to broth kept over time and dough worked by hand as examples. He has also spent recent years teaching younger cooks and documenting regional methods, with the idea that a cuisine only survives if the next set of hands knows how to make it.
The expansion is deliberately slow.
Shanghai comes first, through hotels, festivals, tastings and teaching. If that model works, New York follows. Zhang is not describing a large flagship restaurant as the first move. He talks instead about collaborations, demonstrations and cultural programs that introduce people to the work behind the food before trying to scale it.
It is a modest opening for a larger ambition.
Chinese food has traveled around the world, but regional Chinese cooking often arrives through a small number of dishes. Zhang wants Shaanxi cuisine to travel with more of its context intact.
That movement between China and New York is one Da Vinci has explored from other directions, including in its profile of Yuhan Liu and the effort to build a global runway for Chinese fashion. In Zhang’s case, the vehicle is food.
He knows adaptation will be part of the process. A different city will ask for different things. What he says he wants to protect is the internal standard, the memory of how the food tasted before it became something designed for a market.
Asked where he wants to be in three years, Zhang does not point to another title.
He would rather have left behind students who can continue the work and a clearer route for Shaanxi food beyond the province.
For now, that route runs through Shanghai, then New York.
The long way, on purpose.
