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I tend to have only a vague awareness of the regional origins of the Chinese restaurant I’m dining in — be it Mandarin, Cantonese, Hunan, or Szechuan. Until this evening, I would not have known, for example, if I was eating in a Chiu Chow (Chaozhou) restaurant. Chiu Chow, a primarily seafood-based cuisine, hails from “the freshwater deltas and the ocean along the coast of Guangdong (Canton), the province that borders Hong Kong,” according to the story “Psst, want Chiu Chow?,” by Linda Burum, in tomorrow’s Los Angeles Times food section.

Chiu Chow specialities include a cold crab dish which is steamed upside down so the juices and flavors are retained in the shell; a porridge that is basically a rice soup loaded with tiny oysters, baby clams, slivers of smoky dry fish and shrimp; a layered vegetable dish of nappa cabbage, mushrooms and greens braised until tender; and shrimp bundles closed with a chive knot. Gayot says that Chiu Chow flavors are “lighter than what you find in Hong Kong seafood houses, but the flavors are more complex through the use of larger combinations of ingredients.”

If you’re looking to further bone up on local varieties of regional Chinese cuisine, as I really should, then try lowendtheory who has a very good online compendium of L.A. restaurants and guide books. He cites, in particular, author Carl Chu’s Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles: A Guide to Regional Chinese Cuisines: “Awesome book that describes Chinese regional cuisines and lists many practitioners for each style.”

The LA Times held their Chiu Chow pow wows at:

Seafood Village
684 W. Garvey Ave. (Chandler Ave.)
Monterey Park, CA 91754
626-289-0088

Photo credit: Overunder, taken in a Chiu Chow joint in Kowloon City, Hong Kong