Growing up Jamaican Chinese, you're never quite
Jamaican enough to fit in with the Jamaicans and
you're never quite Chinese enough to fit in with Chinese people.
Ah, it even gets spicy for me sometimes.
I knew that I wanted to open Patois with this type of identity.
It's a reflection of my Jamaican Chinese heritage.
I'm chef Craig Wong from Patois restaurant here in Toronto.
I love to feed people and it must come from my grandmother
because that's exactly what she did.
She fed people.
You know, one of the things that
I wish she would've been able to do
while she was alive, was to come and dine here at our restaurant
and that never happened.
She died very shortly after we opened the doors.
Our jerk chicken chow mein is one of those special dishes
that you'll find only on our menu.
It's that perfect blend and harmony
of Asian and Caribbean cultures.
Many people are shocked to find out that jerk paste
has a lot of origins in Chinese ingredients.
Soy sauce is one of the key ingredients to jerk paste.
And you pair that with scotch bonnet, scallions, thyme,
pimento, ginger.
And we like to add a little bit of rum.
We put a little bit of pineapple, some nutmeg.
And one of the predominant flavors is scallions.
All of these flavors combined to give you this really punchy,
aromatic, super flavorful jerk paste that we love
to use and cook on all kinds of different ingredients.
And now we marinate overnight.
And we actually cold smoke it.
And we cook it on a rotisserie.
And it gives us a super soft and tender,
but really juicy jerk chicken.
And so we take all of these big punchy flavors and we infuse that
with oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, and
some of these key flavors that you'll find in chow mein.
Start with some onions, some shiitake mushrooms.
Chef, you have garlic for me?
I just need a small amount.
Yeah just give it to me right now, I want it right right now!
A bit of Shaoxing wine,
A bit more of that jerk paste,
oyster sauce,
and we have our chicken stock, our jerk chicken stock.
Ah, even gets spicy for me sometimes.
And that’s the basis of our chicken chow mein sauce.
And at this point I drop our noodles.
Add some bok choi.
That cold jerk chicken meat that we’re adding in as well.
So our noodles are crispy.
We finish with our sauce.
With a little bit of cilantro right at the end.
So jerk chicken chow mein,
for me, it’s all about that spicy, crunchy, aromatic meaty notes,
with all of that jerk spice, you really get the spiciness,
and there’s even a subtle hint of smokiness to it as well.
Just want to make sure that they have a fantastic time.
And that we show them a good time.
I always got the same reaction whenever I told somebody that
I'm Jamaican Chinese, you know, whether it be like,
“Man, you are lying to me.
There’s no way that you guys are from Jamaica.”
Or it’s,
“I didn't even know that there were Chinese people in Jamaica.”
My great-grandmother left China when she was two.
And this is going back many, many years.
In the 1930s, there was a lot of immigration from China,
Guangdong province to the Caribbean.
Growing up in Jamaica, we led a very privileged life.
Maybe we weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either.
There was always food on the table.
However, in the 1970s, there was a lot of political upheaval.
The Chinese as a group
were not made to feel welcome in our homeland.
And someone threw a molotov cocktail through my window,
and my bed went up in flames.
But thank goodness I was not in it.
And then they decided in the early '70s to move to Canada.
I was such a bad kid.
You know, if anyone told me not to do something,
you better believe that's exactly what I would go and do.
I knew what school was about and school was never hard.
I just didn't get excited about it. And that's what I found in food,
something that I could channel all of my efforts and
make every part of me yearn to want to do something great.
I was so upset with my parents when I was young,
because they forced me to go to all-French school.
We felt that in order to succeed in this community,
our kids are minority,
they just had to have that little bit of an edge, you know,
and we felt that English plus French
would probably open more doors to them.
Little did I know that my path would take me to
start doing fine dining French cuisine.
In my early twenties, I would leave and go and live in France
for three years,
work in some of the best restaurants in the world.
But I wanted to tell my own story.
Every time I would walk into a
new restaurant, a new kitchen, I'd be the only Asian-looking guy.
And then you start to tell them about your family and
where you're from, and you're just like, you know,
nobody understands.
I could cook other people's food, but it wasn't my story.
Hell yeah. You wanna make a smoked scotch bonnet pepper?
F--- yeah. F--- yeah.
Absolutely.
I’m going to start playing around and do some fun things like
that and experimenting with food.
Yeah. We’re ready, man. Let’s do it.
We got this. This is always what we wanted.
So growing up, my grandmother was
one of the huge food influences for me.
Not only did she cook at home,
but she owned several canteens in Jamaica as well.
And she never differentiated from Chinese dishes that
were cooked with Jamaican ingredients and
Jamaican dishes cooked with Chinese ingredients.
And that was really the place that I started to learn that
there's no differentiation between food. It's what you have,
where you are, what's easy, what's delicious.
And nothing speaks volumes about Chinese culture and
how much generosity and how much kindness there is.
That's exactly the feel that we wanted
to do with our restaurant here.
And now here are these two young impressionable people that
I'm trying to raise at the same time. So I think
keeping my calm, being a bit more patient,
a little less reactive has made me not only a better chef,
but a better person to be around,
and probably a kinder person at the same time.
And I couldn’t like spring to...
He had to get away from these bad people.
Brother,
sorry, I don’t even have a brother.