It appeared at first that I had arrived in Macau by time machine. The hotel’s name, Morpheus, seemed picked to evoke either Greek mythology or The Matrix, but the exterior of the $1.1 billion building makes it clear the proprietors had chosen science fiction. Designed by the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, it looks as though a black block of liquid metal had three holes melted through it before it was wrapped in a fishnet exoskeleton. It’s even more difficult to describe the avant-garde dream space once you’ve stepped inside the lobby. Imagine a glass church built from fractals expanding skyward in chaotic harmony. It’s a bit like the city itself: ostentatious and awe-inspiring, a place that can bankroll wild ambition.

A tiny peninsula across the Pearl River Estuary from Hong Kong, Macau was a Portuguese colony for nearly five centuries. Twenty years ago, the city reverted to Chinese rule, and construction cranes quickly crowded its skyline. Gambling—thanks in part to American corporations such as Wynn Resorts and the Las Vegas Sands Corporation—boomed so unfathomably fast, it now makes Las Vegas seem like the nickel slots. The only territory under the Chinese flag with legalized gambling, Macau now brings in seven times more gaming revenue than Vegas. And so, new casino resorts keep shoehorning in; Morpheus is barely a year old, and it’s not even Macau’s newest hotel.

With only 12 square miles of land, virtually all of it developed, there’s no room for local farms for livestock or produce. Like the trading post it was during its 442 years of Portuguese colonial rule, Macau today is a crossroads where cooking traditions from all corners of the globe converge. Like much of traditional Macanese cooking—a hybrid of Portuguese and Chinese, with sprinklings of Indian, Malay, and East African—Macau is a stew of influences, a place that looks like Europe and sounds like China. But everything here is flown in internationally or trucked from mainland China, and any dish from any cuisine could magically appear before you—provided you have the means.

These days, the greatest demand is for high-roller Chinese food. On the second floor of Morpheus, the Cantonese restaurant Jade Dragon is a kaleidoscope of gold, silver, and crystal, all undulating walls and 12-foot-wide chandeliers. Thumbing through the menu, the existence of a $1,850 fish maw made me shudder at the items marked “market price.” But in Macau, a restaurant like Jade Dragon is not an exception but increasingly the rule. The restaurant was awarded its third Michelin star in December 2018, which automatically warrants a reservation among a certain set of wealthy Chinese visitors. Macau, a city with a population equal to Louisville, Kentucky, has eight restaurants with two or more Michelin stars—more than Chicago or Los Angeles. Cooks who swing for the fences have a receptive audience here.

Kelvin Au Yeung, the 39-year-old chef at Jade Dragon, took me back to his spotless glass-wrapped kitchen. He showed off a brick oven more suited to a Naples pizzeria, where a row of glistening barbecue pork char siu hung, glowing in the flames of lychee wood. While other Cantonese siu mei chefs might use pork loin, Au Yeung uses the marbled pork collars from acorn-fed Spanish Iberico pigs. What emerged from the lychee wood embers, my very first bite after arriving in Macau, was a sweet, crusty, luscious piece of pork char siu good enough to make my eyeballs roll toward the back of my skull and ruin all other Cantonese barbecue for me forever.

Around the corner from the Cartier and Prada billboards, the water-and-light shows, and faux Venetian canals is a sweltering Macau with a soundtrack of Cantonese, honking horns, and air-conditioner hums.

At the entrance of one alley was an orange sign advertising Riquexo, a restaurant that serves homestyle Macanese cooking from the ground floor of an apartment complex. It is not Portuguese or Chinese cooking, or even a straightforward fusion, but a singular cuisine formed over five centuries that uses Portuguese ingredients (olive oil, chouriço) alongside Cantonese (soy sauce, ginger, lap cheung sausage), and marries the two with flavors that have their roots in Portugal’s historical link to the spice trade.

With the notable exception of Fat Rice, the James Beard Award–winning Chicago restaurant, Macanese cooking is rarely found in restaurants, even in Macau—it is a culinary tradition of the home cook, kept alive by the precious few ethnic Macanese living here today. One of the last places to find it is Riquexo. Inside, an elderly woman named Dona Aida de Jesus sat by the cashier, sipping the murky broth of a lotus-root soup. At 103 years old, she’s at the restaurant most days as both an ambassador and for quality control.

All around de Jesus were black-and-white photographs from the Macau of yore. She spoke in a whisper, in short declarative sentences. I told her I came halfway across the world to meet her. She flashed a wide smile and asked a server to bring me a bowl of what she was eating.

“Macanese food isn’t like French cooking, which is pleasing to the eye,” said De Jesus’ daughter Sonia Palmer, who owns Riquexo with her husband. “It’s very down-to-earth.” On the top of my food list was minchi—every family has its take, but it is universally a humble minced-meat hash with crispy potatoes, sometimes with a fried egg on top, and almost always served with rice. The bacalhau à brás was more classically Portuguese, a scramble of salt cod and eggs. And the greatest revelation at Riquexo was galinha à Africana, or African chicken, a local dish of crispy boneless chicken thighs smothered in a sophisticated sauce of coconut milk, garlic, and peanuts. It conjured up the complexity of Oaxacan mole, but made from ingredients that arrived from Mozambique, Goa, Malaysia, and Southern China.

These days, the Chinese population greatly outnumbers the ethnic Macanese and, at least culturally, tends to not veer outside what’s familiar. I grew up 40 miles to the east, in Hong Kong, and used to take the hourlong ferry to Macau with my family, yet this was the first time I was tasting most of these dishes.

When I was growing up in Hong Kong, Macau was a Cantonese Key West—a sleepy resort town that took Hong Kong’s frenetic pace and slowed it down to half-speed. There were the seaside shanties hung with ropes of fish that were salted and drying the way they had been for centuries. I remember the pastel de nata egg tarts, subtly different from the ones I was used to, with caramelized patches of burnt sugar against the smooth, sunflower-colored tops.

But my most indelible memory of Macau happened at my family dining-room table. The Hong Kong people have a beloved dish called Portuguese chicken, something you would never find in Portugal. But the reference was clear: It came from our Macanese neighbors—baked chicken and rice with a curry–coconut milk sauce. It was just exotic enough for Chinese sensibilities that labeling it “Portuguese” sounded right, and it became the Cantonese equivalent of mac-and-cheese, a comfort food for generations in Hong Kong and abroad. I requested the sweet-and-savory casserole no less than once a week from age 7 through 17.

Before I left Riquexo, I asked where in town served a Portuguese chicken like the one I grew up eating. I was led next door to a place called Associação dos Aposentados, Reformados e Pensionistas de Macau. Better known as APOMAC, it’s a senior activities center for pensioners of the Macau government. Inside, you could tell from the hailstorm-like clacking that there was a game of mahjong underway. And then it appeared way in the back: a real-deal restaurant, open to the public, inside a social club for retirees, apparently serving the finest Portuguese chicken in town. APOMAC acts as a link for Macanese in ways greater than its original intention: It helps pensioners fill out paperwork and unearth the taste memories of their childhood.

In the case of Portuguese chicken, it was my childhood too. I last had the dish in high school. Several decades later, it sat before me, in a creamy turmeric-yellow gravy studded with potatoes and bony hunks of chicken. You can tell the story of the Portuguese explorers in that clay pot: Portugal to India, then around the Malay Peninsula to arrive in China. There was a plate holding papo secos, yeasty Portuguese rolls with a crackly crust that begged to be torn apart and sloshed through the curry–coconut milk sauce. I did just that, and one bite of comforting, delicious Portuguese chicken dialed back time.

One night I met up with a former Fat Rice cook named Rich Wang. He grew up in suburban Chicago, earned a law degree, and found himself miserable at his job. He sold a plan to his parents that one day he’d open a fine-dining Taiwanese restaurant in Chicago, but first he needed to walk away from his lucrative law career and learn to cook. Macau, a rapidly growing playground of immense wealth, beckoned.

Wang works at one of the largest casino resorts, at a luxury Chinese restaurant striving for Michelin stars. He had been in Macau for three months, living like a college student in a shared dorm with Filipino, Nepalese, and Thai cooks. I tagged along with Wang to dinner on his day off. Dona Aida de Jesus’s African chicken was five minutes away, as was $285 beef chateaubriand at Joël Robuchon’s place, but our destination was his favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant, Fei Chai Man.

“Macau is, oddly, very open to outsiders like myself,” Wang said. “For a Chinese city, definitely. Because they need people like us.” By “us,” Wang meant workers who’d arrived to Macau with certain skills, English speakers preferably, and could cater to big spenders.

A simple plate of noodles arrived at our table. They were topped with a layer of shrimp roe from the brackish waters of the nearby Pearl River Delta. Locals say the shrimp roe here are brinier and more intense, and indeed, these noodles bore magnificent pungency, something like blue cheese from the sea. Wang ordered another local Chinese-Macau favorite, water crab congee, a thin, light-colored rice porridge with a bright-orange crustacean shell lurking beneath the surface.

“You’ll see that in Macau, there is no limit,” Wang said. “The prices they are charging here would not work for people in New York City or Paris. There are places that use A-5 wagyu in a stir-fry. I mean, who does that?”

The next morning, a deluge of rain seemed to affect everyday life not one bit. It certainly didn’t keep drenched customers from patronizing a covered stall called Sun Sin It Lat—“Fresh and Hot”—where a mountain of fried chicken was piled high next to rows of lotus-leaf-wrapped sticky rice, pork chop buns, and stacks of dumpling-filled bamboo steamers. Both styles of egg tarts were on offer: the Hong Kong style with glossy canary-yellow tops, and the Macau version, closer to Lisbon’s, with a flakier crust and tops pockmarked with caramelization.

The Macau pork chop bun is just that: a slab of fried pork chop nestled in a roll. The innovation at work is sandwiching the pork chop inside a pineapple bun, the much-loved Cantonese breakfast pastry. (No pineapples are involved—it’s named for the diamond pattern crowning the buns.) It’s a Macau specialty that’s both cliché tourist food and something locals actually eat. If you can appreciate the novelty of a doughnut burger or a McGriddle, the appeal of the pineapple bun pork chop sandwich is evident: meat meets sugar, fried meets baked, and crisp meets pillowy, a contrast upon contrast in hand-held form.

A few blocks away at Sun Hong Fat—a Cantonese-style cha chaan teng, a casual diner-style restaurant with a split Chinese and Western menu—the pineapple bun pork chop sandwich was made even richer, with cheese and an omelet also packed between the bread. Just as over-the-top was Sun Hong Fat’s take on French toast, stacked and fried to the height of a Kleenex box, the bread pieces held together with a layer of peanut butter. At a diner like this, you might find hints of the colonial past—maybe the spiced Portuguese sardine bun, quite simply two canned sardine fillets on a toasted bun. But most people living in Macau have Cantonese ancestry, and it’s a safe bet most have never heard of minchi or bacalhau à brás. They’re certainly not regularly ordering the prix-fixe menu at the casinos. In some sense, Macau could be a satellite neighborhood of Hong Kong. So, it’s not incorrect to say that for the majority of people who live here, casual Chinese—stir-fried beef noodles, macaroni and ham soup, wonton noodles with beef brisket—is the true food of Macau.

What doesn’t exist in Hong Kong, however, is the type of elevated Macanese food served at La Famiglia, in the village of Taipa. Its chef, Florita Alves, calls Riquexo’s Dona Aide de Jesus her hero. Alves, third-generation Macanese, only pursued cooking professionally after her retirement from a 30-year career monitoring Macau’s central bank. One of her sons was a partner in a struggling Portuguese-Italian restaurant, and Alves had earned enough renown as an interpreter of Macanese cuisine to do monthlong guest-chef stints at the Four Seasons. And so La Famiglia was reborn as a Macanese restaurant last year with Alves and her husband, Vitor, at the helm.

As a steady lunch crowd filled the restaurant downstairs, Alves brought me to her third-floor private dining room and gave me a crash course on the home-cooked dishes of her youth. Alves’s take on minchi had pork marinated with three soy sauces, pan-fried in olive oil—a Portuguese touch—cooked to caramelized crispness, then served on shoestring and cubed potatoes, and topped with a sunny-side-up egg. There was tacho—a generous winter stew of chicken, cabbage, salted duck leg, Chinese lap cheung sausage, jiggly hunks of pork knuckle, skin, and beef brisket. The broth tasted of its color, gold. Roasted chicken, deeply marinated in a garlic-and-pimento rub, had been perched upon a bed of Moorish-style rice with sultanas, hard-boiled eggs, and crispy shallots. But her pièce de résistance was the capela (“chapel” in Portuguese), a meatloaf meant to resemble—if you squint your eyes—the top of a church dome. It was a combination of pork, chouriço sausage, olives, bread, and character,” said Alves as we dug into serradura, a local cream dessert topped with crumbled cookies meant to resemble sawdust. “When the people lose their identity and culture, they are empty, like a body with no soul.” Money means convenience, and in Macau, virtually any food is one phone call away—sushi, pad thai, burgers, pastas, anything.

But the story of Macau has always been about money, and how it changes a place. The Portuguese were not motivated by altruism when they came here to trade. And though the city is far from the worst of the ills colonialism has brought into the world—no major settlement existed here until the Portuguese arrived—its political history is still marked by coercion, and it was an important node in an unjust system for centuries.

For a time, the flows of capital and power meant it was a town where Macanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and outsiders could coexist in shared prosperity, a place to raise children and where a home-cooking culture could flourish—but one ruled by a tiny European country halfway around the world.

Most recently, money has created a place where casino restaurants can charge four figures for a single serving of abalone and, for at least a little while longer, kitchens like that at La Famiglia can serve a cuisine that could come from no place else on Earth.

The post Macau Is Home to a Cuisine Found Nowhere Else On Earth appeared first on Saveur.

The worst present I ever received was a goldfish, when I was 10. I don’t think I even gave it a name. I’d never before had the responsibility of keeping anything alive, but my parents thought a 1-inch fish was a no-fail starter project. On day two, I sprinkled five times the food recommended—I picked that move up from dinners at my grandma’s—and on day three, we bid the goldfish farewell.

After that, I never entertained the thought of owning a pet, or really anything that grows at all. So when my wife announced she was pregnant two years ago, my reaction was to stand frozen in mortal fear. But fatherhood arrived, ready or not, and the responsibilities came fast and furious. So far, so good.

Of the many ways fatherhood has changed me, the most enjoyable has been my transformation into a total homebody. And no hobby illustrates la vie indoors more than my newfound obsession with baking bread. I now own every book there is to read on the subject, and many Saturday nights have been spent studying dough-folding and boule-scoring. Here’s the thing: I like bread more than I love bread. I taste a few slices of what I bake and jot down notes in my bread journal, and the rest gets turned into croutons. How did I fall for baking so hard? I tried retracing my steps. Is it the microbiology? The primordial novelty of cooking a food made 25,000 years ago? No explanation fully satisfied until I birthed my own sourdough starter.

As it has been for so many new bread­makers, Jim Lahey’s no-knead method was the gateway drug. That four ingredients and 20 hours could yield such a crusty, pillowy, wondrous loaf at home felt like some kind of spell. Using Lahey’s recipe as my baseline, the next step was to tackle sourdough. Here was Mother Nature at her most beautiful and giving: With a mixture of water and flour kept in a properly warm setting, enough naturally occurring yeast—in the flour, on our fingertips, floating in the air—would propagate, leavening the dough on its way to becoming bread.

For the first few weeks, it felt like an exercise in futility. I measured out flour and water to the gram, feeding it at the same time before bedtime. I’d excitedly check in the morning to see if science had worked. All it did was produce a few flat bubbles and remain a lifeless, wet pile of dough. At the end of the second week, I threw my jar of failure in the fridge and picked up a book on pickling.

Then: the miracle of life. While rearranging the contents of my fridge a few days later, I took the jar out and forgot about it on the counter. When I returned several hours later, the soggy mixture had transformed, blooming and crawling halfway up the jar! The mixture smelled like beer and stretched like melted mozzarella. I fed it again that night and the next morning, wonder of wonders, the sourdough starter came alive, doubling in size. What the bread gods were trying to tell me was be patient. Listen to what it needs. Give it love and care. Now, feeding this living dough and making bread with it has become part of my daily routine. I feed it to my son, who calls it “daddy bread.” It’s the most gratifyingly caveman thing I do.

This will be the year I stop buying gift cards for friends. Instead, I will package my sourdough starter in a jar and attach explicit instructions on how to care for it. It will be the cheapest but most meaningful present I can ever give. For some, to have such great responsibility foisted upon them will be as terrible a gift as a goldfish to a 10-year-old. They may humor the process for a few days before dumping it in the trash. And I’d be fine with that. I just need one person to buy in so the lineage continues. Because what is discarded wet dough for some is a living, breathing wonder for others. I hope they see it as I do: That I’m sending this small clump of life into the world.

Get the recipe for Sourdough Starter »

The post Give a Jar of No-Knead Sourdough for Others To Feed appeared first on Saveur.

Garry Kennebrew had fire in his eyes and smoke in his veins since he was very young. He grew up in Gadsden, Alabama, crammed alongside six siblings in a home with no electricity or running water. When he was 6 years old, his mother taught him how to bank the fire that warmed the house in the winter—to take charcoal ash and lay it atop the flames. It kept the embers underneath hot through the night, and the next morning, a quick shake and some kindling brought the fire back up. But it was his grandmother’s skill in the kitchen that stayed with him. Frying chicken is tricky enough with a controlled gas flame, and she had it mastered on the intense and inconsistent heat of a woodburning stove. A half century later, Kennebrew is still taming fire. As the owner and pitmaster of Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que, 30 minutes outside downtown Chicago, he’s one of the foremost practitioners of a peculiar form of barbecue found only on the South Side of this city. Winters are harsh here and outdoor space is hard to come by, so ribs and sausages are smoked indoors, in custom-made glass-walled contraptions called aquarium smokers. They’re called that because they look like giant fish tanks with meat swimming around inside. These smokers, which can cost more than $10,000, employ no dials, knobs, or even an onboard thermometer; they’re simple boxes that house a live fire and capture the smoke it produces. The primary method of controlling the heat produced by the fire is spraying with a garden hose. Every region lucky to have its own barbecue style operates with its own conventions and peculiarities. Beef brisket is the state-sanctioned protein of Texas; pork shoulder reigns in the Carolinas; baby back ribs get smoked and sauced from Kansas City to Memphis. But the style of Chicago’s South Side remains a curious footnote in the American barbecue canon. Few barbecue cognoscenti outside Illinois would consider it top-tier. The restaurants in Chicago still cooking in this manner use a cut many butchers throw away. They cook it indoors in smoke-choked kitchens. And there are only a dozen or so left.

I’d argue that South Side barbecue is integral to the Chicago experience, yet it seems half of the city’s residents have never sampled, much less heard of, this kind of barbecue. I spent a decade as a food writer at the Chicago Tribune, and not a week goes by I don’t receive an email asking for the best deep-dish pizza or Italian beef in town. But no one asks about barbecue, and it’s my favorite of our city’s culinary contributions. When cooked right, South Side style is downright wondrous. Pork rib tips, the knobby end of the spare rib, are the favored meat. Chopped into matchbox-size pieces, these tips are paired with bulbous foot-long lengths of hot link sausages, nestled over a bed of French fries, drenched with a viscous tomato-based sauce, and topped with two slices of Wonder Bread. It is a singular, specific combination of textures and flavors, proteins and carbs. People around here know it as a “tip-link combo,” and like the best barbecue, it finds a dozen ways to stay with you, physically and psychically, leaving evidence to discover hours and days later: dots of red sauce splattered on your T-shirt, a sliver of pork stuck between teeth, woodsmoke emanating from your pores despite a thorough scrubbing.

But as a generation of pitmasters passes on, the specter of Chicago South Side barbecue fading into the culinary hereafter is a sadly real possibility. As much as there’s a lack of patronage from more prosperous North Side customers, the larger reason is that few young people are interested in taking over. The handful of South Side pitmasters fighting to preserve the tradition believe they can win over the uninitiated. They believe that they, with people like Garry Kennebrew, can do for Chicago’s South Side what Arthur Bryant did in Kansas City and Rodney Scott did in Charleston. First they need people to know it exists.

On a Friday last fall, hours before his restaurant began its weekend rush, I returned to Kennebrew’s restaurant, Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que—a place I’ve frequented for the last five years. It’s wedged into a strip mall in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb just beyond Chicago’s city limits in the shadow of one of the country’s largest rock quarries. Before you see the interior of Uncle John’s Bar-B-Que, you smell it. Fifty feet from the front entrance, woodsmoke tinged with some unknowable savory seasoning takes hold in the back of your nose. Once inside, the smoke that envelops you is thick, hot, and meaty. It is intoxicating in small doses, overpowering within minutes, and after a while you don’t even smell it anymore. Kennebrew’s aquarium smoker is 8 feet wide and 4 feet deep, enclosed on four sides with tempered glass and stainless steel, with a roof that slopes to a metal chimney that punches 42 feet up, through the ceiling and extending well above the building. I watched his right-hand man, Derrick McClinton, tame a flame with a garden hose. He sprayed water into the burning mixture of hickory, pecan, maple, apple, and ash. It hissed. Wisps and then plumes of smoke emerged into view, curling as they rose, appearing somewhere between powder white and translucent. On its way up, the smoke passed through three dozen slabs of glistening, mahogany pork rib tips.

The basic procedure for smoking rib tips can be communicated in a sentence: Season tips overnight, smoke, flipping often, for an hour and a half over fire, move to a cooler zone for another hour, serve. But that only gets you 90 percent of the way, and it’s in inching toward that elusive 100 that separates the pedestrian from the acclaimed. When pitmasters of this caliber smoke meats, there is little fussing or second-guessing. Their fingertips are equipped with X-ray vision that can see through solid hunks of meat.

“I’m still learning that 10 percent,” Kennebrew said. “You can do this a lifetime and still not experience all its variables.”

Which makes finessing the finer points of South Side barbecuing difficult to articulate. It’s about reading the signs and knowing when you know. The way Kennebrew and McClinton teach barbecue sounds less procedural and more like abstract wisdom. For example, how does one tell the temperature in the smoker is between the ideal 220–225°F zone? McClinton invited me to stick my hand into the smoker over the hot zone. I could hold it there without recoiling from the heat. “I know when it’s too hot. Believe me,” said McClinton in a tone suggestive of painful lessons in his past.

Temperature and moisture management are the pitmaster’s primary task, and with the aquarium smoker, you can’t just set it and forget it. Controlling the fire is a manual process using oxygen and water to achieve the desired conditions. Say the fire gets too hot. A spray from the garden hose tempers the heat, stopping the meat’s exterior from scorching and turning into leather. If the temperature gets too low, he might crack open the two doors at the base of the smoker, which helps circulate oxygen and fuels the fire. For Kennebrew, it’s a mastery earned by suffering through less than optimal batches of barbecue—thousands of pounds of it. “After about the third year we gained some level of consistency,” he said. “We were no longer trial and error. We had arrived. We could put out consistently good product that can stand up to anybody.”

Some advice for those about to try Chicago barbecue for the first time: From the moment the cashier hands the tip-link combo over to the customer (and it’s almost always a tip-link combo), the contents are degrading. The dual insulation of a foam container and a paper bag steams fries and softens the ribs’ crusty bark. So upon receiving the order, immediately tear a corner from the Styrofoam box to create a vent for steam to escape. (For that reason, it is necessary to always request sauce on the side.) The next problem arises: The majority of these barbecue restaurants are takeout only, typically with transactions made through a bulletproof carousel. (Uncle John’s, a rare exception, has a seating area.) Here, one needs to make quick mental calculus involving municipal speed limits and distance-to-destination, then determine whether it’s worth waiting to consume the rib tips after the drive home. The answer is almost certainly no. South Side barbecue is best experienced moments after payment, with a fistful of napkins, on the hood of your car. Once you unbox the rib tips, cast the two slices of white bread aside. Why waste precious stomach real estate? Opt first for a thick, fatty hunk of rib tip, preferably one studded with cartilage. As with crabs or wings, the high effort-to-food ratio of rib tips is half the point. Don’t delicately nibble; you pop the whole piece in your mouth, then use careful teeth-tongue-jaw cooperation to maneuver and separate cartilage. Now spit the bonelike knobs into the paper bag. It is one of the essential tactile experiences of Chicago dining, alongside dislodging caramel-cheese popcorn from your molars and dripping Italian beef jus down the front of your shirt.

Hot links enjoy a longer shelf life than rib tips. That’s especially the case if this particular establishment flash-fries the smoked sausage. It’s a common practice that creates a crackly casing that’s utterly satisfying when bitten through, a textural counterpoint to the coarse-ground pork and toothsome fat within the chile-spiced link.

With both rib tips and hot links, it’s best to sample sans sauce first to fully appreciate the pitmaster’s control of smoke. Is it subtle? Overbearing? Do the ribs, typically seasoned with a blend that includes paprika and onion and garlic powder, offer a balanced savory character? The purity of smoke-imparted meats acknowledged, venture a dab of sauce. (Unlike ribs from Memphis or Kansas City, brown sugar is rarely used in Chicago barbecue dry rub. The sweetness comes mostly from the tomato-based sauce—typically, one tastes ketchup and molasses first, a host of spices, finally a touch of tang.) Intermittently, break up your meat intake with French fries soggy with the smoky drippings from the ribs nestled above.

When finished, wipe your fingers and the corners of your mouth, then dismount from the hood of your vehicle and be on your way.

Garry Kennebrew’s family moved north from Alabama in 1968, when he was 9, as part of a massive movement of people later named the Great Migration, which saw half a million blacks settle in Chicago between 1916 and 1970 and established the African-American industrial working class. His father found work at a steel mill and provided Kennebrew with a happy, middle-class life on the South Side. He studied accounting and business in college, then made a good living working in corporate America. In 1998, he took a buyout when the hair care company he worked for was purchased and relocated, and started a car wash and detailing business. His shop happened to sit next door to Barbara Ann’s, a renowned South Side barbecue spot. Stopping by several times a week for lunch, Kennebrew developed a friendship with Barbara Ann’s pitmaster—a gentle hulk of a man named Mack Sevier.

If someone were to carve a Mount Rushmore of Chicago barbecue pitmasters, rendered in stone might be the faces of Leon Finney (of the Original Leon’s Bar-B-Que, the first wildly popular South Side barbecue business), Argia B. Collins (creator of Mumbo Bar-B-Q sauce, arguably the most successful retail product to come out of the South Side), the Lemons brothers (the long-running Lem’s Bar-B-Q House), and Sevier himself, the most acclaimed Chicago pitmaster of the last quarter century.

From a block away, Sevier was an unmistakable presence. He was a strapping figure: 6-foot-3 and 300-plus pounds, shaped like a defensive tackle with an ever present Kangol hat. Behind that imposing frame was a man who made the best South Side barbecue I’ve ever tasted. Sevier’s smoked-then-fried hot links in particular were mind-altering, a fatty and coarse pork mix flecked with chile flakes and sage.

Kennebrew still ran his car wash when he asked to apprentice with Sevier at Barbara Ann’s. Over lessons and lunches, they discovered things in common: Both grew up in the South—Sevier in Arkansas, Kennebrew in Alabama. Both were deacons at their church. Both fell hard for barbecue. Their relationship deepened, and eventually Sevier began introducing Kennebrew as his nephew.

“He was the master. He was the man,” Kennebrew said. “There was nobody I could think of that had the full scope of knowledge like Mack. He was the Michael Jordan of Chicago barbecue.”

Kennebrew took over operations at Barbara Ann’s when Sevier opened his own shop, which he named Uncle John’s. In those early years, Sevier struggled. Kennebrew donated equipment and product to thank him for his mentorship. In 2010, when Kennebrew struck out on his own himself, Sevier paid him back by allowing him to use the Uncle John’s name. Kennebrew inherited Sevier’s secrets—the spice blend, the hot link recipe. Kennebrew didn’t even need to offer an invitation: Sevier would stop by the restaurant before it was opened to the public, tasting every item on the menu to ensure his Uncle John’s name wouldn’t be sullied. I asked how Sevier reacted, and Kennebrew sat silent for 30 seconds. “He gave me his blessing,” he said through tears. “He said, ‘Just promise me you won’t change my recipes.’ ”

I surveyed fellow Chicago food writers, pitmasters, and barbecue enthusiasts, and nobody could come up with even one barbecue restaurant with an aquarium smoker on the North Side of Chicago. Put another way: The North Side is predominantly white. South is predominantly black. And South Side barbecue is something cooked by black people, catering to black communities. There already exists a glut of barbecue restaurants on the North Side, and many of these full-service restaurants have loyal followings, including Smoque, Lillie’s Q, and Green Street Smoked Meats. But all those restaurants serve an amalgam of regional styles, a greatest hits of American barbecue from Memphis to Kansas City to Austin, many cooked in gas-powered Southern Pride smokers or Oyler Pits. And while it’s true that they have comfortable chairs and drinks served in Mason jars, I’ve always found it curious that even my most culinarily adventurous North Side friends have at most a peripheral awareness of South Side barbecue, and almost none have tried it. I don’t believe explicit discrimination on an individual level has anything to do with it. But it may say something about being comfortable living in our social silos.

Natalie Moore, a journalist with WBEZ radio and author of the well-regarded The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, pointed to Chicago’s history of housing segregation to potentially explain the divide. Real estate commissions as late as the 1940s could write restrictions into deeds blocking white families from leasing or selling their property to black families. After the Supreme Court struck down this practice in 1948, white families on Chicago’s South Side moved out en masse. What were once all-white neighborhoods in Chicago transformed to all-black. The effects linger to this day. In 2014, Brown University’s American Communities Project named Chicago the nation’s most segregated city. White Chicagoans don’t tend to visit places where South Side barbecue shops are located, Moore said. “If you don’t live or have families in those neighborhoods, you’re not going to be exposed to it,” she said. “Those patterns of segregation still exist today. It’s not a relic.”

A challenge to this arrangement was Honey 1 BBQ, founded in 2003 on the western edge of the well-to-do Bucktown neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. Its pitmaster, Robert Adams Sr., garnered acclaim in local press and on food message boards for his aquarium-smoking prowess. But through 12 years at the location, the business was increasingly subject to complaints from neighbors about smoke and smells. Robert Adams Jr., who runs the business with his father, said even after they spent tens of thousands of dollars to mitigate those issues, the city was still regularly issuing tickets prompted by the complaints of nearby residents. He knew barbecue restaurants on the South Side just weren’t experiencing the same level of public scrutiny. The implication was clear: “City fees, lawyers—we had major expenses, and in the end, the neighborhood still didn’t support us,” he said. “There were a lot of people who didn’t want us there.” In 2015, Honey 1 relocated to Bronzeville, a neighborhood on the South Side, where the restaurant has flourished.

Late in Sevier’s life, diabetes took hold and he began to lose feeling in his fingertips. For a pitmaster, it was an irony on the level of Beethoven’s losing his ability to hear. Doctors implored him to retire, and he sold his business in 2014 (today there’s a competing Uncle John’s Barbecue 20 miles north of Kennebrew’s).

One year later, Sevier died at age 70. Six months after, in December 2015, James Lemons, last surviving of the three Lemons brothers who founded Lem’s Bar-B-Q House, died at age 87. It was a one-two punch of Chicago barbecue legends lost within a calendar year. Among my local food-writing colleagues and pitmasters in the know, our best estimate of the number of people proficient with an aquarium smoker today is a dozen, generously 20.

“You don’t see a lot of young guys trying to do this,” said Kennebrew, who is 58. I asked him who was going to take over when he’s done. One of his sons is a doctor, another is in college, a biology major interested in medicine, and his middle son owns a trucking firm. He says it might be the middle son, if he can talk him into running both businesses. But he doesn’t know. It may end with him. It may be that this singular style of barbecue disappears.

“That’ll be a major tragedy,” Kennebrew said of the thought. “But I’m hopeful. There will be young folks that recognize there’s an opportunity and fill it. Nobody could’ve told Mack that I was coming along.”

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The 16 bar seats at the Chicago restaurant Monteverde offer a view of one of the slower-paced shows in town, even by avant-garde standards: The two female leads perform on a raised stage in silence, heads down, with faces that betray no emotion. The action is all in their hands. You sit, you watch, you don’t applaud, you may even stay for all six hours.

Chicago holds its theater culture in high regard, and at Monteverde, from James Beard Award winner Sarah Grueneberg, the dinner and a show is a show that’s your dinner. Its pasta makers are showcased on a tabletop stage made from Boos Block walnut. Overhead, a 10-foot-long mirror is carefully tilted where the TVs would be in a sports bar. It provides a view of the flour-dusted surface, where pale yellow balls sit, and two sets of hands pinch, crimp, knead, and roll out pastas with balletic precision.

Five nights a week, those four hands belong to Besa Xhemo and Maria Perez. Xhemo comes from Bologna; Perez from Mexico City. Both immigrated to America, they said, to provide better lives for their children. Communication sometimes gets tricky—Xhemo speaks mostly Italian, Perez mostly Spanish, chef Grueneberg mostly En­glish. So they’ve concocted a hybrid language with much gesticulating and the occasional assist from Google Translate.

The pair takes their place at the pasta stage hours before the first customer arrives. They lay out the eggs, flour, and assorted implements that will produce the 60 pounds of pasta the restaurant needs each dinner service. Both were initially skeptical about being displayed so openly, as if they were exhibits at a zoo, but they realized it beat plying in the back kitchen facing a wall. Plus, they say, the more benevolent guests will sometimes send them a glass of wine.

This pasta-making exhibition is entertaining in the way of passing scenery on long train rides. It’s a rather understated performance, where the most exhilarating moment is when a sheet of dough gets shredded into spaghetti on a chitarra. But there’s something genuinely affecting when you watch them fill and crimp tor­telli to order, and moments later, those warm spinach-and-Parmigiano-Reggiano-filled pockets appear before you, still bearing their fingerprints.

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An old traveler’s adage: The more ramshackle the restaurant, the more soulful and satisfying the food find. So here I am at a spot in Wenchang, China, perched along the canal and facing Three Corners Street, with rickety tables, pink plastic lawn chairs, and tarps strung overhead that shade from the fierce sun. Several older men in flip-flops just sit here, for no reason other than it’s midafternoon on Hainan Island, and the air is so sweltering and sticky the smart thing is to remain motionless until sundown.

This restaurant specializes in Wenchang chicken, the hometown specialty, and it is called, fittingly, Wenchang Chicken Restaurant. The 63-year-old owner, Sung Shen Mei, tells me it has operated continuously here since 1927. His grandparents, he says, were the first to make a living serving the dish.

When I ask to watch Sung cook, he brings me to a tight, greasy closet of a kitchen with a wood-burning stove heating a wok of simmering broth. Half an hour earlier, he’d rubbed the chicken’s cavities with salt and ginger and lowered them into the broth, beige from dozens of bird baths before it. Now, Sung uses two-foot-long wooden dowels to fish out the whole, head-on specimens, and they emerge glistening from comb to claw.

Next up: a glass-enclosed alcove by the front of the restaurant, open at the top, where a medieval-looking cleaver sits on a wooden board that has been chopped concave. There’s noise from all directions—incessant honks of three-wheeled motorcycles, fireworks crackling in some nearby alley—and under it all the alluring whack-whack-whack of the meat cleaver, a Chinese Pavlovian trigger if there ever were one. In 30 seconds, Sung breaks down the chicken into two-bite segments, then arranges them on a plate with rubbery blood cakes and chopped gizzards. He carries it to a table on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, along with a tray of chopped ginger, garlic, red chile, sesame oil, and the orange-green citrus fruit calamansi (tasting like a cross between a lime and a kumquat), which he combines into a tart, savory, tingly dipping sauce. The mixture is classically Chinese except for the calamansi juice, which stands in for vinegar, an island twist. The recipe hasn’t changed at Sung’s place in 90 years.

This, before me, is Wenchang chicken, the progenitor of one of the most beloved culinary exports of Southeast Asia: Hainan chicken rice.

In Singapore, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian countries, Hainan chicken rice has achieved last-meal cult status, and the dish is known for the clean taste and relative simplicity of its components—poached chicken alongside a bowl of chicken-fat-slicked rice and cool dipping sauce. When I was growing up in Hong Kong, this was my hands-down favorite meal. And why not? It was unfussy, it was homey, it was skin-on chicken.

For many years after I’d moved to the United States, true Hainan chicken rice eluded me. Even in cities with robust Chinatowns, the versions available were inferior to the ones at home. But recently, I’d seen Hainan chicken rice beginning to gain traction stateside. Each time I’d come across a version at a neighborhood restaurant or in the press, I would yearn for a proper plate of my childhood favorite. The solution? To hunt down the original version and eat it where it was born rather than where it spent its formative years.

Standing in that thick midafternoon air outside Sung’s ramshackle restaurant, I aim my chopsticks for a thigh piece, naturally: It’s the tastiest quadrant of a chicken. What I taste first is that blond chicken skin. It’s plump and fatty as lips. There’s a luscious, gelatinous quality, and the flavor of chicken oil leaching from it is as indulgent as the fat cap of a rib-eye steak. Then I notice the meat—toothsome, gamy, and flavorful like wild turkey or pheasant, but after I dip some into the sauce and chew for a bit, a sweetness comes to the forefront. It occurs to me that what it really tastes like is an exaggerated form of chicken, both delicious and jarring. It brings to mind the apotheosis of other foods: the buttery, marbled beef of Kobe, the fruity, peppery olive oil of Liguria.

This Wenchang chicken experience feels unmistakably Chinese, looks Chinese, and Sung is hovering over me seeking validation in Chinese small talk. Yet, something about this chicken feels miles away from the China I know.

Pagodas, the Great Wall, modern skyscrapers, smog-filled metropolises: That’s China. But on Hainan, as far south as you can stand on People’s Republic soil, your mind’s imagery of China requires a certain recalibration. This is China operating at a slower pace, where fresh juice from just-hacked-open young coconuts is sold street-side for less than a cup of tea. The food is colored by ingredients that are tropical in nature—pineapples, mangoes, rambutans, that calamansi. You don’t normally associate China with coffee plantations, but they grow beans here and drink their brew alongside chewy coconut rice cakes. While air pollution on the mainland is so hazardous that face masks are considered fashion accessories, Hainan’s capital city, Haikou, enjoys the cleanest air readings in China. The seaside resort of Sanya sits on the south end of the island, where in recent years the Chinese government invested billions of dollars hoping to turn it into “the Hawaii of Asia.” But outside Sanya, in towns like Wenchang, little tourism infrastructure exists. It’s a place where roadside dog restaurants operate openly, the type of business the government might sweep under the rug if more Western guidebooks steered tourists here.

Still, Wenchang occupies an important place in the diaspora of Southeast Asian food. Many of the Chinese who migrated to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand during the turn of the last century came from here, and a lot of them took jobs in the restaurant and hospitality sectors. One dish in particular brought back memories of home—Wenchang chicken—and only after it left Hainan Island did it evolve into Hainan chicken rice and explode in popularity throughout Southeast Asia. At its source on Hainan Island, Wenchang chicken remains a homegrown source of pride.

While there might be a thousand restaurants here serving it, what I find is that, instead of each dish looking like the one I grew up eating—poached, sauce on the side—many are cooked differently. Though poaching is indeed the preferred method, I also come across it fried or baked. It’s less about recipe than it is about origin: a dish rooted in a specific place, the same way champagne is from Champagne and everything else is just sparkling wine. The sole requirement of Wenchang chicken is chicken from Wenchang, bred to taste of its sweet island life.

Goofy human-sized chicken statues, with human hands and human shoes and dilated human pupils, stand watch over the entrance of the Longquan Wenchang Chicken Industrial Farm, a half hour outside Wenchang. A government bureaucrat accompanying me (the farm is not open to the public so I had to arrange my visit through official channels) hands over a glossy booklet, and on the first page is sheet music for a song about Wenchang chicken (not the one on YouTube sung by Wu Duo Dong—with the lyrics “Never miss Wenchang Chicken! Nice skin texture, with fragrant meat!”—but the other Wenchang chicken song, by Yang Ji Min).

As we walk, I see two-month-old chickens enjoying their lunch recess: coconut flesh, rice, peanut cake, and Chinese yam, which they’ll eat until they hit their final full weight of around three pounds. (American broilers are a comparative four pounds-plus.)

As we sit down for lunch at the Longquan farm restaurant, the plate of splayed chicken before me illustrates a critical difference between Western and Chinese tastes. For the Chinese, texture is as important a consideration as flavor. It explains the market for jellyfish, shark’s fin, and bird’s nest—foods with little taste, but with an in-mouth slip-and-slide quality that many Westerners find off-putting. The Chinese also tend to prefer meats with bony shards embedded. As a child of Hong Kong, I can speak for the tactile joys of chewing on a piece of crudely hacked, marrow-exposed chicken, slurping out juices, then using only my mouth to maneuver and extract the denuded bones. Wenchang chicken checks off those boxes.

Back in the farm’s kitchen, cooks insist Wenchang chicken must be prepared with a loving touch. Rather than drop the carcass into the pot in one fell swoop, the bird is dipped in and out of the water several times before full submersion—like testing a hot tub with a single toe to get acclimated.

Poaching is only step one of the process. I watch as a chef takes pieces of cooked chicken, insulated with a quarter-inch layer of fat, and stir-fries them in peanut oil and dark soy. The skin somehow manages to pull in the tastes of sweet molasses and soy while morphing in texture from tender to sturdily crisp. Yes, this fried version also counts as Wenchang chicken. And it would knock the socks off any goofy cartoon chicken statue.

One night a few days later, I head to Education Road, where students from several nearby schools converge and every conceivable food cart caters to their thrifty needs at all hours of night. There’s Bao Luo noodles, a soupy mélange of pork slices, peanuts, and beef jerky over rice noodles. Curried fish balls and sausages appear on sticks, and indeed, whole Wenchang chickens hang from meat hooks.

I find several ladies hunching over the sidewalk outside a restaurant. They are tending to a wok filled with a mountain of salt cooking over a low charcoal flame. Passersby gawk—it’s a shrewd business decision. With archeological precision, these ladies proceed to excavate whole chickens buried within the salt mound.

Chen Ji Ying is the 65-year-old proprietor of Ji Ying Salt Baked Chicken. She greets me holding a stack of 100-yuan bills like she’s starring in a hip-hop video. Chen, I’m told by students here, is quite the figure within Wenchang chicken lore. For the past 16 years, rather than using the poach-and-sauce method most other restaurateurs employ, she’s been baking her birds in salt, to rave reviews from happy customers. I’m told at least a dozen other Wenchang salt-baked-chicken restaurants exist on the island.

I sit down for dinner. Then out come the plastic gloves. Put them on, Chen motions to me and my table mates. She places the bird in the center of the table. This is a serious development. Without communicating a word, she’s saying, have at it.

Four pairs of hands simultaneously attack, Hungry Hungry Hippos-style, tearing into hot chicken skin and flesh. I return with a tender shard of meat slippery with chicken fat. I taste it. There is no dipping sauce. This doesn’t need dipping sauce.

After many renditions of Wenchang chicken on Hainan, and a lifetime of eating poultry before that, this single salt-baked bite hits the reset button. It’s meltingly rich and pushes the boundaries of savoriness. Guttural noises tumble out. Chicken has never tasted more of itself. Julia Child, Colonel Sanders, and a legion of bar kitchens in Buffalo found success on some level, but as I swallow my first bite, I’m convinced that only on Hainan Island do chickens become the best possible version of themselves.

Get the recipe for Wenchang Chicken and Rice with Calamansi Dipping Sauce
Get the recipe for Salt-Baked Chicken with Congee and Pickled Mustard Greens
Get the recipe for Rice Noodle Soup with Pork and Pickled Bamboo
Get the recipe for Rice Cakes Stuffed with Coconut and Brown Sugar (Yi Bua)

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