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Business & Tech

Village Cuisine Defines a New Type of Bay Area Chinese Restaurant

Popular Chinese comedy called 'The Village' provides good timing for Bay Area restaurants to launch Village cuisine, a combination of different regional Chinese cuisines.

Authentic—as opposed to Americanized—Chinese restaurants are generally categorized by the regional Chinese cuisine they serve, but a new type of Bay Area Chinese restaurant is doing something completely different.

These restaurants, including a busy one in Cupertino and another one in Mountain View, mix different regional Chinese cuisines and call the combination "Village cuisine." With a name like that, it's reminiscent of , a huge hit in theaters of the Chinese world and at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino last weekend.

The Village owes its plot to the so-called "Dependent Villages," compounds built for military dependents in Taiwan. When the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, those military dependents following the defeated Nationalist government to Taiwan took their various hometown cooking styles into Dependent Villages. As Dependent Village moms gradually exchanged recipes with their neighbors and absorbed influences from the local Taiwanese cuisine, their homemade dishes became more and more heterogenous.

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Such heterogeny is apparent at Liang's Village Cuisine in Cupertino, 19772 Stevens Creek Blvd., 408-725-9999. The restaurant's menu has Northern Chinese noodle dishes juxtaposed with Taiwanese noodle dishes in its noodles section, while listing purely Taiwanese-style rice dishes and Northern-style pan cakes.

Customer Jeremy Chou says combining Northern Chinese and Taiwanese dishes is actually nothing new.

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"There are other restaurants that do the same," says Chou. "What's new is just they call it Village cuisine."

Indeed. For instance, Potsticker King in the same strip mall, 19634 Stevens Creek Blvd., serves mostly Northern Chinese food but mixes it with Sichuan and Taiwanese dishes. However, Liang's Village Cuisine distinguishes itself by not only the combination of Northern and Taiwanese cuisines but also some specialties concocted in the Dependent Village where its founders, the Liang family, used to live.

One of the signature noodle dishes here, la-pian (which literally means "pulled pieces"in Chinese), presents noodles two to three times as wide as linguini. Chou, who grew up in a Dependent Village, says he had such wide noodles in his childhood, but people in his village didn't give it a name other than the general term, noodles, or mien in Chinese.

Chou explains that the wide noodles were cut from dough with a hand-held knife and, therefore, wouldn't look as thin or neat as machine-made noodles. Dependent Village moms used to handmake noodles from the free flour given by the Nationalist government as part of their husbands' compensation packages.

Chou's wife, May Huang, born and raised in a different Dependent Village than Chou's, says those who come from Dependent Villages will never forget their childhood, because houses in a Dependent Village were so close to one another that neighbors became like family.

"We didn't have much, but we were happy," says Huang. "I believe everyone from a Dependent Village will look back and miss it. That's probably why the LA-based chain, Liang's Village Cuisine, has recently decided to open franchises in the Bay Area. As far as I know, there are more people from Dependent Villages in the Bay Area than in LA."

Chou adds that there are many people from Dependent Villages in Silicon Valley, because parents in Dependent Villages used to tell their children, especially sons, to all study engineering. The parents said they had no land or money to pass down to their next generation, so they wanted their children to receive as much education as possible and choose a pratical major for the sake of job security.

"We understand where our parents were coming from," says Chou. "That was a difficult but memorable time. So the name Village cuisine certainly sounds attractive to those who once lived in a Dependent Village."

While Village cuisine is new in the Bay Area, it has existed for about a quarter century in Los Angeles. Liang's Village Cuisine was among a few Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles County that came up with the idea of Village cuisine in the 1980s to serve the county's many Taiwanese immigrants, including those from Dependent Villages.

There was a surge of immigration from Taiwan to Los Angeles in the 1980s, because the United States officially recognized the Communist regime of Mainland China in 1979. Many in Taiwan then were afraid that Mainland China would attack Taiwan sooner or later, after Taiwan's loss of official ties with America.

Liang's Village Cuisine became a chain but never expanded to the Bay Area until 2010. By then The Village had caused a Village cuisine fever in Taiwan. Many Taiwanese immigrants in the Bay Area watched The Villlage and tasted Village cuisine on their visits back in their hometowns. That created good timing for Village cuisine restaurants to open in the Bay Area.

Liang's Village Cuisine opened a San Jose restaurant and a Cupertino restaurant in 2010. It is opening a new one in Fremont this week, according to Gary Chien, a partner in the chain and manager of the Cupertino restaurant.

The small Cupertino restaurant had a long line of waiting customers on Saturday. But not all of them were there for an emotional attachment to Dependent Villages.

Kim Wagner, a Cupertino resident originally from Denmark, says he just likes Chinese food, and Liang's Village Cuisine is close to his house.

Wagner's wife, Suzie, is from Taiwan, but her parents belonged to the population living in Taiwan before Mainland Chinese refugees arrived there in 1949. She never tasted homemade Village cuisine before leaving Taiwan for America, so she says she cannot attest to how authentic the dishes at Liang's Village Cuisine are, though she finds the special sesame sauce over dry noodles on the menu similar to a Taiwanese noodle dish she loves.

Customers at Trend Restaurant, Mountain View's Village cuisine restaurant, are not all there for its association with Dependent Villages, either.

An American-born Chinese, Wei-Hwa Huang, and his Caucasian girlfriend, Trisha Lantznester, are regular customers at Trend Restaurant at 400 Moffett Blvd., 650-625-9388. They say they go every other week for the spicy boiled-fish fillets, which had been on the menu here before the restaurant switched to Village cuisine in July 2010.

Trend Restaurant first opened in June 2007 as a restaurant serving the cuisine of Sichuan, a province in the Southwest of China. According to owner David Shen, he and his partner, Dai-Hong Zhao, decided to convert to Village cuisine, because there were many Sichuan restaurants in the Bay Area, and they wanted to do something special.

Village cuisine includes Sichuan cuisine, as many Dependent Village residents were originally from Sichuan. Trend Restaurant's menu change only entailed an addition of Northern, Shanghai, Hunan (a province in central China) and Yunnan (a province in southwestern China) dishes.

Shen says Taiwan actually kept the best Sichuan and Shanghai dishes from the pre-1949 era, because Mainland China went through the Culture Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and lost many old recipes.

"The most traditional Sichuan and Shanghai dishes are in Taiwan's Village cuisine," says Shen. "And you can get them at our restaurant."

Trend Restaurant is about twice as big as the Cupertino version of Liang's Village Cuisine but still had a line of waiting customers Sunday night. Shen says the restaurant's business has grown 60 percent since its switch to Village cuisine.

"Taiwanese immigrants are nostalgic about Village cuisine," says  Shen.

Henry Yan and his 12 friends were among those going for the nostalgia. The group of 13 all watched The Village at Flint Center last weekend.

"I never lived in a Dependent Village," says Yan. "But I've had Village cuisine in Taiwan. The Village cuisine at Trend Restaurant is quite authentic, especially the braised pork meat balls, Chinese bacon with leeks, and house special, rice noodle soup."

The meatballs originated from Shanghai cuisine. The bacon dish is a Hunan dish, and the rice noodle soup an adaption from a Yunnan specialty. The original version of the Yunnan rice noodle soup has rice noodles separate from the soup, so customers can put the rice noodles in the soup by themselves. Trend Restaurant did that at first, but soon decided to serve the rice noodles in the soup to prevent customers from getting burned by the hot soup.

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