In Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood, the red brick building that houses The Spice Table has become known as the go-to spot for the soulful flavors of Southeast Asia. With a menu highlighting some of his favorite dishes inspired by travels to Singapore and Vietnam, Chef Bryant Ng has cooked his way into the hearts his customers, critics and influential magazine editors. For Ng translation is more than words and language. It’s culture, food and flavor; Ng aims to capture travel experiences and bring them home.

 

Ng’s culinary career includes stints in kitchens that turned out elegant French preparations and authentic Italian dishes. When it came time to open his own place the flavors of his family heritage in Singapore and his wife’s Vietnamese roots evolved into one of the most celebrated food stories in Los Angeles, including glowing review by Pulitzer winner Jonathan Gold and his being named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs.

Later this Spring Ng’s adventures around the world and in the kitchen will come full circle in Singapore at the inaugural World Street Food Congress. Along with Anthony Bourdain, James Oseland and Jean-Georges Vongerichten Ng will join KF Seetoh on the council for the event in Singapore.

We stopped into The Spice Table mid-afternoon to find Ng stoking the fire at his customized grill setup—which includes a section designed specifically for making satay—to bring the perfect amount of smoke and char to his ribeyes, chickens, burgers and vegetables. While savoring the aromas from the grill, Ng shared his thoughts of the Street Food Congress, cooking and traveling through the streets of LA and the world.

How did the idea to plan a street food congress come about?

I met Seetoh the last time I was in Singapore. He told me about the congress and asked if I wanted to be involved. It’s about preserving culinary heritage. We talked about how the children of hawkers are not becoming hawkers. They are going into medicine or finance which is great, but we are losing a very important part of Singaporean heritage, which is the food. So what will happen when the older generation stops cooking and retires? It could disappear.

What’s the strategy for preserving it?

We need to open that dialogue. We need to get hawkers and street food professionals and people who are in large companies and other chefs like myself or people who are media personalities like Anthony Bourdain to discuss ways we can maintain culinary heritage. We hope to create incentives for the younger generation to go into the field. Singapore is not chef-driven it is food-driven. You don’t know who is cooking the food—it is just auntie and uncle back there. How do you make cooking sexy? How do you make it lucrative? How do you create financial incentives? How do we get the younger generation to say, I really want to go into cooking.

How have your travels influenced your menu at The Spice Table?

I love cooking. For me it’s about experimenting—coming back from a trip and coming up with these dishes that I love to eat. I want to share some of that street flavor. One time we were in Saigon and we went to a northern Vietnamese restaurant that is known for grilled chicken feet. It was the most beautiful thing: they were perfectly cooked, perfectly charred. It had a sweet flavor to it that took in all that smoke. What he does every morning is splits the chicken feet in half so that they have more surface area. When they grill it, it is perfectly fanned out. The flavors were so simple, but so spot on. I took that idea and flavor profile and put it into a chicken entrée here. This particular dish is also inspired by Campanile restaurant. I worked there about eight years ago. Now that the restaurant is gone, this is my ode to Campanile. They served a crispy flattened chicken over mashed potatoes with garlic confit and arugula. It was so simple, but everybody loved it. I wanted to take the flavor profiles I had in Vietnam and translate it to this dish. I make it with lemongrass, shallots, garlic, honey, fish sauce and chilies.

How do you translate the experience of standing in a night market in Singapore eating something off of a piece of tin foil to your restaurant menu?

When I eat something in Singapore or Vietnam I am trying to understand more than the ingredients. I am trying to capture, what I am feeling when I am eating. I taste the flavors, but there is more to it. There is the smoke. There is the attention to detail. So how do I bring it here and really be able to execute it the way it should be and give it respect? To me it is capturing that soul. Trying to understand it as best I can and translating it to dishes I make here.

Do you consciously include menu items that are handheld, like your kaya toast and fried chicken, to capture that texture and tactile experience of eating street food?

Absolutely. And also like the dish the Salted Duck Egg Crab Bee Hoon. It’s a whole crab. You have to commit. You have to crack the crab. It’s going to be messy, but that’s part of it. When you are out of the street, you eat the food as it is. That’s part of the beauty of it. I ate a couple versions of Crab Bee Hoon in Singapore. I try to capture the nuances of the flavors.

Is this part of the reason for your grill being inside the dining space, for your diners to smell the smoke and see the char?

This grill is very much a statement. Our front door is right there. You walk in and immediately see the grill. To me it is a commitment to a craft and the way we cook which is vey traditional with wood and charcoal. You see that. You smell that. You feel it. There is a literal and figurative warmth to it.

What were the modifications you made to this grill for it to be able to cook traditional satay?

If you look here there is a large gap between the coals and the cooking surface. We created this section to resemble those charcoal boxes you see all over Asia made for cooking grilled meats. The cooking surface is closer to the heat surface. What’s important is to get that char. You need it to caramelize to get the flavors to get in there. You need the smoke. I make lamb belly, chicken, beef and tripe satay. We’ve done sweetbreads.

Coming from a fine dining background at Mozza and Campanile, how does this environment, the grill in the middle, the brick walls and Vietnamese bird cages hanging from the ceiling tell your story?

Working in those places it was about learning good technique, learning how to cook and how kitchens and restaurants run and a good understanding of a professional kitchen. Here at The Spice Table it is about Southeast Asia. That is where my family is from. My mom is from Hong Kong. My dad’s side is from Singapore. My wife’s family is from Vietnam.

Besides Southeast Asia have you eaten street food in other countries? Can you share a food memory that sticks with you?

For my honeymoon we went to Paris, Barcelona and San Sebastian. The best thing we ate was this potato and leek pancake at a farmers market in Paris. A two Euro potato and leek pancake was better than any place we dined. That was the most memorable thing we ate. To this day that still inspires me. For me that was so simple, there was cheese in it, it was pan fried. It was beautiful. I think some of the best things are simple. We are a mom and pop shop. When people come in I want them to feel the heart and soul and love put into the food and service. Wherever we go I want to be able to capture that.

 

What inspires you to keep cooking?

My goals have changed. It has a lot to do with my conversations with Seetoh about the World Street Food Congress. When I opened The Spice Table it was simple—I just wanted to cook and have a restaurant to do the food that I wanted to do. Now I think more about how important it is to uphold this culinary heritage of Singapore. I want to go back there to learn more. I need to cook more and be somebody that can help carry the torch to uphold those traditions.

What are you most looking forward to during the conference?

I want to see what kind of impact this congress can have. We need it to be more than a feast with everyone patting ourselves on the back. If we truly want to make a difference then we have to make those connections, have a dialogue and make an action plan.

But along with the flashes in the pan, I saw some new developments that seem to have both legs and merit.

In the big picture, Nordic naturalism (with its embrace of ancient, earthy and cold-weather foods) and Spanish modernism (which celebrates intense flavors and technical skills) are…

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Or if, I gave up 2 years of my adult life to slave in a little respectable Japanese omakase restaurant and learnt, first hand and in my face, all the secrets of the Japanese kitchen, would I be regarded as a soldier of their food culture? Could I tout and hawk comforting and even grandiose versions of all those iconic flavours and be respected as an advocate and their culinary ambassador? I doubt so, especially in my case: I would not have that all-important element of soul to complete that journey. I would not have that pure local childhood joy of wonderment, that virgin innocent first time connection with the devilishly alluring smoked BBQ ribs as a naïve and curious little kid. These pure experiences would easily mould my impressionistic palate and root me to the culinary heritage of the land.

I had the pleasure to spending time recently with Bryant Ng and his ardently wired-in wife Kim Luu. They are the folks behind The Spice Table, a Singapore-Asian-inspired restaurant in LA. He was christened Food & Wine’s Best New Chef this year. His family’s DNA has some Singapore culture and food heritage but he’s all bred and born in the USA. They made a “rediscovery” trip back to Southeast Asia to “pay homage” and reconnect with its food culture. Honestly, I wouldn’t know how many trips he has to make before he can surface for air and say fait accompli, or in local speak here, “ho say liao” (all nicely done). We did the usual: tore into mean laksa, bak kut teh, salted egg yolk prawn tempura, white pepper crabs, satay beehoon, chicken rice etc. It was an amazing graze.

But it would be hard to connect, let alone reconnect, if the line was not linked in the first place. If one hadn’t had humble childhood peasant pleasures like a bowl of plain rice porridge with half a boiled salted egg — and been consumed by that purity — it would be hard (if not impossible) to even think of introducing that earthy and salty yolk as a sauce for fried crabs, or even calamari. If you can’t taste a feeling, a memory or a word, you are at best a culinary anthropologist, struggling as a chef. Damian De Silva, who junked his western culinary school training to go back to his comfort basics at his brand new Immigrants Gastrobar in Singapore, says you just can’t teach recipes, “you gotta teach feel.” Damian offers “lost” dishes like Eurasian Feng, a tediously done offal stew and Hakka roasted intestines, to pair with Japanese whiskeys.

But I think Bryant has an edge; he is acutely curious and openly religious with his food. His has the kind of roots that tells him just how sacred the laksa rempah is, the blasphemy of using lemon instead of calamansi lime in chicken rice chilli and the redemption in authenticity. His menu reeks of Southeast Asia, dishes like beef rendang, kaya toast, grilled pig’s tail (reminds me of the vanishing Teochew Lo Mei), BBQ chicken wings accented with daun kesom, cha kway teow, Hainanese chicken rice and kon loh mee.

He is coming back again for another exploration trip soon, and I think he knows it’s not just about finding flavors and recipes but finding gastro-soul in this city of unique chow. But Bryant, do consider a hop over to Indonesia, to “second” cities like Solo and Bandung. You’ll be surprised just how connected you may be to these strange lands in Southeast Asia — so as long as the yearning and hunger to approach the future with the past in tow is calling.

Bryant Ng is chef-owner of the Spice Table downtown. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times /September 21, 2012)

Bryant Ng is the chef-owner of the Spice Table in downtown Los Angeles, the Singaporean-Vietnamese restaurant he opened last year with the help of his wife, Kim. Ng grew up in the restaurant business; his parents owned a Los Angeles restaurant called Wok Way, and his grandparents owned a Cantonese-Polynesian spot in Santa Monica in the ’60s called Bali Hai. After graduating from UCLA with a microbiology degree, he decided to pursue a cooking career and attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Ng has worked at Daniel in New York and Campanile andPizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. He recently was named a best new chef by Food & Wine magazine.

What’s coming up next on your menu? I’m heading over to Singapore and Vietnam in a few weeks to visit family and be inspired by the region. It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve been back, and it’s about that time to add some perspective and invigorate. Lately I’ve been cooking traditional dishes I love to eat, like char kway teow (flat rice noodle dish with pork, bean sprouts, egg and cockles when I have them, clams when I don’t)…. I’ll be doing some whole crab dishes, like chilecrab, salted egg yolk crab and even a chilled crab (I love chilled seafood).

Latest ingredient obsession? All things seafood. I recently had on the menu a raw and fried geoduck dish. The raw portion was served with a fragrant chile oil made with garlic and preserved vegetables, and the fried portion was coated in ground panko and served with a black pepper lime sauce. I love geoduck, not only because it’s the most phallic looking creature on the planet (it looks phallic on the siphon portion and the base), but also because it’s delicious. The siphon eaten raw is sweet, briny, meaty and crisp. The mantle portion is like the best fried clams you’ve ever had, the ideal flavor and texture.

What restaurant do you find yourself going to again and again? Dai Ho in Temple City. This noodle house has a very concise menu of noodle dishes as well as other veg, tofu and meat sides. Their spicy beef noodles, dan dan noodles, minced beef noodles are superior versions of those dishes. The noodles are cooked perfectly, and the broths and condiments are well seasoned and flavorful. People complain that they are too expensive at $8 or $9 a bowl when they can go somewhere else and pay $6. To me, the extra $2 to $3 is definitely worth the quality that I can taste.

The one piece of kitchen equipment you can’t live without? This is going to sound like a pretentious chef answer, but I’ll say it anyway: my palate. The palate is the one thing that people in kitchens take for granted and underutilize. Yet it’s so important. The hardest thing for a restaurant to achieve is consistency, and the only way to do that is to taste your food. That’s why a friend of yours, whose tastes you trust, loves a particular restaurant but when you went there it sucked. The chefs and the cooks weren’t tasting that day.

What chef has most influenced you? Nancy Silverton: dedicated, detail-oriented, amazing palate, inspirational and an awesome dresser.

So Los Angeles deserves our thanks for one of the finest Friday nights we’ve had this year.

We started downtown at the Los Angeles Food & Wine festival’s Andrew Zimmern-hosted Asian night market. Zimmern was actually cooking a Flintstones-sized rib there. Yu Bo flew in from Chengdu to make ma la dumplings steps from the Staples Center. Kogi BBQ parked its truck. Between Kogi and the Fukuburger chicken and donuts, the grilled tuna from the Picca/Mo-Chica crew (who do indeed remind diners of the overlaps in Peruvian and Asian cuisine) and the skate with sambal from the Spice Table’s Bryant Ng, LA’s hot crop of flavor-over-frills chefs were representing their city well.

But after circling the night market a couple times, we left for dinner. Though other chefs warned us that maybe we should visit another night — given that Ng, his wife Kim Luu-Ng and key members of his staff were all at the night market — we headed over to the Spice Table, the Little Tokyo restaurant that specializes in Southeast Asian food.

This is the food of the streets, food that fuses ideas from many countries, food you find in hawker stands where you sweat through your clothes while you sit outside and eat huge bowls of soup and mounds of rice as you watch old men grill meat on charcoal.

Even without Ng in the house, the Spice Table was superb. The chicken and beef satays were tender, moist, full of Asian flavors and charred exactly right. The Hainanese chicken over rice and the laksa, with its rich coconut-seafood gravy, satisfied constant cravings we’ve had since visiting Singapore. We also loved the fried cauliflower with fish sauce — crispy, light and funky. And the kaya toast reminded us that coconut jam on buttered toast with an egg/soy sauce/white pepper dipping sauce would work just fine for breakfast, dinner or dessert. Think of this as the Southeast Asian version of salted caramel.

After dinner, we headed to the Sayers Club in Hollywood. To get inside, you walk through a Papaya King and an unmarked yellow door, but this is no PDT-style speakeasy. It’s a cozy room that feels like a full-on nightclub/performance space, and it’s part of Sam Nazarian’s SBE empire.

It was jazz/hip-hop night (the Sayers Club often has rock nights, too), and DJ Bizzy kept the crowd bouncing, smiling and drinking with a smart, soulful playlist that had us at Rob Base and Run-DMC. (One night later, we saw the versatile Bizzy playing Calvin Harris and Avicii at David Arquette’s Bootsy Bellows club while Arquette himself put on a bizarre, interpretive puppet show.)

The Sayers Club crowd was ultra-diverse, with a mix of cultures, fashions and ages that you just can’t get from the single-minded “image promoters” less creative nightclubs hire. That led to an in-the-moment, of-the-moment vibe where people were actually having fun. Unlike the bored, distracted folks you often find at big bottle-service clubs with dozens of “VIP tables,” iPhone use was kept to a minimum.

And when a band led by Tony Royster Jr., perhaps best known as Jay-Z’s drummer, hopped on stage, the appreciative, attentive crowd danced and clapped and raised their glasses. There were all-American-looking guys dressed up in white suits and exotic ladies purposefully dressed down in denim on the dance floor for every single song. There were short Asian gals in high-high heels cavorting with tall handsome fellas who looked like they had just put on a fedora after playing pickup basketball.

This is what we wish Fort Greene was really like. Why isn’t there a spot like this in New York, steps from the new Barclays Center arena, curated by, say, Yasiin Bey (can we just keep calling you Mos Def, please?).

Royster and friends play at the Sayers Club every two weeks. Jay-Z opens up the Barclays Center with eight concerts in September/October and will become even more of a Brooklyn icon when the Nets start their season. Let’s make this happen in Brooklyn, Hov.

Ng, too, owns a Los Angeles eatery that is a hybrid of Asian cuisines. But to say that Ng is following in the family footsteps misses the essence of what Ng does, and of what his ancestors did.

“Those were businesses, restaurants run as businesses,” the 35-year-old said of his parents’ and grandparents’ places. “They weren’t particularly original or different. They were modeled after something else.”

Ng, who was born in the Northridge neighborhood of Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, has pursued a different model. The Spice Table, a 60-seat spot that he opened in March 2011 in the Little Tokyo neighborhood, emphasizes the cuisine over the business plan.

“I’m focused a lot on food,” Ng said by phone. “I’ve trained in restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, so my upbringing is more food-focused than their restaurants. I try to go away from anything I see as a trend,and be truthful to what I’m doing here. I don’t think my grandparents thought like that. They didn’t think about food. With my parents, it wasn’t their main passion or main career.”

A big payoff for Ng came in April, when he was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s “best new chefs.” Ng is in Aspen for the Food & Wine Classic and will join the other nine best new chefs for appearances in the Grand Tasting Tent, a first at the Classic. Ng will serve short-rib and beef tongue rendang, peanut sambal, fried anchovies and coconut rice during the Grand Tasting at 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

Like the previous generations of his family, Ng’s talents were not limited to the kitchen or restaurant business. Ng’s father was a cosmetics chemist, his mother a microbiologist. His grandfather owned a detergent factory. For them, owning a restaurant truly was a business — they hired cooks to run the kitchen.

Ng spent large chunks of his childhood at Wok Way, peeling shrimp and washing dishes. At UCLA he studied molecular-cell and developmental biology, then worked as a consultant for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. He enjoyed the work, appreciated that he was able to develop his business skills.

“But I realized it wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he said. “I began to explore other opportunities.”

Ng decided on the food business. In 2002, impatient to get on with his career, he chose the shortest chef course there was — at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, which offered a three-month program.

“I really wanted to get back to the U.S. and start working,” he said. “Education is a lot of theory, and it’s very different than the real world. I wanted to get into the real world.”

Ng returned to San Francisco, where he had been living, and took a job at La Folie, a French restaurant.

“I wanted a kitchen that had really good systems. In the U.S., it’s the French kitchens that are most codified,” he said.

At Campanile, in Los Angeles, he met Nancy Silverton, who would become a key colleague. He switched coasts for a job at Daniel, in New York, then returned to L.A. to help Silverton open Pizza Mozza, a partnership with Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich, where Ng was chef de cuisine.

Ng opened the Spice Table last year with his wife, Kim, an attorney who managed to run the front of house in the early months. (Kim’s shifts are down to hostessing on Friday and Saturday nights.) Though he had cooked French, Italian and California cuisines, his restaurant is pure Asian, influences primarily by Singapore, where his ancestors came from, and Vietnam, a nod to his wife’s heritage. For lunch, the menu is filled primarily with sandwiches inspired by the Vietnamese bánh mi. At night, the menu switches over to dishes like beef rendang, a dried-beef curry dish that uses short ribs and tongue, and laksa, a traditional noodle dish.

The food is inspired by all of Ng’s experiences: his training in Paris, the kitchens he’s worked in, his childhood in L.A. — even McDonald’s. But the decision to focus on Asian cuisine was an easy one — even if the Spice Table has little philosophical resemblance to the restaurants of his parents and grandparents.

“It was very natural,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to cook the food of my heritage. I knew this was the guiding force. It was something I knew I’d be able to do comfortably. Because it was a part of me. I always felt like an impostor doing French and Italian food. The cuisine I do now speaks to me.”

stewart@aspentimes.com

(Above) Chef Bryant Ng feeds the fire. The lunch menu is built around Southeast Asian-inspired sandwiches on homemade bread, made with Vietnamese ham, paté, headcheese, garlic mayo, pickled carrots, pickled daikon, cucumber, cilantro and jalapeños. Photos: (Bryant ng) Courtesy of Anne Fishbein at LAWeekly; (sandwich) Courtesy of Rick Poon. 

“Like a good Asian boy, I studied molecular, cell and developmental biology,” says Bryant Ng ’00. But his heart never left his parents’ Chinese-American restaurant, Wok Way, in Los Angeles.

So, after a stint in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, Ng went back to school, this time at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. He worked at several top restaurants, including La Folie in San Francisco and Pizzeria Mozza in L.A. Today, he and his wife, Kim Luu-Ng, own and operate the sizzling-hot Spice Tablein L.A.’s Little Tokyo. Earlier this year, Food & Wine magazine named Ng “Best New Chef.”

The Spice Table celebrates the heritage of the couple’s families, who are from Singapore and Vietnam. By day, the menu is built around Southeast Asian-inspired sandwiches on homemade bread, and at night, satays rule, grilled on a custom-designed, wood-burning hearth.