Dragon View Chinese Restaurant

Dragon View serves upscale Cantonese cuisine. This restaurant is operated by the Wah Wing group and was formerly known as Wah Wing Seafood Restaurant.

A three-star Michelin chef is going out for dinner. Chef Chan Yan-tak and his four work buddies push through plastic door flaps and squeeze into a fluorescent-lit, Cantonese diner in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The five middle-aged men keep their puffy winter jackets over their graphic tees to shield them from the city’s wet winter chill, but their cheeks redden as the whiskey gets flowing from the bottle kept for them on the shelf. Pictures of them hang on the wall near a bunch of plastic yellow tulips, and when another regular recognizes Chan, he comes over and greets him with a shot of rice wine.Until Chan flashes his watch—a simple black timepiece with the goofy Michelin Man on its face—you would have no idea that this ragtag crew powers Lung King Heen, which in 2008 became the first Chinese restaurant in the world to receive three Michelin stars.“A gift,” the 67-year-old executive chef says with his chest puffed out, mimicking the Michelin Man. “They don’t make them anymore.”The Michelin Guide gave the watch to Chan when it bestowed haute cuisine’s ultimate accolade on his restaurant. Located on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons Hong Kong, it has held onto those stars tightly now for a decade.

By day, these guys polish the plaque—stoking the BBQ pit, wrestling with enormous woks, shuffling towers of bamboo dim sum steamers. But once the whites are hung up, they’re just your ordinary guys trying to make a living and get their kids through school.

After a long day at work, Chan gnaws on fried pork and glances at the soap opera on TV. This is exactly what he likes.

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“Simple,” he says. “Very simple.”In an age when chefs are lauded for their indomitable passion and commanding personalities—for the doppio zero flour and grandmotherly lore that supposedly sprinkled their heads as children and sowed the seeds of culinary genius—Chan and his crew are guffawing, plain spoken, back-slapping anomalies. They came to the job simply through economic necessity as adolescents, then inadvertently fell into a celebrity that doesn’t concern them. Like an arranged marriage, it’s a love that came to be, but wasn’t necessarily meant to.“We’re not educated, we don’t get to choose,” says Chef Ling Yung-cheong, Chan’s second in command, who has worked with him for over 10 years. All around the table nod in agreement.

“When you have very little education, you don’t have dreams.”. Photo by Aria Chen for TIME Executive Chinese Chef Chan Yan-tak at Lung King Heen, Hong KongBecoming a chef was certainly never Chan’s dream.

He grew up in the tough, impoverished Hong Kong of the 1960s. His father passed away young, forcing him to drop school and start working at 13. With no formal education in English, Chan used a dictionary to cross-check words he heard from American music and films. Today, he loves Indiana Jones but not Star Wars (unless you’re talking about the first one). 18 wheels of steel haulin prism3d error fix. His Spotify playlists feature lots of Simon and Garfunkel and Abba, his phone’s ring tone is “We Will Rock You,” and he’ll spontaneously start singing “Unchained Melody.”.

Photo by Aria Chen for TIME.For many in the restaurant biz, landing a Michelin ranking is the ultimate triumph. It lifts the red velvet rope and ushers a restaurateur into the vaunted club of Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. It can also springboard a chef into a full-blown celebrity. “Those three stars that you can get, they can give you a platform,” says Juliette Rossant, author of Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires. “Some chefs reject that because they’re passionate about cooking. But some are tantalized by the power and profit that’s inherent in the whole machine that gets created by the celebrity of a chef.”.

Photo by Aria Chen for TIMEEven if celebrity chefs were a fad in China, Chan would not fit the profile. The stout sexagenarian lives in Sham Shui Po, a seedy, working-class neighborhood where grimy highrises drip AC runoff onto the market stalls, methadone clinics and brothels below. From here Chan commutes 40 minutes to the Four Seasons by subway, wobbling into the staff canteen around 9 am for rice porridge and news. Next, the clowning begins. He’ll shake a steel bowl of scaly, chopped flesh too close to your nostrils, and implore you to try and identify the alligator claw. Then he’ll slap his belly, cackling over how much he likes meat. “I don’t like animals,” he jokes.

“That’s why I kill them!”. Front of house, however, Lung King Heen is meticulously Michelin. For lunch, an average meal per head is about $90, and dinner is $190. Reservations need to be made weeks in advance, and the highly coveted window seats overlooking the famous Victoria Harbour and the Nine Dragon Hills are for VIPs only (Lung King Heen means “View of the Dragon”).

The staff of 34 is trained to follow over 150 service steps from the start to the finish of your meal. If serving a western table, for instance, women are served first.

But at a Chinese or Japanese one, the guests of the host are served first, irrespective of whether they are male or female. Shoulders should never twist too fast when presenting a dish. If a glass breaks on the floor, the first problem that’s addressed is whether or not any shards have scattered over the nearest woman’s designer handbag.“Sometimes I joked that I had nothing to do,” says Simpson Yeung, Lung King Heen’s former director. “It’s so smooth.”The same applies in the kitchen. At the crack of dawn, Chef Leung Ming-chiu, head barbecue chef, and his team are down in the pit handling sticky slabs of honey-roasted pork and turning spit-mounted piglets above a furnace of 100 degrees. Three floors above, Chef Lo Kin-ming and his dim sum team prepare siu mai.

Packing the dumplings with pork, shrimp, and mushrooms, Ming pleats the yellow rice-flour pastry, paints it with alkaline water—it keeps the dough chewy—and readies it for a steaming on a translucently thin slice of carrot.Chan drifts around, occasionally consulting the others in huddled whispers. As lunch nears, the cutting boards patter, the steamers wheeze, but nothing ever roars above the woks. The way the kitchen moves is like watching a highway from an airplane—hundreds of machines rev with explosive energy around turnpikes, but from 30,000 feet, they flow with direction, poise, and silence.“Sometimes he has to be a little tough, but I’ve never seen him screaming at people,” says Tsui.

“He’s mild and calm but he’s firm. His team respects him.” ‘He inspires me, we inspire him’In Cantonese, Hong Kong means “fragrant harbor.” Some say the name was inspired by Hong Kong’s incense exports, others say it’s from the freshwater influx that streams in from the Pearl River. Whatever the reason, “fragrant harbor” takes on a whole new meaning strolling through any of the city’s seafood markets. At the Nelson Street Market in the blue-collar district of Mongkok, water overflows from the tubs of prawns and lobsters as they wiggle about next to floating styrofoam blocks bearing their price. An old fishwife sees a lobster try to escape and whacks it back in with her net. With his stubby hands, Chan point to a tank of coral trout, a supply of which arrived at Lung King Heen that morning. “Red is lucky and happy,” he says.Fresh seafood is the crux of Cantonese cuisine.

Once upon a time, before the skyscrapers and stock market, Hong Kong was just a collection of fishing villages and salt pans. But with plentiful access to flavor and seafood, the provincial style developed as one of the most prominent of the eight major Chinese cuisines. Today, it the best known Chinese cuisine around the world. It has also given the Western dining table one of its daily staples—ketchup originated as a Cantonese condiment, its name deriving from the Cantonese word for tomato ( kair) and sauce ( tsup).“Cantonese cuisine really plays on subtly and a diverse spectrum of flavor,” says Adele Wong, author of Hong Kong Food & Culture: From Dim Sum to Dried Abalone. “That’s how it really stands apart.”Lung King Heen’s menu boasts just such an array.

While infused occasionally and subtly with rich Western ingredients like truffles and foie gras, simplicity and freshness remains of utmost importance, and adulterating dishes with too many flavors is frowned upon. In its kitchen, there are several live fish tanks replenished daily, a customary feature at most waterside Cantonese restaurants, where you can select your entree while it still swims.For all of the freshness of Cantonese cuisine, it remains underrepresented in the Michelin Guide. Lung King Heen is one of two Cantonese restaurants to hold three Michelin stars in Hong Kong and one of just five in the world. Altogether, there are just 127 restaurants with three Michelin stars worldwide.

Lung King Heen’s victory was a milestone. But it also raised questions about comparative cuisine.“I don’t think you can apply a universal standard of gastronomic pleasure” says Dunlop, citing appreciation for texture, which is far more developed in China. For example, take sea cucumber, “A slithery, bouncy piece of textural food which in itself has no flavor,” she says Dunlop. And yet it is one of the great delicacies of Cantonese cuisine, with “the kind of texture that a lot of westerners find repellent.”Equally baffling to Western gourmands would be Chan’s lack of airs and graces.

He maintains that he has no philosophy or grand vision. He doesn’t give interviews about his “passion” to worshipful food writers, or produce beautifully photographed cookbooks, or take part in lavishly shot documentaries about the pressures of genius. He doesn’t even lie awake at night struggling to bring forth great recipes. “How do you compose a song?” he shrugs, while relaxing after work at his favorite hole-in-the-wall.It’s almost 11 p.m.

On a Tuesday. Everyone dumps their leftover scallop shells and pork bones onto the big platter at the center of the table, but the whiskey isn’t done yet and there’s some prawns left to go. Chan plops an extra prawn onto the plate of his neighbor and tells TIME to add The Graduate to his list of favorite films.Then he gets the bill and the toothpicks circulate, but there’s no rush to go. The chefs only do this once a month.“It’s hard to find a good boss,” says Ling.“He inspires me,” adds Lo.

“We inspire him.”“Maybe if I leave the table,” jokes Chan, still chewing some pork, “They’ll start telling you the truth.”Metal chairs skid across the floor as Chan wiggles out of the corner table, which is flanked by boxes of Tsingtao beer. The world’s greatest Cantonese chef then bums a cigarette from chef Leung, twists his colleague’s ear with a smile, and heads out on to the crowded Kowloon streets, unnoticed and unremarked.— With reporting and video by Aria Chen / Hong Kong.

Updates on Business Hours:

Dear Customers,

We hope everyone is staying safe and doing well.

Due to the impact of the Coronavirvus outbreak, we decided to shorten our business hours throughout the week.

Updated hours are listed below and will be applied to our online partners’ websites and on Google as well.

• Hours: Monday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Tuesday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Wednesday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Thursday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Friday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Saturday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)
• Hours: Sunday 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Midnight)

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

Best Wishes,

Chinese Dragon Restaurant

Craving for Chinese Food? We recommend our customer-voted No.1 favorite dish-General Gao’s Chicken. Hum, just want some starters or appetizers? PuPu Platter or Tibit sampler might be a wise choice!

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We, the Chinese Dragon Restaurant, are located at 380 Chelsea Street, East Boston, MA 02128.

About Us

Basic counter-serve eatery offering a big menu of standard Chinese fare, including lunch specials, daily specials, and all-day specials. We take dine-in, take-out, delivery, and catering orders. Fordine-in, we have around 4 to 5 tables. Take-out &Delivery orders could be done on the phone (617-569-0300), in person, or through ONLINE ORDER. Please be aware that the delivery fee varies by location. For CATERING ORDERS, customers need to call or notify, most preferably a week, in advance with known party size.