The 37-year-old Chinatown favorite House of Nanking is releasing a cookbook next week, full of decades worth of the restaurant’s most popular recipes, plus a number of long-lost dishes that haven’t been on the menu in years.
Since its opening in 1988, Chinatown’s famed House of Nanking has been one of the city’s most beloved Chinese restaurants for both locals and tourists, and it’s certainly Keanu Reeves’s favorite. House of Nanking founders Peter and Lily Fang raised their daughter Kathy Fang practically in the restaurant, and she’s gone on to establish SoMa’s modern-fusion spot Fang restaurant, while finding foodie TV stardom as a two-time champion on Chopped, making appearances on Beat Bobby Flay, and the Fangs got their own dedicated 2022 Food Network docuseries Chef Dynasty: House of Fang.
Now, the House of Fang is getting its own cookbook. House of Nanking: Family Recipes from San Francisco's Favorite Chinese Restaurant will be released this Tuesday, September 30. It’s written by Peter and Kathy Fang, and is not only full of decades worth of House of Nanking recipes, but traces Peter Fang’s journey from Chinese immigrant to busboy, bartender, server, cook, and eventually establishing the wildly popular House of Nanking.
“The book is very much about the journey, from my dad emigrating from China to the US, and how he became the chef that he is,” Kathy Fang tells SFist. “Because he is not classically trained. He never even worked in a restaurant prior to moving to America. He is completely self-taught.”
“There’s the stories and recipes in House of Nanking. The recipes that put us on the map,” she adds. “There’s a lot of dishes that we had from 30 years ago that people still talk about that are not on the menu anymore because you can’t keep everything, right? We’re bringing back a lot of the old classics that people loved that are no longer on the menu.”
While the cookbook is written by Peter and Kathy Fang, it actually captures three generations of Fang family cooking, dating back to Shanghai.
“The recipes are written between my dad and I,” Kathy Fang explains. “They’ll have my dad’s voice, they’ll also have my voice, and there’s dishes that my dad remembers growing up and having, dishes his mother made for him that had a big impact on him when they lived in Shanghai.”
A press release for the book says it “recounts the Fangs’ deep-rooted passion for serving authentic Shanghainese home cooking.”
“Chinese cuisine overall can be quite complicated, because there are so many different regional specialties,” explains Fang. “The core actually comes from the eight major cuisines in China. Jiangsu cuisine is one of them. It’s known for its umami and its mildly sweet flavor profiles. And Shanghainese is developed from the Jiangsu cuisine.
“Shanghai is also a port city, so it absorbs many different influences. It also has access to the Yangtze River. So just the amount of produce and the variety of ingredients that they had access to, it helped them create their own version of essentially, like a Jiangsu cuisine.”
“They have such amazing produce and access to fresh seafood,” she adds. “Once the crab comes into season, they put it in everything. They put it in noodles, they put it in soup dumplings, they make buns with it, they put it over rice, tofu, anything.”
Shanghainese cuisine is also more flavorful, compared to the subtle Chinese food varieties like Cantonese. “The style that people know Shanghainese for is going to be characterized by sweet, savory,” Fang says. “It has a reputation for being very heavy-handed on sugar, soy sauce, rice wine, and MSG.”
The “home cooking” aspect comes from a version of Shanghainese cooking known as jiācháng cà; items like Soup dumplings (Xiaolongbao) and pan fried juicy pork buns (Sheng Jian Bao). “It’s really based off of simple ingredients, comfort food,” she tells us. “These are things you would find in people’s homes, and less in restaurants.”
The cookbook features items that have been on House on Nanking’s menu since Day One (the famed Nanking Sesame Chicken), right down to a few short-term seasonal dishes that were only available briefly (Thanksgiving Orange Chicken). “These are recipes that came out of Peter Fang’s brain, and were not made in any Chinese restaurant,” Fang says. “But he took Chinese techniques, methods, and ingredients and then turned it into something that was more distinctively what we call ‘Fang food.’"
“This cookbook isn’t just a cookbook,” she emphasizes. “Yes, you’re going to learn how to make all of these amazing dishes, but it’s really a preservation of culinary history that may otherwise be lost forever.”
Kathy Fang says the cookbook also describes her parents’ and journey from immigrants to culinary superstars, and “what it took for them to come across the ocean with nothing, to do this. This is not just a distinctive story of ours, I think that's a story many people can relate to, I found that out from the show. It's not just a Chinese cookbook that teaches you some wok cookery, this is a lot more than that.”
House of Nanking: Family Recipes from San Francisco's Favorite Chinese Restaurant will be released on Tuesday, September 30, and you can preorder the book here. It will also be available at a number of SF book signing events in the weeks and months to come, seen in the Instagram post above.
Related: House of Nanking Is Getting a Food Network Docuseries Premiering Next Week [SFist]
Images: Quentin Bacon
