#ChineseFoodiesofIG: Michael Zee of Symmetry Breakfast

Michael Zee of Symmetry Breakfast

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews I’m doing with my favourite Chinese foodies that I follow on Instagram. Come and follow the #ChineseFoodiesofIG hashtag on Instagram and leave a comment showing your support for these talented folk!

Where are you from? Where are you really from?

I’m from a small town called Runcorn in Cheshire, but I’ve told people my whole life I’m from Liverpool because no one knows where Runcorn is. My father’s father is Shanghainese but that goes back to Zhoushan Island. The rest of me is Scottish and ultimately Viking blood.

Rice or noodles?

I adore noodles, but ultimately it’s got to be rice, fried rice is one of the greatest inventions from leftovers. But it’s not only from a Chinese perspective, I also have quite a sweet tooth and I love rice pudding. Everything from the one I had at school with a blob of jam, my mothers recipe with the skin, or cold out of a can.

What does home taste like?

My Dad is the chef at home, he’s a very good cook. After leaving China in the 1930s, my grandfather opened Anglo-Chinese restaurants in Liverpool. One Ningbonese dish he makes is rice cakes (年糕) very simply cooked with fatty minced pork, soy sauce and pickled cabbage. It’s a light, thrifty peasant dish but it fills you up.

Favourite Chinese breakfast:

What a question! I eat a jianbing 煎饼 once a week without fail. They’re not all equal but I could give you a top 10 tour of my favourites in Shanghai. The subtle variation between the different vendors, the batter, how spicy the chilli sauce is, what brand of 甜面酱 tianmianjiang they use and how that compares to the OG in Shandong province, the north south divide, how oily or dry they are. Someone could spend serious research on them.

What’s in your fridge?

My fridge is a total mess. My ayi doesn’t go in there. There’s a lot of cheese (Mark, my husband, is Dutch). I’ve got some vac pac stuff from Trabzon, Turkey that you eat as a breakfast fondue with cornmeal. Some velveeta which legally isn’t allowed to be sold as cheese but it’s delicious anyway and some stunning soft cheese from Le Fromager de Pékin, a producer in Beijing using milk from Inner Mongolia and Tibet.

Share a food memory:

After school and during holidays my Dad would pick me and my siblings up and we’d go to work, such slave labour thinking about it but so much fun. We’d work in a chippy in Huyton, Liverpool called Peter’s (Peter is my Dad) that served English and Chinese takeaway. We would haul 20kg bags of potatoes off a lorry, make curry paste, do odd jobs and we would all get 50p to buy something at the shop at the end of the arcade. Still now 20 years after my Dad retired, if we are out in Liverpool he gets approached by old customers. 

Who's your Chinese food legend?

Peiran and TongTong of Chinese Laundyroom. I started as a customer when they had their first restaurant in Islington, but only really got to know them after I moved to Shanghai. We recently went on a trip together to Shaoxing to see a soy sauce garden. Rather than learning about Chinese food through a Western lens, I find their approach, a self-reflective Chinese perspective looking at their own memories and how their homeland is evolving around them, both refreshing and deep.

Dream dinner party guests:

I only have one guest of choice. Christopher Hitchens, the legendary intellectual that “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”. A useful piece of advice for digesting information via social networks. 

He also said that the four most overrated things in life are "champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics." 

Lol what a guy!

The secret Chinese ingredient is…

Furu (腐乳), fermented tofu. I truly believe it’s going to be the next big ingredient in Western kitchens. Much like how miso took over a few years ago and now it’s used in ways even Japanese people don’t. Furu is coming….

What does Chinese food mean to you?

Continuous progress. It's easy to look at Chinese food under a microscope, to try to ‘make sense’, to analyse it and look at the history as a way of explaining why it is the way it is. I read books that are retrospective or romanticise a province or cuisine and readers view them as total and complete. Chinese food is not linear, but I think of it in three dimensions expanding outwards on an X, Y and Z.