Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves by Dave Lowry

Author:Dave Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

25

Rule #54: Being honest is vastly overrated.

When I wasn’t looking at corpses or wondering what Corinne was doing in Seattle, I was thinking about which dish I was going to present in the “Best Chinese Chef in St. Louis” contest. I thought, too, about my reaction when Mr. Leong told me about the contest. Excited? That would be a little much. Worried? Not really. When he’d asked me about entering the contest—or, to be more exact, telling me that he had entered me—more than anything else I thought it would be fun. Fun in the same way it was fun to be close to Chinese conversations, particularly when the conversations were about stuff they probably didn’t particularly want to be overheard. And overhearing them and letting them go on and on, and then casually breaking in to offer some comment. The looks of surprise—incredulity sometimes—that brought on were fun. In a similar way, it was going to be fun to get into this contest.

It was fair to say there wouldn’t exactly be a lot of contenders for St. Louis’s best Chinese chef. On the other hand, there were a lot of Chinese restaurants in town. Most had Chinese cooks in the kitchen. There was a good-size Chinese and Chinese American population in St. Louis. The fact that I had a job working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and turning out dishes that appealed to Chinese diners who knew what good Chinese food was meant something. I had my doubts that being named the best Chinese chef in the city was going to be the highlight of my cooking career. Still, it was more than jack squat. I had to admit to myself, too, that I kind of liked the idea of being a non-Chinese guy who was at least in the running for the best Chinese chef in the city. So I gave my dish some consideration. Langston and I had talked about it, every morning, at breakfast ever since Mr. Leong had told me about the contest a week before.

“The secret to winning any contest like this is knowing who’s judging it,” Langston said. He’d been told that the judging panel would consist of some business people in the Chinese American community in St. Louis. “There aren’t going to be a lot of meishijia there. No gourmets who really know Chinese food. We’re going to have to cater to their tastes. You could make something spectacular, something that would have a true meishijia sobbing tears of happiness, and it might not impress these judges. That makes it tough.”

I agreed. There are some classics of Chinese cooking. Whatever Langston was planning for his own entry, he wasn’t saying. We were friends. We trusted one another well enough to punch and kick within fractions of an inch the places where we could really do some damage. Langston had told me about his first crush, Mindy Collingswood, way back when we were in fifth grade. He knew about my mother’s

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