Monique Siu: the Chinese-American chef who put Portland on the culinary map
In 1990, the restaurateur – whose father’s family came from Guangdong and whose mother was German-Danish – opened Zefiro, with a game-changing menu of local, seasonal food
A dish called three-storey building I was born in August 1952, in San Francisco. I grew up in Berkeley. My father was from Tahiti. He was Chinese and he came to the United States to go to the University of California, Berkeley.
He came from a very large family, from around Guangdong. Like a lot of families, all the celebrations were food-centric, and in Tahiti a lot of it was about fishing.
My mom grew up in California. Her parents were immigrants, German and Danish. So we’re quite a melting pot. My mom was the Western side of the kitchen and my father was the Chinese side. He cooked on weekends.
One of his dishes was called Three-Storey Building – the lower floor was sautéed tomatoes and onions, then there was stir-fried beef with five-spice, then fried egg and green onions. I had a brother and a sister, five of us, and I swear those meals we ate very fast.
Pastry skips a generation We loved going to Italian delis. They’d give me pieces of salami and say I was an honorary Italian. For many Chinese Americans, Chinatown is the heart of their experience, but not for me, being half-Chinese.