Cuisine is based on traditional Cantonese style but with updates for American appetites
Published in the June 11-27, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
Photo by Marty Cheek
Shun Chao Deng, left, and Tak Chung Ho prepare rice and noodles at Morgan Hill’s new Pearl River Chinese restaurant.
Food-loving folks in South Valley have long been asking Steven Chiu to open a Pearl River Restaurant here. Started by his Cantonese chef father more than 37 years ago and operating in two San Jose locations, the quality of the eatery’s Chinese cuisine brings people from all over the South Bay to try out mouth-watering lunch and dinner dishes. Last month, Chiu fulfilled many local foodies’ wishes by opening a Pearl River Restaurant in Morgan Hill.
The small but elegantly-designed new business sits in the former China Star restaurant site in the shopping center on Hale at Main avenues. Chiu remembers taking his brother and sister, co-owners in the business, for a Chinese restaurant tour through the South Valley to check out the competition. After sampling various eateries, they said, “You know, there’s nothing like ours,” he recalls.
“And so I said, ‘It’s a good opportunity if it happens,’” Chiu said with a grin. “And when we took over China Star, my sister asked, ‘Why are you so confident?’ and I said, ‘We have the highest Yelp review (rating) in Morgan Hill and we haven’t even opened the door yet — based on San Jose reviews.’”
Even though it’s been opened only three weeks, Pearl River’s already established reputation has brought in many customers — some coming up from Gilroy for lunch and dinner. The restaurant’s gem of a name comes from the Pearl River in south Canton where Chiu’s father was born. The Pearl River is one of the smallest streams in China, Chiu said. The restaurant was named after it for good luck.
“There is a belief in China that water is money, and so you want to keep the water flowing,” he said. “Pearl River is the only river in China that doesn’t have a drought because it’s always plentiful. And that’s how it all came about.”
Pearl River’s cuisine is based on a traditional Cantonese style of cooking but with updates for American appetites. Chiu reads restaurant food magazines and watches the Food Channel to try to see what his chefs can do to keep the Chinese style and yet adjust to modern tastes. “The new generation, what they value in food is more about flavor,” he said. “They don’t need it to be so authentic. They want the value and the experience.”
The restaurant entrepreneur likes to create new dishes based on traditional Cantonese recipes. New on the menu is Ocean Garden which offers diners a choice of either grilled fish fillets or fried breaded prawns topped with cream corn sauce on a bed of broccoli. Chiu jokingly said this dish originated as a successful cooking experiment he tried out on his children one night. “It came out great. My kids loved it,” he said. “We kind of use the kids as our guinea pigs for trying new dishes.”
The Garlic Prawns Scampi ala Pearl is also a new dish on the menu. “It’s a traditional Chinese dish but we try to give it a new twist,” he said. “When we cook our vegetables, we use that sauce that’s heavy on the garlic. And after you make those nice prawns, you pour it on top, it actually gives it a little more flavor — it’s very garlicky. ”
The restaurant’s technique for preparing its chow mein noodles is very unique for the Bay Area, Chiu said. On the East Coast it’s called lo mein and is not common in California, he said. “They like it like a spaghetti and it’s pan-fried before it’s stir-fried,” he said. “Because of the vegetable and the meat that you put in and that little extra sauce, it softens it up so that it sucks up the flavor and it tastes a lot better.”
Pearl River offers a “lite menu” for people on their lunch breaks who want a reasonably-priced selection they can pick up quick and return to work and not feel weighted down by a heavy meal. This includes the restaurant-made WonTon soup for $1.95 and a choice of several appetizers for $2.95 per item such as paper-wrapped chicken, cream cheese fried WonTons, and pot stickers.
“We notice that a lot of people these days are on the go… so we basically have created a choice of items where it takes a couple of minutes to prepare,” he said. “There’s enough variety where it’s nothing fancy but for as little of six dollars, you can’t go wrong. By the time you finish our lunch special, you feel like you got some value. You feel full and it helps you get through the next three or four hours.”
