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Photo: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
Since it was introduced in 1849 during California’s Gold Rush, Chinese food in the U.S. has gotten a nutritional bad rap. Many chefs found they needed to adapt their cooking to better suit the tastes of American customers—swapping out “strange” ingredients, adding more sugar and oil—and the cuisine collected negative stereotypes and a reputation for being unhealthy.
Read more:Future of Food
This revelation—compounded with a decline in the number of Chinese immigrant chefs, the rise of national chains using unhealthy shortcuts, and a growing public emphasis on wellness—convinced Wang to discontinue his medical career and lead the change he wanted to see in the food world.
In 2013, he began developingMÓGŪ,a quick-serve Chinese restaurant that brings takeout into the future. (MÓGŪ means “mushroom” in Mandarin, a symbol of good luck, longevity and health in Chinese culture.) And interestingly, Wang’s vision started not with recipes, but technology. “The key to Chinese takeout is the art of wok-cooking—the nuances of flavor that high heat and constant tossing over a fire provides,” he says. “I wanted to recreate those subtleties in a way that uses less oil, salt and sugar but maintains the techniques and chemical reactions that make the food so good.”
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That’s just the start. Wang aims for expansion, and this auspicious mushroom is poised to usher in a whole new way of enjoying Chinese American food—not to mention how we think about its healthfulness. All of that is good for our hearts, too.
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