Meet the chef: Stephen Wong, chef/owner of Rice restaurant in Dover
Q: You’re family came to the United States from Hong Kong in 1989, how did you find yourself in Dover?
A: We used to have a restaurant in New York City, but the landlord decided to sell the land to build high-rise. My wife grew up here, in Bear, and her father lives in Seaford. So we decided to come here to be close to her father and we’ve been open a year and a half now.
Q: Why did you think Dover would be a good place for a sushi restaurant?
A: It’s a city. I looked at the area around here and there’s a lot of development. Every town, every city has the potential for a sushi restaurant. I would call it a healthier food. And Dover has the population that wants to try it. The trend in society now is people tend to eat more healthy — less oil, less cornstarch. Even with our Chinese food, we cook pretty differently from other Chinese restaurants.
Q: There aren’t many sushi restaurants around here, have you been successful in exposing people to new types of food?
A: When you talk about Japanese food, you might think Wilmington, city life, upscale. But my philosophy is I want to bring this food, this style in a more affordable way. If you go to a Japanese restaurant in Wilmington, you spend $5 or $6 for a piece of sushi, but here we go down to $2 or $3 with the same quality you’d get in those restaurants. I want people to give it a try, then come back and try something else. It’s affordable, so if you try something and you don’t like it, you can try it one more time.
Q: Where do you get your seafood?
A: You don’t need very expensive ingredients, but it has to be fresh and it has to be good. We get it from different sources — Philly, Maryland and sometimes from New York. They have some unique stuff, some stuff you can’t get here. I try to bring things back when I have time to go to New York. We get seafood in three times a week. On Friday morning we get a load of fish, so Friday night is a great night to come. But we tend to use the fish within one or two days. You need to use fish very fast, and I don’t freeze it because that’s not the way to make sushi.
Q: How did you learn to make sushi and Chinese food?
A: I’m a designer and I used to work in a firm in New York City in an area that had a lot of Japanese restaurants. Those people tended to go out to business meetings for sushi. And my father and mother, mother-in-law and father-in-law have always been in the restaurant business. My uncle used to own a Chinese restaurant and I learned the Chinese style from him. And I went to culinary school in New York, it wasn’t necessarily Japanese but I learned a lot. Culinary school was more technique, but I learned how to create these dishes in my friend’s restaurants. Many of them have been cooking for more then 10 years now, most of them are master chefs with restaurants in NYC.
Q: What’s the most important part of making sushi?
A: To me, it’s how you cut the fish. It’s just like meat, there is lean and there is tendon. If you cut it the wrong way, it destroys the fish. You may not notice when you get it, but if it’s cut the wrong way, instead of biting it you have to tear it. You have to be clean when you cut fish, your board always needs to be clean. And freshness is always important.
