You might assume that New Orleans’ Mr. Mao restaurant serves Chinese food and that it’s named after Chinese politician Mao Zedong.
You’d be wrong. The popular restaurant features a mixture of Southeast Asian, Indian and Mexican food.
“Mao is my Khmer nickname. And Mr. Mao is named after my cat,” said Sophina Uong, who will be cooking at a dinner with Beautiful South owner David Schuttenberg on July 17. The dinner is part of the Charleston Wine + Food Festival’s Summer Sizzle series.
The multicultural influences reflect Uong’s varied and colorful past.
Uong, who started cooking at age 9, grew up in California and had plans to be a horticulturist or a shaman until she met a surfer while she was volunteering with the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil. The surfer, it turned out, was from a town about 50 miles away from where she grew up in California. The two dated for about seven years, traveling the coast of California wherever the good waves were. Uong said she supported herself by waitressing, bartending or catering. After a stint in New York, after her relationship with the surfer ended, Uong returned to California.
“When I was 28 or 29, I met my daughter’s father, who was a chef at the time. He kind of turned me into his pastry chef and I sucked, because I can’t do math, even though I’m Asian, and I didn’t have the patience to weigh things out,” Uong recalled with a laugh.
“So I moved into savory and then I became a better cook than I think he was. It just kind of divided our relationship and then I became a single mom for 14 years. And through all of that, I realized I was kind of good at cooking and I was pretty good at bossing people around.”
In 2012, Uong met the man who is her current husband, and by 2016, she went from “kind of good at cooking” to being Food Network’s “Grill Master Napa Champion.”
California to Minnesota to New Orleans
Uong and her husband later moved to Minnesota so she could work at Andrew Zimmern’s Lucky Cricket Chinese restaurant, which opened and closed relatively quickly amidst controversy after Zimmern was quoted as saying he would save the Midwest from bad Chinese food.
“I had no idea about Chinese food,” Uong said. “But there was a 72-item menu and two woks. I was just like, ‘Are you insane?’ You could definitely tell it was a kitchen that was built by a celebrity chef that never worked the line! But he taught me a lot about regional Chinese cuisines and ingredients and brands, and showmanship.”
Uong left Minnesota and moved to New Orleans to do pop-ups for what became Mr. Mao.
“I was at a point in my life that I’d already felt middle-aged when I moved to Minnesota and when that changed, I was kind of floundering. It was time to reinvent myself and start over. And New Orleans has such an incredible, diverse community. I made some fast friends.”
New Orleans, it seemed, was ready for a restaurant that Uong describes as “loud, celebratory, comfortable for women, and affordable for hospitality workers.”
Uong said she was given the latitude to feature different ethnicities in her cooking because she is a person of color, but added, “Clearly, I just made sure that we’re appreciating rather than appropriating.”
That approach makes her pairing with Schuttenberg a natural.
Appreciation of a cuisine
Schuttenberg and his wife, Tina Heath-Schuttenberg, own Kwei Fei, as well as Beautiful South. The former serves Szechuan-style cooking; Beautiful South serves dim sum, American-style Chinese takeout and South of the Yangtze river food. Neither owner is Chinese, but their approach echoes Uong’s appreciation, not appropriation style.
When the couple first opened Beautiful South, they gathered an advisory board of people with differing backgrounds and asked them to dine at the restaurant.
“We wanted to make sure we were doing things with integrity, being respectful. Because sometimes you put things out there and you’re not sure how they will be perceived,” Heath-Schuttenberg said. “It was all very helpful for me to see things I might have missed.”
She said the advisory board was disbanded as a formal body but that they still check in with members regularly, to ensure they stay on track.
Schuttenberg fell in love with Asian flavors when working with chef Zakary Pelaccio in New York, who cooked Malaysian food.
“I fell in love with the spice and the balance of Asian cuisine,” Schuttenberg said.
When the pair moved to Charleston, they looked for a gap in the dining marketplace. At first, they considered Mexican, to reflect Heath-Schuttenberg’s background, and briefly opened Micho on the Pour House deck but later decided Szechuan was a bigger need for Charleston, and Kwei Fei was born seven years ago. Beautiful South followed five years later.
The dinner with Uong will be a mashup of what they love best: global flavors with bold spices that pay tribute to cultures that the chefs admire.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Tickets are online at charlestonwineandfood.com
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