Wake up to a Chinese breakfast with Michael Zee

Michael Zee is the man behind the wildly popular Instagram account Symmetry Breakfast. Known for his beautifully composed, perfectly symmetrical breakfasts, Michael has inspired followers around the world with his eye for design and love of food. In his new cookbook, Zao Fan: Breakfast of China, he takes readers on a flavorful journey through the country's diverse morning meals, offering stories, recipes, and insights that bring the culture and history of Chinese breakfast to life. 

Evan Kleiman: The book is fantastic and I can't wait for listeners to see it. You're a guy from the UK. Introduce yourself a bit. Tell us a bit about yourself and where you grew up.

Michael Zee: Like you say, I'm British. I grew up just outside Liverpool. I grew up there because of my grandfather. He emigrated from China before the Second World War and was originally from Shanghai. Shanghai and Liverpool have this historic shipping connection, so my grandfather came to England, married a local English woman, and after the Second World War, set up many restaurants. I grew up in those Chinese restaurants. I moved to London in my formative years, and then with Brexit, I moved to China and lived in China for many years. Now, after COVID, I moved to Italy. 

I love it so much. Your life is just a peripatetic dream. Tell us a little bit about the restaurants that your grandfather opened and your memories of the food and the relationship to food that existed in your family.

I was born in the mid '80s, and I'm the youngest of four children. We all worked in the restaurants after school from a really, really young age. My earliest memories of the restaurants were very unglamorous. I was a 5, 6, 7-year-old child given very menial jobs. Take things off deliveries, prepare garlic or paste, move things that we would pack takeaway boxes in, things like this. Stuff that wasn't too difficult or dangerous. It felt now, in retrospect, really unsafe, in many ways. 

I remember my father's business partner. He was Cantonese. He wasn't a blood relative but he was called Uncle Tony. I remember cooking and eating with his family, food that was so different from what we served. The real table in the back was actual Chinese food. What we sold to people in the front of house was this anglicized, still to this day, a shadow of what Chinese food is — things deep fried and things covered in gravy and sauces and with a side of thick, English style chips. 

Now that I'm much older and I've obviously lived through China, my understanding of American Chinese food is so different from British Chinese food. American Chinese food seems to be much more... it honors the origin whereas I think Chinese English food is just on a tangent away from the beginning. My growing up was very split in that there was the private dining of our family and the public-facing business.

Tianshui Mian is served in small portions that can be eaten in a few bites. Photo by Michael Zee. 

I'm so curious about the title. Why is it "Breakfast of China" and not "Breakfast in China"?

There was lots of conversation about this with my editor, my friends. I didn't want to trivialize it in a way that I felt breakfast often is. I want for people to understand that breakfast is an important measure of how we live and how we interact with every single element of the politics of food, whether it's supply chain, food trends, our ability to eat healthy, our lives, and how much value we put on food, meal times, and the history of the impact that changes in society have had on food. I think breakfast is probably the best barometer of that. So I feel that it's the tiniest difference. 

It's interesting because there was a long email chain on "breakfast in" or "breakfast of." Or should I have "the breakfast of China"? Is "the" too singular and too grand? At the same time, I wanted to take China and show people that it's not just singular Han Chinese, and that the Han as a majority today has not always been the case. The diversity and the size of China, there's hundreds of other ethnicities, languages, cuisines, histories, and approaches to food. I wanted to encapsulate that enormity, as well.

In the book, you say that it's a culmination of three important parts of your life, your love of breakfast and food, your love of China, and your love of photography. Why has this work been so important to you? What are you hoping that you deliver to the reader?

I suppose there's the beauty of photography. I think what I really felt at the very beginning, when I started shooting this book, was that I didn't want it to be shot in a studio in London with a prop stylist and a home economist and to somehow overly romanticize the reality of life through a Western lens. 

I get sent cookbooks from all over, from many different people, not just because I'm with the publishing house but also because people want me to promote their books. Before I even wrote the proposal, I was realizing how much everything's starting to look the same — vintage spoon, half-eaten with a pudding and a gray background, a linen cloth, and some person with their head cropped off. There's a coding to food recipes of how we visualize, and therefore, how we say, "Oh, I want to cook this recipe." 

Part of the beauty of China is actually being there in a way that I felt like because of COVID, we'd suddenly had taken away from us. We couldn't easily travel. We can't easily go places. I find so much of the beauty of photography in cookbooks is the fillers, the portrait of a guy on a dock or a baker. I don't necessarily need to see their interpretation. I want to see his skill. I want to see the person making the cake. I want to see the person who inspired the recipe. 

I felt that part of shooting it in the way I did was to be honest to China and its artisans and its craftspeople who make food. I want you to learn from them directly in a way that I learnt from directly.

Okay, let's talk about some food. Tell me about (I'm going to try and pronounce things correctly) Xizhou Baba and the husband and wife who make it.

Xizhou Baba, this is a region, Yunnan, it's the south of China. Fairly high altitude. It's something like a garden of Eden because you're on the north of the Himalayas so you don't get any of the monsoon from the India side. This is a province that grows absolutely everything. It's almost twice the size of Italy and you get pu'er tea, wine, coffee, chocolate. They have incredible produce. 

They also have quite an interesting drinking culture. I have experienced incredible hangovers in this province. They have this thick, almost like a focaccia in its interior, but it has a kind of shell of crunch. And these are breads that can be sweet or savory with an egg. They're cooked in a Dutch oven. Traditionally, they put the lid on with the coals on top. Now, some are moving towards electric pizza ovens. Baba is a southern dialect word for something that's round.

So we might know it as a bing?

A bing is the more coastal, more Han Chinese round word, exactly like a scallion, a bing or jian bing. Bing can be used to describe cookies. It can describe brick tea in the shape of a circle. It can be used to describe pancakes or breads. But the further south you go towards Guizhou, Yunnan, south of Sichuan, the baba word comes into play as an alternative.

And what's the filling?

The classic is a combination of pork scratching, so really crunchy skin with a fried egg embedded into the dough and lots of lard that's seasoned. It's quite salty so it has that trifecta of a bit of protein, a bit of carbohydrate, a bit of salt, a bit of chili. It is just this delicious morsel in the morning. They're not so big, maybe one and a half times the diameter of a burger, but they're intense. One is enough.

Is there a sauce that performs double or even triple duty that we can make and store to facilitate quicker, fantastic eating?

I think the fu zhi jiang you is a great way to take your store-bought soy sauce that can sometimes just taste good, and it basically takes this to the next level in terms of depth, sweetness. You can use it to finish dishes. I've used it to make marinated hard boiled eggs. It's really delicious. It can take an average priced bottle of soy sauce to another level.

Is it like an infusion of store-bought soy sauce?

Yeah. Basically, in a pan, soy sauce, a bit of water, lots of spices. You boil it like a tea, you let it cool, strain it, and then that is the enhanced finishing sauce.

Michael Zee is behind the popular Instagram account Symmetry Breakfast. Photo by Wilson Fok.

The dishes that you have it strewed across look unbelievable. It's been a long time since I've Googled so many restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley while I was reading your book. It was like where can I go to get a bowl of this stuff?

You're probably in one of the best places in the world outside of China to eat Chinese food. 

Yeah, we're very lucky here. There is a chapter on Xibonese breakfast. Where in China is this? Can you tell us about the people? I have to say, I was drawn to a couple of the vegetable preparations you feature. One is like a slaw and one is pepper-based.

The Xibonese people, the story is truly fascinating. I have very good friends in Shanghai who own Xibonese restaurants. The Xibonese people were one of the original clans of Imperial China. They were originally from the border where North Korea is now, in northeastern China. Around the 1750s, the emperor said, I need 20,000 of you to go to the other side of the country, to Xinjiang, on the border with Kazakhstan and Russia, and I need you to protect and defend the border. So 20,000 [people] packed their bags with their families and left. 

What happened is that today, you have 200,000 Xibonese people living originally where they're from, on the Korean side of the country, and you have 100,000 of them living on the Russian side of the country, over by Kazakhstan. What you have is two distinct branches of the same ethnic group. 

The Xibonese people that are now in Xinjiang really held on to the ancient traditions because they're living almost in a bubble, in a fishbowl. And the Xibonese on the Korean side have intermarried with Manchurians, with Koreans, with Han Chinese. The culture is less defined and less people speak their original language. So Xibonese food, in its origin, is almost quite Korean. It has this kimchi-esque pickled vegetable culture and is very fish-based because it's coastal. Then you go over to the Uyghur side, the Muslim Xinjiang region, bordering Russia in Kazakhstan, and you have this Silk Road culture that's very lamb-based, fermented milks, jams, Islamic flatbread culture. So you have this incredible mix of cuisine that exists in this one pocket of Northwest China.

"Zao Fan: Breakfast of China" is a flavorful journey through the country's diverse morning meals. Photo courtesy of Interlink Books.