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New Jersey Dining | Whippany

Chinese Cooking, as the Chinese Do

THE REAL THING Chef Jon’s has authentic Huaiyang cuisine, along with American Chinese fare. Below, crystal shrimp.Credit...Tom White for The New York Times

YOU’D never guess it from the outside, but a daring and beautiful experiment is under way in a shopping center on Route 10 in Whippany. A prize-winning chef, just off the plane from Shanghai, teamed up late last year with three New Jersey women he had never met, and who had no prior restaurant experience, to seek a following for real Chinese cooking among a suburban audience.

Not fortune-cookie Chinese food. The kind actual Chinese eat in actual China. In the Huaiyang region, to be precise.

Chef Jon’s, which opened last November, still carries the full panoply of familiar fare, acceptably, if uninspiringly, prepared: sweet-and-sour this, General Tso’s that. But turn the page of the menu, and an uncharted world of subtlety beckons.

Here are vegetables you may never have tasted, or tasted so fully. Like the slippery sponge gourd, a relative of the cucumber, which the chef sautées with deep-fried dough sticks — a popular breakfast food that could be the Chinese answer to an Eggo waffle — and serves up in a simple sauce of sugar and soy that translates as “salty fresh.”

Here, too, are homemade sauces that enhance, not overwhelm, like the sherry-ish “winey sauce,” reduced over 24 hours from yellow wine. In this floats the freshest flounder, alongside lettuce-thin, ear-shaped wood mushrooms.

A restrained chili sauce undergirds the spicy beef noodle soup: it lends a smoky bite but doesn’t draw tears. The chef, Hua Zhang, not satisfied with what he could find in bottles, makes his own.

Huaiyang cuisine is pretty much the inverse of American-style Chinese food, with its short list of overpowering flavors and finite permutations, according to Mr. Zhang, interviewed after my visits; Mona Lee, one of his partners, translated. The emphasis is on freshness of ingredients and labor-intensive preparation.

So the crystal shrimp — a traditional Huaiyang dish that helped Mr. Zhang win a gold medal at the 2009 International Chinese Culinary Competition in Manhattan — requires repeated soaking and rinsing, all to achieve a glassy, crystalline look and crispness.

(At the contest, Mr. Zhang, 40, met Rita Wang, who had spent 10 years working in food service at a Beijing hotel. She proposed setting him up with a restaurant of his own, and brought in her friends Kathy Zhao and Ms. Lee, who is a dean at the Bergen Chinese School in Hackensack. The chef never returned to China.)

The Shanghai wonton soup surprises not just because the dumplings are so generous and meaty, but because the broth is flavored with dried baby shrimp and seaweed, and enriched by cooked egg that has been painstakingly sliced the width of noodles.

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Credit...Tom White for The New York Times

Among appetizers, the house special roll — tofu sheets, pear and fish — was a light, sweet and fruity revelation. By contrast, one bite of the crunchy jellyfish was enough to make clear this was an acquired taste.

Mr. Zhang, who previously worked as a chef for a Chinese hotel chain, isn’t only turning out popular Shanghai dishes. He is improvising new ones, coating balls of fish gluten in a grit of salty egg yolk, for example, for a savory and surprisingly hearty, if not exactly heart-healthy, main dish.

Chef Jon’s owners are performing a high-wire act, carrying two extensive menus as they build an audience for Mr. Zhang’s food. They have replaced veteran cooks who scoffed at Mr. Zhang’s ideas with two Shanghainese sous-chefs. But they still need to guide uninitiated diners through the Huaiyang menu. The dessert of green bean paste and coconut milk, for example, was a fragrant marvel — a purée of hand-shelled peas (not beans), offset with walnuts and pine nuts — but it was big enough for six to share, and priced like an entrée.

Meanwhile, Mr. Zhang is tweaking the American-style dishes and dispensing with shortcuts: costly black fungus has replaced canned mushrooms in the spring rolls, which are now cooked to order instead of being fried en masse each morning.

All in all, one is left thinking: this can’t last — not here.

Can it?

Chef Jon’s Chinese Restaurant

831 State Route 10 East

Whippany

(973) 585-6258

chefjons.com

DON’T MISS

THE SPACE An eye-pleasing but not overly done storefront in a shopping center, with big tables and comfy booths. Fully wheelchair accessible. Seats 80.

THE CROWD Local families and curious and adventurous eaters from all over.

THE STAFF Eager to please but still getting the hang of it. Dishes tend to arrive all at once.

THE BAR Bring your own.

THE BILL Familiar fare: entrees, $7.95 to $18.95. Authentic Shanghai menu: entrees, $9.95 to $18.95. Major credit cards accepted.

WHAT WE LIKE Sponge gourd with deep-fried dough sticks, fish in winey sauce, Shanghai wonton, spicy beef noodle soup, Yang-Chow fried rice, fish gluten with salty egg yolk, green bean paste with coconut milk.

IF YOU GO Lunch and dinner: Tuesday to Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Reservations not yet a must, but no harm playing it safe. Plenty of parking.

RATINGS Don’t Miss, Worth It, O.K., Don’t Bother.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section NJ, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinese Cooking, As the Chinese Do. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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