Family recipes offer healing comfort for two Asheville chefs

It was a frigid, gray morning when Xpress sat down with chef Ray Hui in the small dining room at Gan Shan in West Asheville with a couple of bowls of his congee. The basic building blocks of this Asian rice porridge are white rice and water. But it can easily be dressed up with whatever is on hand.

On this particular day, Hui’s recipe was rich with chicken stock and fresh ginger, studded with chunks of roasted chicken thigh, sunny slices of jammy egg, tart pickled fennel, scallions, cilantro and crunchy chopped peanuts. The consistency was oatmeallike as per the chef’s preference, but a thinner, soupy gruel is more traditional, he says.

With Western North Carolina’s cold and flu season dragging on into early spring, Xpress reached out to Hui, as well as chef Suzy Phillips of Gypsy Queen Cuisine and Simple restaurants, to get some expert ideas for tasty, healing nourishment. Congee, says Hui, has always been his go-to when he needs to warm up.

“It’s what my mom made for me when I was not feeling well,” says the chef, who grew up in Fort Myers, Fla., the child of restaurant owners who emigrated to the U.S. from South China.

Hui likes to eat congee for breakfast or when he’s in a hurry. He also frequently serves the dish for Gan Shan staff meals, where it’s become an employee favorite.

Congee can be prepared with fresh rice, but Hui typically uses day-old or frozen cooked rice he’s saved from other dishes. “[Frozen rice] actually makes the quickest congee,” he says. “The water in the rice kind of expands and crystallizes and breaks up the rice structurally, so it will make congee in under 20 minutes.”

A dish that turns a small amount of rice and random odds and ends into a hearty meal, congee has deep cultural significance for the people of China, Hui points out. “During hard times — famine and things like that — you could make congee to stretch your meals a little bit further.”

Secret ingredient

Phillips, of Gypsy Queen and Simple, also turns to family recipes when she’s not feeling well. Natives of Lebanon, her family fled her home country as a teenager in the 1980s to escape its civil war. Dishes she learned to cook from her late mother, Salwa Farah, fill the menu at her West Asheville restaurant, deli and market Gypsy Queen, keeping Phillips connected to Lebanese culture and her mother’s memory. 

Her mother’s chicken soup is one of Phillips’ favorite meals when she’s under the weather. But it’s not your standard American chicken soup, she notes. “It’s heavy on cinnamon,” she says.

Along with providing a comforting aroma and flavor, cinnamon has long been used as a traditional healing food, and modern studies show that the spice can act as an antibacterial, antimicrobial, antioxidant and more.

For her mother’s soup, Phillips makes stock from a whole chicken, an onion and cinnamon bark. She prefers to use the flat, more savory type of Southeast Asian cinnamon bark that can be found at local Asian markets, though she says the curled cinnamon sticks found in regular grocery stores can be used as well.

“The flavor of the onion and the chicken broth and the cinnamon is so soothing,” she says. “And I generally add cayenne, because it’s good for you when you’re under the weather.”