Bao Kee Cafe has two specialties worth the drive to South El Monte

Imen Shan, owner of Tea Habitat in Alhambra, and I were catching up recently. The topics of conversation at first floated like lazy clouds. We talked about work and his niece's graduation. Shan was born in Guangdong province and keeps up to date with local food news, so we both knew he would eventually start interrogating her for new information.

“Any good new Cantonese restaurants in SGV?” I finally asked.

“Not really,” he said. “But there are a lot of boba shops.”

“Well… any Cantonese restaurants that have been around for a while that make you really happy?”

She thought for a minute.

“Bao Kee Café. The owners are from Toisan. People are looking for healthy soups.”

Bao Kee was unknown to me, but I soon learned that her words point directly to the restaurant's two specific and exciting strengths.

The soups are special: their range of ingredients follows the precepts of traditional Chinese medicine. Delight is a common side effect.

Chef Kevin Liao also distinguishes the cuisine with his enlightening Toisanese specialties, a regional subgenre of Cantonese cuisine that is rarely seen in Los Angeles or is so deeply assimilated into more generalized Cantonese menus that its distinctions are difficult to parse.

In that sense, Bao Kee has its share of Cantonese standards: shrimp and wonton noodle soup, peanut French toast, and breaded pork chops with rice, which are staples in Hong Kong cafes. Crispy Chongqing-style chicken with red chillies, mapo tofu and soft Hainanese chicken rice for mass appeal.

Chef Kevin Liao's menu at Bao Kee Café encompasses healing soup, Toisanese comfort food, Cantonese standards and wide-appeal favorites like Chongqing-style chili chicken.

Toisanese is a rustic-leaning style of cooking, often studded with cured meats and salted fish, from an area of ​​Guangdong about 75 miles west of Macau, where the first wave of Chinese emigrants left for the United States beginning in the 1850s.

Liao opened Bao Kee Cafe in South El Monte with co-owner Bonnie Chen in 2022. Last fall, the couple opened a second, larger outpost with a more varied menu that includes Hong Kong-style roast meats and clay pot-braised goose, a Toisan specialty.

Shan mentioned that he preferred soups at the original location, his small dining room decorated with pictures of lucky cats waving on white walls. When we met there a few days later, she pointed out her favorite way to start a meal: “chicken ranchero tonic soup,” an elixir that also translates into English as “essence of chicken.”

A white tureen arrived with a cup and a half of concentrated broth, sprinkled with a few strands of meat. We divide it into two bowls that we bring to our lips. The consommé was poultry liquid, literally. A whole chicken, minimally seasoned, had been steamed for several hours, without adding water to the container. The heat below had slowly drawn the juices out of the bird. Only a sheen of chicken fat gleamed on the surface.

Ranchero chicken tonic soup, also translated as “chicken essence,” is a concentrated consommé with a poultry flavor; the chicken has been steamed for several hours without adding water to the container.

Do you know the jolt that runs through your entire body after taking a drink of strong alcohol? This is the opposite: instant, intravenous nutrition. Serving has much more to do with potency than quantity.

A waiter also brought out the chicken carcass, sprinkled with a couple of jujubes. Most of the remaining meat was dry, really just further proof of the life force extracted.

Two more soups with more complex flavors followed: duck, lighter in texture but darkly rich, cut with sweet-and-sour orange peel, and silky chicken, whose spicy murmur is offset by the herbal, almost smoky red ginseng.

We needed some solid foods to round things out. Among a selection of steamed dishes, strands of ginger tied together the strong flavors of the silver-skinned salted fish and billowing chunks of pork belly. Fresh cilantro brightened a plate of shredded chicken and rice. The snow peas with garlic stood out for their simplicity.

When I detailed the meal to my editor the next day, she remembered that Los Angeles photographer Dylan Ho had mentioned Bao Kee to her a couple of years ago. Ho's family is from Toisan, alternatively spelled Taishan or Hoisan. He and his mother, Bessie Ho, agreed to join me for dinner in South El Monte (and Dylan returned later to take photos for this review).

Bessie immediately wanted me to know about Toisan-style lap cheong and asked one of the owners to bring a package and show me its flexibility and how different it was from other Chinese sausages that can be as dense as salami. The restaurant serves it in slices, paired with spicy, bacon-like lap yuk over steamed rice, capturing its intertwined, distinctly unctuous qualities.

They guided me toward a specialty I would have otherwise overlooked, a dish that translates from Cantonese as “fried eggs with five sauces” and is listed on the menu as “fried eggs with pickled vegetables.”

Chefs cook the eggs in boiling oil so that the whites crisp up and become thin at the edges, resembling the lace of puffed taro, while the yolks remain jammy and gradually turn opaque with residual heat. The grated vegetables (carrot, ginger, papaya, shallot and cucumber, some pickled and some fresh) are arranged, according to the original name, on top in a slender rest.

The sweet and sour toisanese sauce finishes the dish. A hint of vinegary ketchup dominates, but there's also a lurking cranberry-apple note that could be hawthorn berry juice, a traditional Cantonese ingredient, although no one at the restaurant confirmed this.

Fried eggs with pickled vegetables.

“This is country cooking,” Dylan said approvingly. Bessie nodded. He remembered the dish from his childhood. We talked about how immigrants from Toisan and surrounding areas, then called Sze Yup, came to America during the California Gold Rush (and before the blatantly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and made up the majority of the workers who built the Central Pacific Railroad. And how Toisanese traditions, like sweet and sour sauce, undoubtedly influenced the dishes that evolved, transformed and codified in the Chinese-American culinary canon.

We also delved into soups. Watercress curled like a dragon's tail through a broth infused with the pleasant, medicinal earthiness of chuan bei, an herb from the lily family known to help control coughs. A duo of conch and sea coconut (which is also supposedly good for the lungs) tasted as tropical as they come.

Preserved Egg Watercress from Bao Kee Cafe in South El Monte.

A specifically Toisanese stew featured tang yuan (marble-sized glutinous rice balls) with strands of chicken, sliced ​​mushrooms, and pieces of preserved pork in a milky, markedly salty broth. Each spoonful provided satisfyingly chewy contrasts.

For dessert? A soup of a different kind. A cored and poached snow pear, bathed in a fresh, floral-scented syrup, swimming with goji berries and jujube. A spoon slid easily through the fruit. This time it was sugar I felt pulsing through my veins. I can't speak to the health benefits, but I finished my plate and went back for seconds.