Canton Disco. 1025 First St., SE. Beloved Chinese restaurant Hollywood East Cafe closed in Wheaton last summer after nearly three decades. Now, Timothy Yu, whose family ran the restaurant, is carrying on part of its legacy with Canton Disco, an all-day Cantonese-inspired restaurant in Navy Yard in c ollaboration with Side Door Pizza 0wner Brian Schram and Maxwell Park owner Brent Kroll. It’s slated to open for dinner on Wednesday, February 18, just in time for the Lunar New Year, with daytime hours coming later this spring. Schram says he met Yu, who was working the kitchen at Hollywood East, at the beginning of Covid as they were trying to figure out ways to help each other’s businesses. A collaboration between Side Door Pizza and Hollywood East never materialized, but the two kept in touch. After Hollywood East closed in August, Yu hosted a number of pop-ups at Rice Market, cooking everything from congee to Japanese-style sandwiches, when Schram approached him about opening a restaurant together. Timothy Yu, Brent Kroll, and Brian Schram. Photograph by flipsh0t for Canton Disco. Don’t expect a replica of Hollywood East at Canton Disco. Yu’s menu is very much his own, but he will be incorporating some family recipes such as the XO sauce in typhoon shelter shrimp. He’ll also use his family’s char siu marinade, but his version of the barbecued pork dish is finished on a binchotan charcoal grill with a maltose glaze. “Maltose is basically like a honey without the sweetness. It’ll bring a lot of the crisp flavors without adding extra sweetness,” Yu explains. Photograph by flipsh0t for Canton Disco. Other classics are also upgraded: beef chow fun uses freshly rolled rice noodles and New York strip, and golden fried rice with Chinese sausage and shrimp is mixed with egg yolk for extra umami. Another section of the menu is also devoted to Cantonese barbecue, including a Canton duck set. Yu plans to bathe the bird in duck fat and roast it on a French rotisserie. The breast will be served with bao buns, while the rest of the meat will be taken off the bones and incorporated into a lo mein with fresh noodles. Everything will be available for dine-in and takeout, which you can find this week (February 11 through 14) ahead of the official opening. Photograph by flipsh0t for Canton Disco. Kroll, a sommelier by trade, plans to pair the food with plenty of sparkling reds, light chilled reds, and smoky-peppery reds, which he says is “phenomenal with duck.” For whites, he’s eschewing subtlety for highly aromatic, volcanic, savory, and floral wines. “When you have intensity of a flavor like this, you need intensity of flavor in wine,” he says. Meanwhile, cocktails incorporate plenty of Asian ingredients, such as an old-fashioned with pandan liqueur and five-spice syrup or a cosmo with the Chinese spirit baijiu, plus ginger and Thai basil. By mid-April, Canton Disco will also debut a daytime cafe with coffee and Chinese-inspired breakfast items, such as egg sandwiches with Chinese sausage or pineapple buns with coffee-infused butter. There will also be an emphasis on tea, from Hong Kong-syle milk tea to other tea infusions. “It’s kind of fun to see some of the parallels with tea and wine and the tannin structure and aromatics,” Kroll says. As for the name Canton Disco, Yu says his dad was friends with many Cantonese singers and actors. “It almost felt like it was a disco every time they came over. There was a lot of Chinese music blasting. There was a lot of lights, a fog machine,” he says. While his restaurant won’t have a fog machine, he hopes to capture the same spirit: “It’s going to be fun drinks. I think it’s going to be a fun, just playful atmosphere.”The post A New Cantonese-Inspired Restaurant in DC Features Hollywood East Cafe Chef first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less