Chef Calvin Eng finds the perfect balance in ‘Salt Sugar MSG’

For chef and author Calvin Eng, cooking is a form of storytelling—one that bridges generations and flavors. As the founder of Bonnie’s, a Cantonese American restaurant in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in New York and named after his mother, Eng has spent years refining a personal style of cooking that is both deeply rooted in tradition and boldly inventive. He hopes to share the magic of the Cantonese cooking of his childhood with the world. His debut cookbook, which he wrote with his fiancé, Phoebe Melnick, titled Salt Sugar MSG, brings that philosophy into home kitchens, blending the techniques of his heritage with the creativity of fusion. This book celebrates the diversity that lives within a new generation of home cooks.

Born and raised in New York to parents who emigrated from southern China, Eng grew up immersed in Cantonese flavors at home, but also embracing the vast landscape that is the New York City food scene. As he trained in professional kitchens, he found himself drawn back to the dishes of his childhood—the ones his mother made, infused with lessons about balance, technique and how Cantonese cuisine builds depth. Eng embraces ingredients like MSG, fish sauce, and shrimp paste unapologetically, despite their pungency, looking to challenge outdated perceptions and celebrating the full spectrum of flavor they bring. His restaurant uses all these ingredients proudly.

At the core of Eng’s book is a simple but powerful idea, that Cantonese cooking is really built on specific balance—balance between flavors that come from the three different ingredients that became the namesake of his debut book: salt, sugar, and MSG. JoySauce recently caught up with Eng to talk about how these ingredients have shaped his journey and what he hopes the home cooks take from Salt Sugar MSG.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Anjana Pawa: Salt Sugar MSG includes a mix of different flavors inspired by your upbringing in New York being fused with Cantonese flavors that you grew up eating at home. There are a lot of cool and approachable ways to mix flavors, like the Fuyu Cacio e Pepe Mein (a fermented bean curd infused cacio e pepe.) When did you start to see food as a career rather than just sustenance as you were growing up?
Calvin Eng: My grandparents lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown, my mom grew up there, and I spent my weekends going there growing up. As a kid, you don’t want to spend your weekends there. You want to hang out with your friends, not walk the streets of Chinatown going to the fish market with your mom. But I did that as a kid, and I didn't realize how lucky I was until I got older. Later in life, I was working at a spot near Chinatown and I remember just spending my free time walking those same streets, being inspired by those same fish markets. During that time is probably when I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in food. Cooking is not something I knew a lot of, but I knew more than I thought I did just because I grew up with it. And the skills I learned from a home kitchen, and combining it with the understanding of those flavor profiles has really shaped my style of cooking now.

AP: Your journey led you to open your restaurant in Williamsburg, but when did you decide you wanted to write a book?
CE: I was never trained professionally in a Chinese kitchen, but I went to culinary school and I worked at a bunch of different places over the years. But this is the food of my heritage, the food I grew up having and my take on it specifically. The main reason I opened a restaurant was to educate people on what Cantonese food is and what it can be. We can only make so much of an impact with the restaurant, so I’ve always wanted to write a book, especially for home cooks.

AP: A lot of this book, and your career in general, is very shaped by family and heritage. You wrote this book with your fiancé, Phoebe Melnick, your restaurant is named after your mother, Bonnie. I'd love for you to talk about how that impacted this final version of your first cookbook.
CE: I think every project that I dive into, I want it to be personal. I always say, “Anyone can make something good, but anything great has a story behind it.” Every dish, everything we put on the menu, everything we have in the book, they all have a natural story and background behind why it became what it is. Making something that tastes good isn't hard. But making something great, with so much history behind it, that’s special. So I think for us to come together to do a book was very special. I didn't know that I was going to do this with my fiancé, but she works in food media and she's a very good storyteller so I think it was natural for me to want to. She was working a full-time job. I was working at the restaurant, we just had a kid, so every free second we had, it was spent working on this book, putting everything we had into it.

AP: I'd like to talk about the title of the book. Depending on who you talk to, MSG might have a negative reputation. There are so many crazy conspiracies around the ingredient that come from anti-Chinese sentiments. What is your history with using MSG and working around the way people perceive it?
CE: So, I didn't grow up using MSG. Actually, we were a chicken powder household. My mom also believed that it wasn't good for you. One of the main ingredients in the chicken powder we used was MSG, though, whether she knew it or not and I obviously ate it and I knew it makes food taste good. I really started working with it and using it a bit later in my exploration with cooking and learned you can't achieve that depth of flavor, that umami and that savoriness it gives, from just salt.

When I started to understand more about Cantonese food, I understood there’s a balance. It really is a balance of salt, sugar, and MSG. In the book, I joke about it being the Chinese holy trinity of seasoning. Cantonese food doesn't really have a lot of acid and there's not a lot of heat, but there is a lot of umami and MSG is how you get that beautiful flavor.

AP: Do you ever find that you have to convince people it's not a bad thing?
CE: I literally have a tattoo of it on my arm! At the restaurant, we're proud to have MSG on the menu. We have it in drinks, we have it in desserts, and we have it in savory food, obviously, but we have it listed because we're proud to use it, and educate people that it's not bad for you. I think in the last five to six years, there’s been a massive push and change towards the perception of MSG, especially for younger people who are educated on the topic.

AP: What is an uncommon way that you found yourself using it that really enhances something?
CE: I personally love savory food, but I really like using MSG in desserts. I love the contrast of sweet and salty. And then when you add umami, it takes it to another level that you don't expect that's really special and tasty.

I want to share something that shows you don’t have to lose that heritage and that identity, but you can fold it into your lifestyle and create a new way of cooking. It’s all about evolution.

AP: What do you hope people take from this book?
CE: I think there’s a new wave of cooking within immigrant communities emerging that is inspired by Americana. My son is a Chinese Jew. He's a mixed-kid born in New York. I was also born and raised in New York, but from a very, very traditional Chinese household. For my child, whether I'm cooking or my fiancé is cooking, it's going to be very different than it was for me because our family looks different. And I think it’ll be like this for a lot of families with kids growing up in the next couple generations. I want to share something that shows you don’t have to lose that heritage and that identity, but you can fold it into your lifestyle and create a new way of cooking. It’s all about evolution.