CHARLOTTE — The path to Asian culture and healthy cuisine this side of the Piedmont leads to the Queen City.
Because it is here that The Peaceful Dragon is nestled behind a modest facade, surrounded by high-end department stores, gourmet eateries and jazzy coffee houses.
It is here that, about three years ago, Eric Sbarge and his wife, Hu Wan Chih, whose American name is Debrah, established the restaurant/tea house/cultural center to satisfy their own needs and the growing interest in Oriental custom in the community.
Wes Adams, manager of the cultural center, sets a Yxing clay teapot on the table in front of him and slides into a seat to tell the Sbarges’ story. After the first sip of green tea, he begins, narrating the events leading to the establishment of the center as if they had been part of his own life.
Eric, Adams says, wanted to open a cultural center similar to the one at which he’d studied for years, the American Center for Chinese Studies in New York. Debrah, on the other hand, had her own reasons for entrepreneurial intentions:She had become accustomed to very good green and oolong teas growing up in Taiwan and was frustrated by being able to find the same in Charlotte.
They hoped to open the unique establishment under the name The Tea Leaf, but were unable to find a location that suited them.
“They figured it wasn’t meant to be and put it on hold for a couple of years,”Adams says.
In the meantime, Eric — who is trained in Tai Chi Ch’uan, Pakua, Hsing-I, Shuai Chiao and Shaolin Kung Fu — was teaching classes in the area and gained a hefty following. Enough, he thought, to again consider opening the center.
“Then Debrah commented that there are a lot of Chinese cultural traditions of vegetarianism and there’s no vegetarian restaurant in Charlotte,”Adams says. “So that just snowballed into the whole idea of not only including in the cultural center classes and lectures, but also the tea house and restaurant.” The Peaceful Dragon was born.
Eric’s two-studio cultural center offers classes in tai chi, yoga, meditation and martial arts, as well as free lectures each Saturday night, on topics dealing with holistic health or Oriental culture. Follow-up workshops also are included.
Debrah, a Buddhist and lifelong vegetarian, oversees the restaurant/tea house side. When preparing a menu, she looked to her friend, a Buddhist nun, who designed the menu for a restaurant in New York.
“Debrah went up to study under her for a few months, learned and brought back some slants on what they were cooking, then combined that knowledge with the family recipes she’d already had,”Adams explains. “That became our menu.”
While all of the food is vegetarian — no meat, including fish, is used — much of it is vegan, not because they set out to make it vegan but because, generally, Asians do not use a lot of egg and dairy products.
But that does not mean the dishes lack flavor. To prove it, Adams suggests trying one of their best sellers: He suggests soup noodles, Tofu Delight, steamed dumplings or their voted-best-by-Creative-Loafing veggie burger.
“The veggie burgers are not ordered, they are handmade,” Adams says. He explains that the staff cooks the brown rice, the shiitake mushrooms and the hard tofu. They chop it themselves, patty it, cook it upon order and serve it with brown rice and kale.
Starters and side dishes include silky tofu, wonton soup, kale, brown rice and broccoli.
The Imperial Phoenix, a dish that’s as massive as its name, features jumbo shiitake mushrooms and snow peas on a bed of brown rice.
They suggest “fooling your mouth”with Grilled Fish Steak, which is a soybean/nori dish with a side of kale and rice, or with a club sandwich made from vegetarian ham imported from Taiwan.
When possible and feasible, the food used is organic and “culturally accurate.”
“There’s a little limitation in Charlotte, like the shiitake mushrooms, which Debrah has to have sent from a friend in New York because of the quality and the quantity we serve.”Adams says.
The quality of the food is attributed to Debrah’s commitment to healthy living.
“It’s not like most places I’ve worked at, where you pull this out of the freezer, put that in the microwave while you’re sauteing this in a pan. Then, you get this and heat it up on a grill and send it out,” Adams says. “And though we’re still not that well-known as a restaurant, I think the fact that this is, literally, homemade food is that reason we get so much repeat business. Debrah is picky, and she treats it like her kitchen.”
For those looking for a sweet way to top off a meal, the restaurant does offer desserts, including red bean, green tea or ginger ice cream, passion fruit sorbet and milkshakes.
When looking for the best desserts to complement the healthy menu, the Sbarges and their staff exhausted their options, including looking at soy and sugar- free desserts.
“The sugar-free desserts tend to be highly unnatural … and can be worse for you than regular desserts,” Adams says. “And with soy, most of the ones we tried tasted awful, and the ones we liked, we couldn’t get. So we just decided to go with holistic, kosher, good quality desserts and just leave it at that. They’ve already eaten healthy food, so if they decide to have a dessert, they can have a dessert.”
Or have the one thing they do call “almost as good as tea” — a cup of gourmet cappuccino or espresso.
“When we opened, we wanted to be a healthy alternative to a coffee house, because people love to go to coffee houses and hang out, but nobody’s going to tell you coffee’s healthy for you,” Adams says. “Coffee houses are cool and they’re nice to hang out at, but there’s the double chocolate cappuccino, the desserts … and we just wanted to offer something better.”
And what could be better, before or after a meal, than a cup of hot or iced ginger peach tea?
The Peaceful Dragon was voted by Creative Loafing one year to have had the best tea selection. The whole-leaf tea is imported from a horticulturist and agriculturist who, Adams says, “has devoted his whole life to not only brining tea to the West, but improving the quality of tea in the East.
“When he went to China, he found they had done away with the old methods and gone to modern (tea) farming, and (quality) was declining. Now, he is trying to convince them to revert to the old methods and modern organic methods,”Adams says. “He certifies that his tea is at least 99 percent organic, because he deals with people he knows are doing it the traditional or organic way.”
All their Japanese and Chinese green and oolong teas are acquired from the horticulturist, while the Earl Grey and black teas come from another company.
The differences in teas, Adams explains, is in the way they are processed. The three major categories of tea are green, oolong and black.
Green tea leaves are picked, steamed, dried and lightly roasted. Oolong teas are picked, partially bruised by shaking them in the bag, partially withered by fermentation, dried and lightly roasted. And black teas are picked, bruised, withered, steamed, dried and roasted.
White and puchong teas are two kinds of green teas:white leaves are picked, steamed and dried, and puchong are picked, bruised, scented (usually in fields of flowers), dried and lightly roasted.
Finally, pu erh tea is a black tea that goes through all the other processing and is then aged and pressed for the fullest flavor.
To complement the whole-leaf and “novelty” teas — including “herbal” teas which are actually infusions, and Earl Grey teas, which are known for consumption in England — The Peaceful Dragon sells authentic Japanese cast iron and Chinese clay teapots and sets and ceramic tea sets.
Yxing (ee-shing) teapots, from the Yxing province where there is purple sand clay, are unique, because when it is fired the material is very strong and porous. Usually, inside the pot there is residue where it has not been finished, and there’s a reason for that.
“If you have an Yxing tea pot and you have a favorite tea, you can make just that one tea in that pot, and it will take on its character and the tea will taste better than in another pot,”Adams says.
There is also feng shui, martial arts and Asian wisdom literature for sale, intricately detailed fountains, prayer beads and flags, bonsai plants, incense and an abundance of other pan-Asian-related items.
Obviously, the trend in healthy lifestyles and eating habits is catching on and, now, more vegetarian and holistic stores and restaurants are opening.
So will The Peaceful Dragon stand up to competition?
“I think the main thing The Peaceful Dragon has to offer, aside from the fact that the food is award-winning and ... hand-prepared, is the idea of the whole cultural atmosphere and a healthy lifestyle,” Adams says. “We really try to be a place that addresses every aspect of a healthy lifestyle possible.”
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