Almost all of the dishes served at New York City restaurant Bonnie’s contain MSG, says owner/chef Calvin Eng.Adam Friedlander/The New York Times/Redux
MSG is the most misunderstood ingredient of the century. That’s finally changing
“When people tell me that they ate at a Chinese food restaurant and they had trouble breathing and tightness in their chest, I get worried – and I’d say, ‘you need to follow up on that because MSG is not an allergen. It’s not going to cause an allergic response. Our bodies make glutamate, so it would not be possible to have an allergy to glutamate’,” says Rains.
By Maggie Hiufu Wong, CNN
Updated 11:15 PM EDT, Wed May 10, 2023
Calvin Eng, the owner of New York-based Cantonese-American restaurant Bonnie’s, isn’t shy about his love for monosodium glutamate.
Case in point – he has the letters “MSG” tattooed on his arm, and his restaurant’s menu includes a signature drink called the MSG Martini.
“Things just taste better with MSG, whether it’s Western food or Cantonese food,” the chef tells CNN.
“We use it in drinks. We use it in desserts. We use it in savory food. It’s in almost everything. Salt, sugar and MSG – I always joke that they’re the Chinese Trinity of seasonings.”
Openly admitting to using MSG – once a surefire way to keep your restaurant empty – certainly hasn’t undermined Bonnie’s success. It’s become one of the hottest tables in New York since opening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in late 2021, winning numerous Best New Restaurant awards from multiple media outlets.
Eng himself was named one of the best new chefs of 2022 by Food and Wine Magazine and was included on the 2023 Forbes 30 under 30 list, just to name a few of his recent achievements.