In high school, my friends and I would take the train into New York and just wander. For hours. My friends always gravitated towards what most teenagers circa 2015-2016 were into: coffee shops, Thai-rolled ice cream, Washington Square Park, the Supreme store—but I always pulled them in another direction. Chinatown.
I was obsessed with simply walking through the neighborhood. If I could scrape together a couple of bucks for a plate of dumplings or pork, all the better, but I was happy enough to aimlessly wander around Chinatown without a worry in the world.
As a young food nerd, I had an instinct to walk toward the roast meat shops. I was mesmerized by the ducks hanging in the window, the highly skilled men and women chopping pork with cleavers, the containers packed with cabbage, meat, and rice that flew out the door. It was only 10-or-so miles from where I lived, but it felt like a world away.
As I grew older, with my own money and my own free will, I discovered that Cantonese roast meat shops were hard to come by on this side of the Hudson. It was just something I had to go into New York for.
So when I caught wind of a Hong Kong roast meat shop opening in Bergen County, to say I was excited would be an understatement.
Canton Rodeo comes to Bergen Town Center with one mission: bring Hong Kong BBQ to the masses. The char siu pork, honey-roast duck, cabbage, noodles, rice—all of it. But the details behind the concept tell a story that goes much deeper than that.
Chef Connie Chung, Canton Rodeo’s Culinary Director, wasn’t always in the fast-casual space. In fact, quite the opposite. The acclaimed chef worked for nine years at Three-Michelin-Star Eleven Madison Park. The world-famous Flatiron restaurant even won Best Restaurant in the World while Chung was cooking there. The point is this: Chef Connie is the real deal.
Along with Chung are Co-Owners Fung Lam and Matthew Kann. Lam is an experienced restaurateur with proven concepts across New Jersey, New York, and Shanghai, and a descendant of Imperial 46 royalty (the very restaurant where I had my 11th birthday hibachi party!). Kann is a veteran consumer brand investor who has spent his career building and scaling category-defining restaurant concepts.
These names built up huge expectations. Not just for me, but seemingly the entire populace of Bergen County couldn’t wait for the doors to finally open. Canton Rodeo was hyped in a way I hadn’t seen for a fast-casual concept in a long time.
I was lucky enough to eat at the new storefront in Bergen Town Center just before they officially opened. I went with char siu pork on my mind. I’m pleased to report that, yeah, it’s really that good. The best roast pork I’ve had, bar none.
Chef Connie employs a slightly tweaked family recipe for her version. Boneless pork shoulders come in from Vande Rose Farms in Iowa—a farm that specializes in Heritage Duroc pork. The meat is broken down into slabs and marinated in a mix of secret ingredients and red rice yeast—which gives it that signature red shade. She tells me that the color red is associated with happiness and good fortune in Chinese culture, so nailing that bright hue is crucial when making char siu. Even better to do it with a natural ingredient and without any synthetic dyes.
The pork is marinated overnight, hung on hooks, and roasted in a ripping hot oven. Hanging exposes the meat on all sides, ensuring proper crust development. It’s pulled after around 12 minutes, then immediately dipped into a mix of maltose syrup and rice wine vinegar. The maltose is a quintessential part of char siu—it adds a glossy lacquer that is ubiquitous with Cantonese BBQ. The rice wine vinegar is Connie’s own secret ingredient, which she says she picked up from American BBQ recipes. It helps thin out the syrup to make it more dippable, while also adding acid to cut through an otherwise rich bite of pork.
For a more accessible option, Canton Rodeo also offers char siu chicken. The same marinade. The same maltose dip. The same intensely hot oven. But with boneless skinless chicken thighs from Goffle Road Poultry Farm instead. It offers guests who don’t eat pork an opportunity to sample a different take on char siu.
To be completely candid with you, Canton Rodeo nailed this. The eating experience is remarkably similar, and I found it to be a crave-worthy alternative to the flagship pork char siu. Sure, it might not be authentic. I hear you and raise you this: who cares?
But the real hidden treasure is the duck. Canton Rodeo serves a honey-roasted duck that is much more storied than they care to advertise.
When Chung, Lam, and Kann were conceptualizing Canton Rodeo, they thought back to the Cantonese BBQ spots that inspired them—what’s hanging in the window of every roast meat shop in Chinatown? Ducks, obviously. “So, we felt like we had to put a duck on the menu,” she told me.
She tapped back into her time in Michelin kitchens. Eleven Madison Park’s signature dish to this day is a lavender-roast duck—and Chef Connie made thousands during her tenure. She explained that throughout her nine years at EMP, the duck was the only dish she never grew tired of. The answer was right there: she could serve, essentially, that same exact duck. And instead of a percent of a percent of a percent of the wealthiest diners being the only ones with access to it, the masses could now enjoy it at an accessible price point.
Canton Rodeo uses the same Pekin Ducks from Joe Jurgielewicz & Son in Pennsylvania. The same spice mix of cumin, coriander, and Sichuan peppercorn. The same several-day process of drying out the skin. The same honey glaze that shimmers on the surface as it hangs in the window. The only notable change is that Chef Connie forgoes the lavender in Canton Rodeo’s version, which she admits was her least favorite part of the EMP duck to begin with.
You can grab a portion of duck with rice and veggies for just under $18. If you want an entire half duck, it will run you about $38. That’s a far cry from the hundreds of dollars that a meal at EMP runs you. No train into Manhattan. No dress code. No maxing out the Amex. You can have your duck, with noodles and veggies, in your sweatpants, inside of a Paramus strip mall. I’ll take the latter any day of the week.
And that’s exactly the point of Canton Rodeo for Chef Connie. “I love making food that makes people happy, and in fine dining, I think you do that, but you reach such a small audience,” she told me. “I think that’s what I love about fast casual—it almost brings me back to why I got into cooking. I can feed more people delicious food, and make more people happy.”
Beyond the meats, Canton Rodeo offers scallion lo mein and fried rice done in the wok, roasted cabbage and broccoli, and, of course, good ol’ steamed rice for a more classic option. There are also some truly amazing homemade sauces: ginger scallion sauce is verdant and punchy, a savory dip called Nana’s Sauce brings a mix of ginger and sesame, the quintessential hoisin plum sauce, and an aromatic mix of chiles, shallots, garlic, and crunchy roasted soybeans that they call Canto Crunch.
I admittedly don’t take the train into the city to wander Chinatown as much as I once did. But these days, I don’t really have to. Canton Rodeo didn’t just bring Hong Kong BBQ to my backyard; it brought back a piece of that feeling I chased as a teenager. Concepts like these remind me why I got into food in the first place. And though the pork is utterly perfect, and the duck is mesmerizingly delicious, Canton Rodeo was always about more than that for the team behind it.
“I grew up eating Chinese BBQ. My family would go to Chinatown every week and get a couple pounds of roast meat to bring home. That would be, like, easy weeknight dinner,” said Chung. “It was a part of my childhood, and I think it’d be great if it was a part of more people’s childhoods.”
Peter Candia is the Food + Drink Editor at New Jersey Digest. A graduate of The Culinary Institute of America, Peter found a passion for writing midway through school and never looked back. He is a former line cook, server and bartender at top-rated restaurants in the tri-state area. In addition to food, Peter enjoys politics, music, sports and anything New Jersey.
