Memories of Chinese Canadian Restaurant Food 1940s-50s

July 2, 2012

       Chinese Canadian historian Larry Wong reminisced about favorite Chinatown restaurant dishes he had while growing up in Vancouver in his blog, "Ask Larry."

Cho San

As can be expected, in the 40s and 50s, no matter where you go in Chinatown, the cuisine was Cantonese. And the meals were cheap. My older brother used to tell me lunch was twenty-five cents when he was growing up. Lunch was a bowl of rice, soup and some meat and vegetable.

In a 1950s issue of the Chinatown News, there was an advertisement for a four course lunch at one dollar!

Wonton houses were popular at one time. You can get a small bowl of six wonton for 35 cents or for 15 cents more, you get ten.

Chicken was a popular dish. As were crabs. You can get a plate of curried crab at the On On Tea Garden for five dollars. Then there was the deep fried rock cod with sweet and sour sauce. Oh that was such a heavenly dish as were the steamed rock cod or even the steamed sturgeon. Presently these fish are in short supply or even unavailable.

Other popular dishes were steamed egg custard, egg foo yung, chicken with corn soup and prawns with Chinese greens.

The King Hong restaurant at 218 East Pender ran for 56 years and had two dishes different from the rest. They served the vegetarian soy sauce mein which were darker and tastier than regular noodles. Another favorite was the deep fried breaded riblets. Again this was not found anywhere in Chinatown nor for that matter anywhere else in the country. It made for a wonderful snack for sui yeh.

The best place for noodle dishes was the Ho Inn which was at 83 East Pender. They made great chow mein and best chow fun. One summer, I took the car and drove my way to Los Angeles. At every stop I made, I dropped into a Chinese restaurant and ordered chow fun. The result was that each place had their own unique recipes. For example the Ho Inn served their chow fun dry while some I visited were covered in sauce. Others had different kind of noodles other than rice. None matched the Ho Inn.

For banquets it was difficult to beat the W.K. Gardens, the oldest restaurant at 63 years in 1985. Every family and benevolent associations, wedding parties, red egg banquets all had their celebration there. Their menu was lavish with shark fin soup, Hong Kong style steak, vegetables with giant Chinese mushrooms, cracked crabs or lobsters and other banquet treasures.

 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

"Genuine American Chop Suey Served Here"

July 2, 2012
      Considered by some to be the Julia Child of Chinese cookbooks, Grace Zia Chu was a pioneer Chinese cooking teacher and cookbook writer with her 1962 "Pleasures of Chinese Cooking" and 1975 "Madame Chu's Chinese Cooking School."  She died in 1999 at the ripe age of 99 but not without making a significant impact on the way Americans understood and appreciated the cooking of Chinese food.
      She will be also remembered for a much less important but nonetheless amusing tidbit.  She claimed to have seen a neon sign at a restaurant in Shanghai that proclaimed, "Genuine American Chop Suey Served Here."   However, she did not say how well this culinary import fared among Shanghai diners.
 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

Chinese Restaurants: Boxed In By Low Prices?

June 29, 2012
    Chinese restaurants grew in popularity over the past century for many reasons ranging from their novelty, exotic appeal, good taste, and presumed positive impact on health.  Not to be overlooked is the lower price of meals at most Chinese restaurants, which gave them a competitive edge made possible by low overhead.  Located often in low-rent areas and staffed by no-wage family members who worked together over long days to enable the survival of their restaurants, they used low prices to attract customers, especially those non-Chinese who before the end of W. W. II were hesitant to try unfamiliar and foreign food.

  Customers of Chinese restaurants have come to expect fast delicioufood, fortune cookies, dirty restrooms, rude or indifferent waiters, and low, low prices.  This last point was even recognized in an analysis in Atlantic Monthly by an economist, Tyler Cowen, author of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.

"Quality food is cheaper when cheap labor is available to cook it. In a relatively wealthy country like the United States, cheap labor can be hard to find. We have a high level of labor productivity and a minimum wage; in some cases even illegal immigrants earn more than the legal minimum. But one obvious place to find cheap labor is in family-owned, family-run Asian restaurants. Family members will work in the kitchen or as waiters for relatively little pay, or sometimes no pay at all. Sometimes they’re expected to do the work as part of their contribution to the family. The upshot ithese restaurants tend to offer good food buys."

   I raised the same point in Sweet and Sour. But the low prices in Chinese restaurants that were once adaptive may have put them in a box from which it is impossible to escape today. Raising prices to match, or exceed, the average price of a meal at restaurants in general might lead to loss of many customers long accustomed to bargain meals at Chinese restaurants.  The trend of some Chinese restaurants to reinvent themselves as fusion cuisine is one strategy that makes higher prices more palatable to diners.  Foodies feel these restaurants are the next hot thing and are willing to stomach the higher tab.

 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Chop Suey and Issue of Authenticity Again

June 4, 2012
     
    Historian Charles. W. Hayford published a wonderful article that discussed the place of chop suey in the history of Chinese restaurant fare.   Although widely disparaged as not being authentic, Haywood points out it is "authentic" as American-Chinese food.

   On the overemphasis on authenticity, he notes that he has on occasion had dreary (but authentic) Peking duck in China while enjoying excellent (but inauthentic) sweet and sour pork in the U. S. He shared an amusing incident on a blog post where he insisted on using chopsticks rather than a fork in a Chinese restaurant.

"I politely turned down the spoon they brought and demanded  chopsticks. Only after a few minutes of chasing the rice around the plate did I look around to see that all the old Chinese men, the ones whose authentic presence had drawn me in, were eating with spoons.
 
I had demanded chopsticks because I was worried about authenticity. What was I thinking? I was a six foot blue eyed blond. Did I think that if I used chopsticks nobody would notice that I wasn’t Chinese? The actual Chinese in that restaurant didn’t worry about authenticity: All they wanted to do was to get the food into their mouths. No matter what they did they were still “Chinese.”  They were sensible; I got rice all over my shirt."

Another perceptive commentary on this issue is by a young Chinese American who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley outside of Los Angeles where a myriad of non-Cantonese Chinese cuisines can be found that makes it the mecca for some of the best Chinese restaurant food in the U. S.. He chronicles on his blog about his dismay when he first encountered American-Chinese restaurant fare as a child:
 
"The food tasted like a farcical imitation of “real” Chinese food, a culinary caricature made by overemphasizing the most pronounced flavors and covering them all in MSG, grease, and corn syrup. My taste buds were the first to revolt against this explosion of sugar and fat; soon afterwards, my stomach joined the protest. I never wanted to eat this type of food ever again."
 
Later, however, when he was in college, his views changed and he came to actually like American-Chinese food and began to defend it.

""Purists may decry that it’s not “real” Chinese food, but what is real Chinese food, anyway? Is there some sort of ancient recipe canon, saying that this is how Chinese food should be? Saying that there is a difference between “authentic” food and “inauthentic” food is denying wonderful cultural mixes like Westernized Chinese food and Westernized Chinese people."
 
 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

Fads and Fashions in Food Followup

May 25, 2012
In an earlier post, I used Google Books Ngram tool to show that the frequency with which popular Chinese foods were mentioned in printed books corresponded closely with the opposite trends in popularity of chop suey and dim sum over the past half century or so.  
As a followup, I checked on how well these iconic Chinese foods compared with 'fortune cookie' and 'fried rice,' two other very popular Chinese restaurant foods.  The results below show that by the early 1980s dim sum was mentioned more often than the ubiquitous fortune cookie, but by 2008, the gap was narrow.  Surprising, to me, was that fried rice easily outdistanced all of them, rising in a linear rate over the past century.  Wonder if 'Southern Fried Rice' was a contributing factor. (-: 
 
 

   Of course, an easier method to determine food preferences might have been to poll a few Chinese restaurateurs!  But it is nice to see that dissimilar methods yield convergent conclusions.  Ngram is a neat tool, and can be used for many other analyses having nothing to do with food.  Note also, as shown at the bottom of illustration, if you click on the link for a given food and given time period, google will take you to its findings of the actual occurrences of that item in books. (Note: You can't do that with the image above, but need to do that from your browser)

Posted by John Jung.

 

Chop Suey in Augusta, Georgia 1905

April 18, 2012

        The Augusta Chronicle in 1905 proudly announced the impending arrival in Augusta of two "celestials," the popular term for describing Chinese a century ago, who were coming all the way from New York to open a "genuine" Chinese restaurant.  It isn't known whether this one,  to be on the 800 block of some unmentioned street, was to be the first, or the first genuine, Chinese restaurant in this southern city.  Augusta had perhaps the largest Chinese population in the Deep South at the turn of the twentieth century that started with the recruitment of Chinese labor to work on the construction of the vital Augusta canal that enabled it to build its own textile mills instead of sending cotton to New England textile mills.
   Again, in the journalistic style of the time, the article goes on to gently poke fun at the Chinese who will open a "sho nuff" Chinese restaurant, one that will serve chop suey!


      It was not the last Chinese restaurant in Augusta, as several others would open within a few years. Augusta was well ahead of much larger Atlanta in attracting Chinese restaurateurs.
 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Chop Suey in Samoa!

April 4, 2012
            Helen Wong, of Auckland, New Zealand, has been one of my faithful correspondents for several years. Since she is a dedicated poster of information from all over the world about the Overseas Chinese, about a year ago I asked her whether chop suey was as popular down under as it used to be in North America. She observed:
           Up to the 1960s most people ate at home... In the early 70s, some Chinese men arrived here, and started Hong Kong Style takeaways. There were some restaurants that catered to the locals, but the meals were westernized for their tastes... fried rice, chow mein (with vegetables like cauliflower, celery, onion, carrot slices).  

            Chop Suey was not  something that was a common feature on New Zealand menus. However, Helen did point out that Samoa now has its version of Chop Suey!



Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

In Honor of Ngalan Tam Lee - Chef opened Chinese restaurants in Georgia

April 3, 2012
Excerpt from Atlanta Journal-Constitution,  March 5, 2011 Obit.

There's a line in an old Chinese poem, the gist of which is that if one wants the best in Chinese cooking, one should eat Cantonese cuisine. That was Ngalan Tam Lee's specialty.

Mrs. Lee and her husband, James Soon Lee, came to Georgia from San Francisco in 1975 at the invitation of relatives already here who said there were very few Chinese restaurants in metro Atlanta and saw that as an opportunity to start one.

The Lees' first place, the Chinese Garden, was in Sandy Springs and was one of a handful of Chinese restaurants in the metro area. After three years, the Lees sold the Chinese Garden, then moved to Carrollton to help relatives run a Chinese restaurant there.

A year later, the Lees opened Hong Kong on Buford Highway in Doraville. Their son, Dr. Louis Lee of Roswell, said it was the first restaurant in the Atlanta area to serve dim sum, a snack-like dish that originated in south China.

After several years, the Lees sold that restaurant, and in 1987 opened the House of Lee Chinese Restaurant in Lithonia, which they operated for a decade.

"Mom and Dad worked from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., every day of the year except for major holidays," Dr. Lee said. "But each of them had a well-developed work ethic from childhood.

"Dad took care of the front, greeting customers and tending the bar, while Mom was the chef. She didn't have formal training, but she learned a lot about cooking from her family growing up in south China."

Her husband said Mrs. Lee was a friendly sort who periodically left the kitchen to mingle with diners and check to see if they were pleased with their meals.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time they would say they were very satisfied," he said.

Bo Giles of Gainesville said he was a teenager working as a dishwasher and observed Mrs. Lee's cooking mastery up close.

"She's the reason," he said, "that when I got my first apartment, the first thing I bought for it was a wok, so I could fix my own stir-fry dinners."

Another former dishwasher and busboy, Greg Hardy of Covington, said Mrs. Lee always treated him kindly, making sure he got his fill of sweat-and-sour this or sweet-and sour that, plus egg rolls.

Ngalan Tam Lee, 74, of Conyers died of pneumonia Feb. 24 at DeKalb Medical Center. Her funeral is 11:30 a.m. Sunday at Wages and Sons Funeral Home, Lawrenceville, with burial March 13 in Colma, Calif.

Mrs. Lee was born and reared in China's Canton state and was trained as a teacher of the Chinese language. In 1960 she acquired an exit visa to go live with relatives in Hong Kong, then a British crown colony. Four years later, she met her husband-to-be, who had immigrated to the United States years before and was back in Hong Kong for a visit. The two were wed in 1964 and settled close to relatives in the San Francisco area for about a decade before moving to Georgia.


Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Restaurateurs 

 
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About Me


John Jung After retiring from a 40-year career as a psychology professor, I published 4 books about Chinese immigrants that detail the history of their laundries, grocery stores, and family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada.

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