2009: You Know How This Ends

Ingredients for Edward Lee's Gutsy Prokchops. Drawn by Lucey Bowen from John Kernick's photograph in 2009 Gourmet.

     In the March 2009, Gourmet, under the heading "Politics of the Plate," Barry Estabrook wrote about "The Price of Tomatoes."  In an expose of farming practices in Florida, Estabrook asserted that "If you have eaten a tomato this winter, it might well have been picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery."   Thirty years earlier, I worked for a fall, packing apples into crates at the last working orchard in Connecticut.  I got the job because Blue Jay Orchards had to advertise for and hire anyone local willing to do the work before bringing a team of workers from Jamaica to do the job.  The Orchard provided reasonably decent housing for these men, and paid them enough that they could send enough money back to Jamaica to make possible the purchase of a fishing boat or the completion of a small house.  I loved listening to their patois and the hymns they sang from up in the apple boughs.
     Labor, food, journalism --- all is political, isn't it?
     Travel can take Nicole Mones to the glorious Li River for cooking school, and immigration bring strangers to our shores.  In 2009, the products of these currents showed in "Sweet Life," the tale of a start-up restaurant, Street, and the resultant clutch of recipes, many strongly influenced by Asian street foods.  But my favorite, can't wait to get myself there, is Brooklyn-born, Korean-American Edward Lee's 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky.  I think I have to take my the-grits-gene-skipped-a-generation daughter, who has adopted Anson Mills Grits as her own, from Atlanta to Louisville, just for one of his meals.
     For Ruth Reichl and others at Gourmet, the sudden closing of the magazine came as a bolt from the blue.  Management blamed falling advertising revenues, in spite of a subscription base of over a million.   If bringing Asian food, culture and travel to Americans in a literate and visually appealing Gourmet had fulfilled d the goals of its earliest editors and contributors.
     What I miss is the writing.  As we've seen, Gourmet's writers brought  intelligence and information to the table.  I still have a great appetite for those.

Chicago:
Wow Bao at 1 West Wacker Boulevard, is still Wow Bao
Urban Belly at 3053 North California Avenue, is still Urban Belly.

Los Angeles:
Cheun Hing at 8450 Garvey Avenue, Rosemead, is closed.
Din Tai Fung at 1108 South Baldwin Avenue, Arcadia is still Din Tai Fung.
Duck House at 1039 East Valley Boulevard, San Gabriel location is closed.
Elite Restaurant at 700 South Atlantic Boulevard, Monterey Park is still Elite Restaurant.
Garden of Flowing Fragrance Tea Shop at Huntington Museum is Garden of Flowing Fragrance Tea Shop.
Half and Half Tea House at 120 North San Gabriel Boulevard is still Half and Half Tea House.
Happy Family Restaurant at 111 North Atlantic Boulevard, Monterey Park is still the Happy Family Restaurant.
Lake Spring Restaurant at219 East Garvey Avenue, Monterey Park is still Lake Spring Restaurant.
Monterey Palace at 1001 East Garvey Avenue, Monterey Park, is still Monterey Palace.
Street is still Street.
Tianjin Bistro at 534 East Valley Boulevard, San Gabriel, is still Tianjin Bistro.
Yi Mei Pastries 736 South Atlantic Boulevard, Monterey Park, is closed.
Yun Chuan Garden at 301 North Garfield Avenue, Monterey Park is still Yun Chuan Garden.

Louisville, Kentucky:
610 Magnolia is still 610 Magnolia.

2008: Into the Kitchens

Doorway to spice merchant, South India,  Lucey Bowen, 2008.

     Which of the following would have been the biggest surprise to those early writers and editors of Gourmet of the 1940s?

1. China played host to the Olympics.
2. Dubai became a major hub of world air travel.
3. Pan-Asian cuisine was being adopted whole heartily in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
4. Americans travelled all across Asia to take cooking classes.

     All of these developments, and more, were recounted in the Gourmet's 2008 issues.  A new crop of writers, new destinations; a promising field.  In "Olympian Appetites," Stephen Glain discovers an innovative way to explore China's regional cuisines without leaving Beijing.  He frequents the cafeterias and diners associated with the offices that provinces and cities maintain in the capital.  The consumer benefits from the regional pride of chefs.
     Jay Rayner adopts a snarky attitude to Dubai's emergence from a sleepy pearl fishing village to the entrepot of the 21st Century.  While he searches, fruitlessly, for "real" Emirate dishes he relentlessly attacks the "glorious fakery" of the entire city.  The obvious parallel to Las Vegas is made only by noting that neither have access to much in the way of local ingredients.
    Brought as  bride from New York's East Village to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Andrea Reusing discovered no Asian restaurants. With her Lantern restaurant,  she decided to fill the niche with ultra-fresh and local ingredients cooked in the manner of China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and India.
     Meanwhile,  once again, my itinerary prefigured travel suggestions from Gourmet.  A favorite professor from Vassar and his Indian wife were leading a tour of South India, and my husband and I joined them.  The astonishing temples in seaside and tropical setting overwhelmed out senses with delight.  Gourmet's May issues would feature cooking schools in Cochin, Kerala and Tellicherry, all on our itinerary.  In fact, we feasted wonderfully at Philipkutty's Farm and with the incomparable Nimmy Paul.
      I must admit that at the time much of brain was caught up in an entirely different journey, that of retracing the photographic footprint my father made when he captured the Hudson River in his 1941 Great River of the Mountains.
The culture of South India would not come into focus for me until future study and travel in Northern India.

Meanwhile, the fate of restaurants reviewed that year:

San Francisco:
Hama-Ko at 108 B Carl Street is still Hama-Ko Sushi.
Murasaki at 211 Clement Street is still Murasaki.
Okina Sushi at 776 Arguello Boulevard is still Okina Sushi.
Minako Organic at 2154 Mission Street is still Minako Organic.

Boston:
o ya at 9 East Street is still o ya.

Seattle:
Chiso Kappo at 701 North 36th Street is closed.

Chapel Hill:
Lantern Restaurant at 423 West Franklin Street is still Lantern Restaurant.

2006: Reflections

From the Water, Halong Bay, Vietnam, Watercolor with Chinese brush, Lucey Bowen. December 2006

     In 2006, Gourmet looked back, as any 65 year old would.  In the September issue, covers of bountiful produce, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s, prefaced very up-to-the-minute recipes, like "Sumac Skirt Steak with Pomegranate Reduction."  Elsewhere in the same issue a menu for a harvest meal featured an extended, multi-generational, multi-racial, multi-ethnic family fronted an overgrown barn to eat at a rustic table.  Were non-whites now welcome at the American table?

     Change, full dangerous opportunity, is announced with the headline "Strip Steaks; Las Vegas has the best Chinese restaurants in the country, but to get a table you have to be willing to wager a fortune.  Many of the so-called Whales who can eat there are gambling tourists from China itself. Even more change comes with the inclusion of restaurants from Portland, Oregon to Long Branch, New Jersey.  These are not road-food joints, which had been featured in the magazine since 1994.  These are serious restaurants with inspired chefs serving food as innovative as any in Manhattan. 

     Two places where "Asian-Fusion" cooking had historical roots, Hawaii and Malaysia, are featured.  In fact Alan Wong's 11-year-old Restaurant  in Honolulu made it to the top-10 restaurants, just behind Masa, with its very high priced sushimi and sushi.  

     The biggest change, to my thinking, is the mention of war in this magazine of good living.  April's issue included "Culture Notes," headlined "Conflict Cuisine; A Roving Correspondent finds that during the hell of war, the comfort of sharing food becomes even more meaningful."  Journalist Scott Simon wrote that he considered himself "privileged to have had memorable meals in places where the three stars are war, famine and pestilence."  In October's "Memorable Meals," David Halberstam recalled meals shared in war-torn Saigon of 1962-64 with other journalists and soldiers.  (Sadly, Halberstam would die in 2007 in a tragic automobile accident not five miles from my home in Menlo Park.)

     Karen Coates, who would write about Asia and food until Gourmet expired in 2009, travelled to Halong Bay on Vietnam's watery border with China.  While the photographs accompanying the article equal any National Geographic travelogue, her reflections convey her solitary sojourn, her willingness to take risks that the thousands of tourists who flock to the bay will not.  

     Coates' story recalls a hero's journey, The Odyssey.  Without question the most serious contender for Homer and Odysseus is my fellow Vassar grad, the one I love to hate, Anthony Bourdain.  In the June, 2006 issue, Bourdain travels to, no, not Las Vegas, but Miami.  The trope here was Anthony against the "bizarro universe."  He was lured into eating "Grass Fed Vietnamese-Style Bison Ceviche" at Afterglo, to him an outrageously expensive, pretentious place.  He's went off in search of and found great food at the hole-in-the-wall kinds of places that are cooking for immigrants, be they from Central and South America, even Japan, Nigeria and Ghana.

     Meanwhile, with my children having departed for the East Coast and college, I began to swim in an the ocean of Chinese culture lapping at my shores.  Brush and rice paper at hand, I practiced Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, with Yu Chun Hui.  At a local community college, I began to study East Asian Civilization with Douglas Lee.  I continued to use a computer programs and CDs, like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur to learn Mandarin.  These two programs showed significant advances in language teaching since I'd left the field of linguistics decades earlier.  I noted in my journals "I can never be Chinese BUT I can understand more."  How could I not want to learn more about a culture and people that makes up half our world?
     In those community college classes I was always the oldest student and usually the only Caucasian.  Was I a solitary sojourner, creating an aura of singularity, member of an exclusive club of one?  I would next go to Vietnam and Angkor Wat with a tour of Vassar alumni, among whom I was almost the youngest.  Once again my preparation was intense.  I found a Vietnamese student at City College to tutor me in Vietnamese.  Alas, Vietnamese, with its six toned vowels proved far more difficult than Mandarin.  Still, I took pride in learning Vietnam's national prose novel, the Tale of Kieu, whose female heroine is said to pre-figure 150 years of Vietnam's struggle against foreign invaders.  

New York:
Masa at Time Warner Center is still Masa.

San Francisco:
Medicine at 161 Sutter Street is closed.

Los Angeles:

Miami:
Hiro's Yakko-San 17040-46 West Dixie Highway is still Hiro's Yakko-San.

Bainbridge Island, Washington:
Madoka at 241 Winslow Way West,  is still Madoka.

Hawaii:

Alan Wong's Restaurant at 1857 South King Street, Honolulu is still Alan Wong's Restaurant.

2007: Into The West of the East

Soup, duck, stuffed eggs in Forest Foods preparation, drawing by Lucey Bowen, Kunming, 2007.

      If pressed, most of us remember 2007 as the year that the economy tanked.  I remember it as the year I explored western China.  Who travels in a recession? Me.  Studying Chinese, Chinese brush painting, Asian American Women and the Filipino community whetted my appetite for a second trip to China.  When my Number Two Chinese Painting teacher, Ren Ming, announced his annual trip would encompass China's southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, I signed on.
     Ming wanted to revisit the minority cultures he'd seen in 1984, traveling after he finished his art degree.  All of our travel, after the flight to Kunming, was by bus and by train.  Almost by definition, non-Han Chinese minorities reside in remote, mountainous areas.  They eke out a living in agriculture and herding in truly awesome surroundings.  The long bus rides gave me a better chance to get to know my fellow travelers, principally American-born-Chinese, or as they call themselves, ABCs.  To see China with them, and thru their eyes was most revealing.  All at once, they take pride in China's history and its vast territory, while taking a more critical attitude to current conditions than Peace-Corps-trained me ever would.
     This trip finally established a congruence in my travels and one promoted by the magazine.  A month after my trip,  Nicole Mones "The Road to Shangri-La," about Yunnan's Kunming, Dali and Lijiang appeared.  In April, Fuschia Dunlop wrote "True West," about Xinjiang.  The principal minority residing there are Turkic Uyghur peoples, and the principal religion is Islam.  Dunlop feels more like she's in Marrakech than Beijing.
      Two more articles, one on Mughal cuisine in India and the other the cooking of Persia make this subtle attempt to convey the range of people and places Americans have begun lumping together as "Islamic fundamentalists."
     Meanwhile, in the United States, there were more Chinese restaurants than Burger King, Wendy's and McDonald's combined.  By-and-large it will be the Mom and Pop shops that survive the downturn, with a few exceptions, noted below.
 
New York:
Momofuku Noodle Bar at 171 1st Avenue is still Momofuku Noodle Bar.
Momofuku SSam Bar at 207 2nd Avenue is still Momofuku SSam Bar
Wakiya at Gramercy Park Hotel, 2 Lexington Avenue is Maialino.

2005: Everything Old Shoe is on the New Foot

At the Great Wall, Watercolor, brush and rice paper, Lucey Bowen, 2005

     Nina Simond's "Shanghai Food Lover's Guide" served to remind us that the a quarter century had passed since the end of the Cultural Revolution.  It seemed that in spite of Irene Corbally Kuhn's fears, Shanghai was once again the "Paris of the East,"  at least for foodies.  Simonds provided a recipe, and the trick (aspic) for making the irresistible Shanghai Stuffed Soup Buns.
     Other things have changed, along with the magazine's graphics and layout.  A Chinese restaurant in London would never have been written up in the early days; this issue reviews four.  There's even a review of the Asian-inspired food in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center's 20.21 Restaurant.
     The centerpiece of the April issue was "The Man Who Came to Dinner."  No less a writer than Calvin Trillin described celebrating, at Chez L'Ami Louis, in Paris, the 70th Birthday dinner of R.W. Apple,  New York Times correspondent and food critic. I mention this because Trillin arranged to be served, the night before,  a dinner including four kinds of dumplings, served up by an emigré chef, Yang from Shandong.
     The indomitable Caroline Bates returned with a survey called "When Tokyo Met Lyon, Or the Rise and Rise of Asian Fusion."  She dated the birthplace of Asian Fusion to 1982, locates it at the Sheraton La Reina at LAX, and credits its emergence to chef Roy Yamaguchi, Japanese born and of Japanese and Hawaiian parentage.  The father, long unacknowledged was, of course, "Trader Vic" Beregeron.  The next phase was the melding of French cuisine minceur and Japanese kaiseki.  Next came Wolfgang Puck, serving up franco-japanese, but calling it Chinois.  In New York, she wrote, what had been a West Coast style was adopted by European trained chefs like Gray Kunz and Jean-George Vongerichten. In 2005, she sensed a return to West Coast roots.  "The show goes on."
     Harris Salat's essay on the aesthetics of Japanese ceramics and food described a difference kind the fusion, a sensual one.  Fuchsia Dunlop and Michael Roberts described the opposite: encounters with the unfathomable, the different.  In "Culture Shock," Dunlop recounted the results of introducing three outstanding Chinese chefs, from Sichuan, to American food at Thomas Keller's The French Laundry in Yountville, California.  Conclusion: Chinese chefs found American food and dining customs just as strange as American found Chinese.  Chef Michael Roberts' journey had a different outcome.  Faced with a debilitating disease, he traveled to South India, and was inspired by the spiritual, introspective patience of its cooks.

     My journey in 2005 was closer to Roberts'.  One child had left for college.  The other was traversing the rocky terrain of finishing high school.  I was unsure of my own future. In a year I would be sixty years old.  Both my parents had died in their mid-sixties.  I felt old and growing older.
     Occupying my mind with strange and wonderful art and literature of Asia filled the emptiness, the feeling of purposelessness.  With my new-found-awareness of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs in the afterlife, I joked that as I might not come back as a sentient being, if I wanted to learn Mandarin, I had better start now.  And so I did.  And when a brochure for a tour showed up in the mail, I wanted to go.  Dick could only take time away from work for the last leg of the trip, from Shanghai to the Yellow Mountains. I redoubled my study of Mandarin.
     The trip surprized me.  The itinerary of palaces, temples, museums, and archeological sites was overwhelming.  My classes and my reading were too new for me to absorb the historical context of what I was seeing.  My enjoyment came from self-discovery, from being more myself.
     A Chinese artist, Xu Bing, who lives half the year in Beijing and half in Brooklyn, observed that he understands himself better for living in the United States.  Traveling in China, I felt my truest self.  Everywhere we went, I painted. I painted the mountains from the Great Wall, the desert from the back of our bus, the misty cliffs of the Yangtze from my cabin on a cruise boat, ancient towns from park benches, the dreamy mountains of the River Li from a river boat and the Yellow Mountains from a rocky perch.  The act of painting drew people to me and I made rudimentary conversation in Mandarin.  At the end of the trip, I happily gave away many of the paintings to my fellow travelers.  The act of observing the landscape, and painting to capture my impressions, had filled me with energy.  Buying brushes, ink and paper, I felt united with China's visual history.
     My body was my other concern.  I tried to swim everywhere we went, and in the larger cities, our hotels had pools.  And I got massages.  In China, massage is a medical treatment, and sometimes is accompanied by moxi-bustion and acupuncture.  I will never forget receiving this treatment, gazing out the porthole as we floated down the Yangtze.  Food?  You must remember that this was a tour-group!
   
   
New York:
Café Gray at Time Warner Center, 10 Columbus Circle is still Café Gray.
66 at 241 Church Street is closed.
Spice Market at 403 West 13th Street is still Spice Market.
Vong at 200 East 54th Street is closed.
Yumcha at 29 Bedford Street is closed.

Los Angeles:
Beacon at 3280 Helms Avenue, Culver City, is closed.
Chaya Brasserie at 8741 Alden Drive, Beverly Hills, is still Chaya Brasserie.
Chaya Venice at 110 Navy Street, Venice, is still Chaya Venice.
Chinois on Main at 2709 Main Street, Santa Monica, is still Chinois on Main.
Matsuhisa at 129 North La Cienega Boulevard, Beverly Hills is still Matsuhisa.
Orris at 2005 Sawtelle Boulevard, West Los Angeles is still Orris.
Roy's Woodland Hills at 6363 Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Woodland Hills, is still Roy's.
Trader Vic's at the Beverly Hilton, 9876 Wiltshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills is still Trader Vic's.
Yujean Kang's at 67 North Raymond, Pasadena is still Yujean Kang's.

Minneapolis:
20.21 at the Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue

2004: It's About More than Food

Peppers feature in Northern Thai food, drawing by Lucey Bowen from Gourmet, 2004, photograph.

    Perhaps the most celebrated piece of writing in Gourmet's 2004 issues was David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster."  It's a mad ramble of a piece which begins with a celebration of Maine's lobster industry and ends with Wallace raising all sorts of questions of the sort not previously addressed in the magazine devoted to "the good life."

    Other articles that year celebrated Bangkok and the fish sauce of Vietnam but are imbued awareness of the illusory nature of tourism and travel.  Perhaps this is most obvious in "Salaam Bombay," dedicated to India's Bollywood film industry.

     The sheer physicality of traveling by bicycle is an antidote to touristic illusion.  As a high school graduation present we asked Connor to accompany us on a cycling trip.  He voted to split the trip between France and Ireland, and we obliged.  Except for the heat, the cycling and the food were better in France than Ireland.  We continued to follow the no fast food rule.  I remember: Connor ordering Pizza Americane at a restaurant on the outskirts of Les Eyzie.  It proved to be pizza crust covered with French fries, hamburger and cheese sprinkled on top.  I would like to say that such a thing was never served in the United States, but soon Connor would discover the civic specialty of Pittsburgh: Primanti's sandwiches, all of which contain an order of french fries, coleslaw and tomatoes.

     My routine of triathalon training and tutoring was about to be modified.  In the fall I began attending the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's friday docent training lectures.  The curriculum was designed to complement Avery Brundage's collection of Asian art.  It paralleled the Museum's chronological and geographical ordering of the collection by beginning in India, and over the course of three years, encompassing Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. Under the direction of a wonderful teacher, Yu Chun-Hui.  The overview I'd taught in my 6th grade social studies classroom was just a start.  

New York:
Oriental Garden at 14 Elizabeth Street is still Oriental Garden.
Big Eat at 97 Bowery is closed.
Joe's Ginger at 113 Mott Street is closed.
Joe's Shanghai at 9 Pell Street is still Joe's Shanghai
New Green Bo at 66 Bayard is Nice Green Bo.
Jing Fong at 20 Elizabeth Street is still Jing Fong
Golden Unicorn Restaurant at 18 East Broadway is still Golden Unicorn Restaurant.
Big Wong at 67 Mott Street is still Big Wong.
Ping's Seafood at 22 Mott Street is still Ping's.

San Francisco:
Cetrella Bistro and Cafe at 845 Main Street, Half Moon Bay is still Cetrella.

2003: All Things Revisited

Mountains around Hiroshima, Watercolor on paper, Lucey Bowen, 2003. 

     Would I be wrong in thinking that the sense of dread and uncertainty which came into my life was shared by the editors of Gourmet and its readers?  My evidence is the special supplement "A Guide to America's Best Roadfood," Jane and Michael Stern's paean to food worth-stopping-the-car-for.  More proof was provided by assigning the adventurous Anthony Bourdain to cook - on a cruise ship, sorry, a floating condominium called The World.  

     According to Ruth Reichl, New York was especially tense, trying to find cheer in the opening of Jean-George Vongerichten's 66, his homage to Chinese cooking.  On the West Coast, Caroline Bates found Singapore's Nonya Cuisine in, of course, Los Angeles.  Nicole Mones extolled Juon Yuon, one of the world's hot spots for Chinese food, located in a strip mall in the San Gabriel Valley, east of L. A.  Mones' first contributions to Gourmet were her twin pieces on Beijing and Shanghai in 1999.  Mones, a New China hand, had done business in China since 1977, and written two novels, Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light.  The heroines of both novels are Caucasian women, fluent in Mandarin, experts in their fields of Chinese history or culture, and conflicted about their assimilation into Chinese society.

     Fuschia Dunlop, another New China Hand, contributed a piece on restaurants in Chengdu, in Sichuan province in China's southwest; a bit farther afield than your average tourist might travel.  

     My own voyage into the East had begun.  In 2003, San Francisco had a Japanese language station,  KTSF broadcast two Japanese television series, Kinpachi Sensei and Sakura.  The former dealt with a middle school teacher's character lessons for his teenage students, a group with issues recognizable to American audiences: demanding parents, sexual identity, drugs. The latter followed an  Hawaiian-born-Japanese-American girl teaching English in a small town in Japan. Both shows introduced me to contemporary Japan, and were broadcast with subtitles.  The Japanese epic Mushashi, a tale of meditation and swordplay, was also featured.  KTSF showed Project X, a documentary series about the inventions which helped Japan recover and advance after World War II.  The theme music was from China's 12 Girl Band.

      It was all new to me, and I began trying to absorb it all.  My notebooks began to fill up with watercolors of the most basic of characters, those for infinity and water.  Soon I was hooked on Asian culture.  My husband instigated my first trip to Asia.  Japan was our destination, with a stop in Hawaii on the way home. Here's why: my father-in-law worked on the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  My husband thought it was important that our children see Japan first hand.  Hiroshima was the must see, as was Pearl Harbor on the way back.  Connor and Fiona were game; Japanese pop culture was ascendant in their world.  Dick and I studied Japanese at a nearby high school.  I purchased tapes for the children and me to practice with as we commuted to school and sports. 
     Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hida Takayama, where Sakura taught school, all were on the itinerary.  Friends from Dick's work in high technology sent us to their favorite restaurants.  We stayed in a ryokan, an old style inn. We rode subways and bullet trains.  With or without husband and children I visited museums and shrines, places I'd read about, although not necessarily in Gourmet.  
     I remember: Tokyo's heat, the pond covered in blooming lotus in Ueno Park, the deafening noise of cicadas in Kyoto, groups of the elderly practicing tai-chi in the early morning, or dancing bon odori in festivals.  

     

New York:
66 at 241 Church Street is closed.

Los Angeles:
Nonya at 61 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, is closed.
Juon Yuan at 140 West Valley Boulevard, No 210, San Gabriel is till Juon Yuan.
Green Village at 140 West Valley Boulevard, No. 206-207, San Gabriel, is closed.
Chung King at 206 Garfield Avenue, Monterey Park is still Chung King.

2002: Close Ups

Dim Sum at Hong Kong Flower Lounge, drawing by Lucey Bowen from Gourmet, 2002 photograph.

     Magazines are "put to bed" months before they are published.  Hence the first allusion to 9/11 occurs in the January, 2002 issue.  "A Brand New Start of It" detailed the slow recovery of the city as reflected in restaurants below Canal Street.  Lower Manhattan had become a community fused by fire, but the author, Jonathan Gold soon left the city to return to the West Coast. There he described a major shift. The best Asian restaurants followed their customers from San Francisco proper to the suburbs that surround the Bay, and the malls that are there commercial heart.
     Maybe I'm imagining this, but it seems that security dominated the travel choices.  Essays on Mauritius, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bali promised islands of spiritual peace and luxury.  Even the country formerly known as Buddhist Burma was recommended as a peaceful destination.
     A reflective, critical note sounded again in the "Culture Notes: Dining on Faith." In the essay by Chitrita Banerji, she told how her Muslim Bengladeshi husband and her Bengali Hindu mother clashed over the mother's Brahmin traditions of food purity.  The mother's preparation of the son-in-law's favorite dishes finally quelled the quarrel.

     Born in New York, but resident in California since 1993, I could understand Gold's flight, as if distance from Ground Zero could diminish the sense of fragility.
     Once again, when school was out, Connor and Fiona travelled to Connecticut, and Dick and I to France.  This time we cycled south and I competed in a small triathlon in Cahors.  Finishing dead last, I was awarded a fine bottle of vin de Cahors.  Returning to California I began serious preparation for the climax of this exercise-to-eat regimen:  Ironman Florida in November.
     Down the windswept Pacific Coast Highway I cycled for hours.  One day I misjudged a change in pavement and fell from my bike, tearing a tendon in my shoulder.  It was painful, but I continued to train.  In Florida, I completed the two-and-a-half mile swim and the one hundred and ten mile swim, but by twenty minutes, I missed the cut-off for starting the twenty six mile run.
     After Christmas my shoulder was cleaned up by the surgeon, but I'd lost the desire to spend endless hours on the bike.  I wouldn't miss the aches and pains.  I wouldn't miss the saccharine energy bars and chemical drinks. I wouldn't miss riding alone with only my thoughts to keep me company.  I would miss the outdoors, and being a body moving through the landscape.

See what the decade has wrought on these restaurants:

New York:
Pakistan Tea House at 176 Church Street is still Pakistan Tea House.
Jewel Bako at 239 East 5th Street is still Jewel Bako.

San Francisco:
Yee's Restaurant at 1131 Grant Avenue is still Yee's Restaurant.
Koi Palace at Serramonte Plaza, 365 Gellert Boulevard, Daly City is still Koi Palace.
Fatima Seafood Restaruant 1132A S. DeAnza Boulevard, San Jose, is still Fatima's.
ABC 873 E. Hillsdale Boulevard, #B5, Foster City is still ABC.
Daimo 3288A Pierce Street, #A118, Richmond is closed.
Pacific East Seafood, 3288 Pierce Street, Richmond, is still Pacific East Seafood.
Hong Kong Flower Lounge at 51 Millbrae Avenue, Millbrae, is still Hong Kong Flower Lounge.
Cheung Hing at 22145 South El Camino, Millbrae, is still Cheung Hing.
Chef Ding at 2214 South El Camino, San Mateo, is still Chef Ding.
Hot Pot City at 500 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Hot Pot City.
Café Ophelia at 516 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Cafe Ophelia.
Lu Lai Garden at 210 Barber Court, Milpitas is Chili Garden.
Golden Island at 286 Barber Court, Milpitas, is still Golden Island.
Mayflower at 428 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Mayflower.
Darda Seafood at 296 Barber Court, Milpitas is still Darda Seafood
Yen Ching at 1616 Washington Boulevard, Fremont, is closed.
Little Sechuan Express at 34420 Fremont Boulevard, Fremont, is closed.
3.6.9. Shanghai at 46831 Warm Springs Road, Fremont, is now Aberdeen Café.
A & J Restaurant at 10893North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still A&J Restaurant.
Taipei Stone House at 10877 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Taipei Stone House.
Joy Luck Place at 10911 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Joy Luck Place.
South Taste at 10825 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino is Southland Flavor Café.
Silver Wing at 10885 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Silver Wing.
Porridge Place at 10869 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is closed.

2001: Enters the Outlaw

Doorway near Kerala, drawn by Lucey Bowen. from her photograph.

     An old friend, foodie, and fellow Gourmet aficionado observed of the magazine's audience in the 1940s, 50s and 60s:  "There used to be men who were not gay and considered it manly to be knowledgable about food and wine."  Add men who consider it macho to ingest the hottest of curries, hot sauces, organ meats, and voilà, there is Anthony Bourdain, profiled in August, 2001.  He'd just published an un-masking of himself and the New York restaurant world,  Kitchen Confidential, and was about to launch his television career with A Cook's Tour,  "a socio-cultural essay on the role food plays in various cultures," but what got "everyone's attention was the extreme eating that Tony engages in."
     The essay, "Kitchen Cowboy," is not about food or travel, although the author followed Bourdain to Mexico for the filming of the series.  It is about a new kind of culture broker.  The twenty-first century culture broker is post-colonial, post-modern, even post-literary. He's all sauced with ironic self-reflection, rarely found in reality television stars.  Not incidentally, the thrust of Bourdain's comments is his Mexican-born kitchen staff that are producing the great French food of Manhattan.
     In retrospect, the greater irony lies in Gourmet's writing about Bourdain.  Yes, he's a famous author and chef.   However, the medium of television, and soon the internet could prove as reliable as the magazine in providing the information and the intimate knowledge of food and place that had been Gourmet's specialty.
    The magazine's graphics had become lyric and evocative.  The travel articles illustrated increasingly exotic destinations reflecting the ever growing sophistication of the audience.  In Kerala, an Ayurvedic spa awaits.  Restaurant reviews had often included a bit of the life story of the owner or chef, but now he or she is the story, as in the Toronto based Sesur Lee and his fusion food.
     2001 was Gourmet's 60th Anniversary.  The September issue was a retrospective. Ruth Reichl commissioned food historian Anne Mendelson to capture the spirit of the magazine's six decades in six one page summaries.  Memorable quotes and recipes followed.  You will remember Anne Mendelson as the biographer of the Rombauer-Beckers of The Joy of Cooking, who I quoted in writing about Alice Richardson in July, 2011.
     I didn't read Gourmet that September.  No sooner had it arrived than we awoke to the news of destruction of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.  I wrote in my journal of the enduring feelings of desolation and hopelessness.
     I'm reading her summaries now, a decade later, as I prepare to perform the same sort of analysis on Gourmet's final decade of representing Asia and Asian cooking.  9/11 was the event which would shape the decade, but how do my perceptions from my narrow perspective compare with Mendelson's?  I'm reassured that she sensed much of what I've described.  She wrote of the early Gourmet thusly: "a more intangible , but supremely important element of the magazine's identity was an intense fixation on the past as the standard of meaning." She expressed beautifully the hunger of travelers at that time to experience "a kind of time travel through physical travel."
     She characterized the magazine in the 1970s as pervaded by the sense of loss, a sense that the country and the world were growing ever more homogenous.  She noted that Gourmet was late in recognizing the importance of farming and of new immigrants.   Indeed she wrote that Gourmet was late in paying attention to the food that "New Immigrants"  were bringing and eating.

     France was still the focus of my travel and food fantasies.  Inspired by our stay in Southern France and by my continuing dedication to my-exercise-to-eat triathlon endeavor, Dick and I booked a biking and eating tour through the Dordogne region.  My notebooks filled with drawings and recipes for goat cheese salad with lardon.  The children went to summer school at my father's WASP boarding school in Connecticut.
     When all returned to home, the two teenagers in high school, with all the drama and after-school-sports.  Their school year would be marked by what we saw on television when we woke up that morning.  Four days later, I was to compete in a triathlon on the Pacific Coast.  Unlike many sporting events that week, it was not cancelled, but dedicated to all those who had died.  As a family, we stood as taps echoed across the water and we sang the national anthem with tears in our eyes.  Plunging into the frigid ocean, I felt cleansed.

   


New York:
Sweet-n-Tart Restaurant at 20 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 76 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 136-11 38th Avenue, Flushing is closed.

San Francisco:
Ana Mandara at 891 Beach Street is still Ana Manadara.
Masa's at 648 Bush Street is still Masa's.

Los Angeles:
Restaurant Katsu at 11920 Ventura Bourlevard, Studio City is still Katsu.
Banh Cuon Tay Ho #4 at 9629 Bolsa at Westminster is still Banh Cuon Tay Ho.

2000: Not Lost in Translation

Mutton Curry, rice pancakes and cashew rice in Kochi, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ann Williams photograph, Gourmet, 2000.

    Gourmet's writers and readers always strove to be cosmopolitan, knowledgable of and comfortable in many countries and cultures.  In the new millenium, Ruth Reichl's writers transformed cosmopolitism with further explorations of the Asian diaspora, and hybrid voices which arise from it.
     In "A Cook and His Castle,"  Chicago's Chinatown-raised-chef Ken Hom, told why he made his home near Cahors, France.  His daily life is Asian fusion.
      The author of "Pilgram's Progress," was American-born Leslie Chang whose Beyond the Narrow Gate,explored "the bond of immigration and what an American identity is."  In the 21st century Gourmet, it follows that she wrote a moving account of the culinary transitions English settlers made in the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies.  The other side of the immigrant coin was the moving piece "My Dragon-Dancing Years," Fae Myenne Ng's story of being re-introduced to her mother's Chinese-food-as-medicine ways in order to please a dying Caucasian friend.
    Those pieces give us a hint of Gourmet for the new millenium.  The magazine's layout and table of contents reflected a new spirit.  The restaurant reviews are unchained from their bi-coastal tethers.  Fine dining is to be found in between, in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, Arizona.  Of significance is that these featured restaurants, featuring everything from Northern Thai specialties to unfussy Asian fusion.  And as in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, some of the best places are found in strip-malls and suburbs, reflecting the changed demographics of Asian immigration.
     Some things remained constant.  Jane and Michael Stern's endless quest for America rolled on, chronicled in their road-food section, "Two for the Road." Road-food, the name for what's served in the homiest local places says much about American culture and contrasted to the street-food that was featured in a Jonathan Gold's "The World's Greatest Street Food."  In the United States we approach the local by car; in Singapore, pedestrians can, in the same hawker center, sample food from every one of the half-dozen ethnic or cultural groups that make up Singapore's population.
     There's also a sense of rewriting the familiar.  "The Spice Route" could have been the title of an article on pepper in Gourmet of the 1940s.  In 2000, it's an in depth account traveling and eating in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, about as far from the Taj Mahal as you can get and still be in India.


     My preoccupations that year had a lot to do with my sense that I was growing old.  No doubt some of that concern arose from knowing that my children were growing up and consequently away.  Those years would probably be the last that they would happily vacation with us.  So when school was out for the summer, we planned a trip which took us to France, naturellement.  We rented a house with a swimming pool in the south, near walled cities like Carcassone.  Once again I imposed the no-fast-food rule.  In fact, each child would be expected to shop and cook.  Before departure each selected and practiced a recipe.  Connor chose pissaladiere  from Julia, the Provencal version of the teen-ager's staple, pizza, but made with mille-fuille pastry dough onions and olives,  anchovy on the side, please.  Fiona chose Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic.
     Our well-trained travelers adhered to the no-fast-food rule as we travelled south by train from Paris and picked up our hired car.  Paraza, the village where we rented, is on the Canal du Midi, once an important artery between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic port of Bordeaux.  No more.  Only yachts and barges, sleeping and feeding tourists, traverse its peaceful waters,  The village itself is almost deserted for nine months of the year.  A family from Sweden uses the former home of the mayor as a summer house.  Once a week a travelling butcher sets up shop.  When he appeared, Fiona and I went to purchase the chicken for her dish.  What an education for her to see the complete  chicken, head, feet and all, and to reply "non" when asked if she wanted those parts.  The chicken dish was a huge success. For his pizza dinner,  Connor elected to invite our landlord, an eccentric Welsh painter, who lived summers in his studio next door. A trip back towards Narbonne to the nearest supermarche was required.  How civilized to find pre-made  mille-fuille.  The painter arrived with a large jug of the wine which is still dispensed from the caves of the local Commune.  Another suces fou.
     Back home, I plunged into the compensatory physical activity of triathlon: swimming, biking and running. While my husband was at work and the children at school, I trained.   My extremely slow pace meant that for hours I was alone, on the bike or on the running trail.  I had hours to meditate.  
     Where was I going? What was I going to do for the rest of my life, after  the children departed for college.  Except for the limitations of age, I could do anything I wanted.  I didn't yet know what that was.

New York:
Sono at 106 57th Street is now BLT Steak.
Thalia at 828 Eight Avenue is still Thalia, but with a different focus.

Phoenix:
Hapa is closed.

Las Vegas:
Lotus of Siam, 953 East Sahara Avenue, Suite A5 is still Lotus of Siam.


San Francisco:
Firecrackers at 1007 1/2 Valencia is closed.
Angkor Borei at 3471 Mission is still Angkor Borei.

1999: The Torch is Passed

Copy of one of very few pieces of sculpture recovered from Harappa site; copies of animal seals with still un-deciphered Harappan script. Lucey Bowen, 2012.

 
     For Gourmet enthusiasts, 1999 marked a seismic shift as rattling to those readers as Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese control was for old-Asia-hands:
 Gourmet got a new editor, Ruth Reichl.   As she would be the first to point out, the magazine had a lot of good things going for it.  One of the features of that first year was an alphabet for cooks;  M.F.K. Fisher had created that decades earlier.
     A crop of new-Asia-hands like John A. Glusman imbued old places with a distinctly post-modern flavor, as in his "Bali High, A Legendary Island's Idyllic Resorts."   Gusman amends the standard history of Dutch colonization of the island with a history of its tourism.   Also heralding change is John Willoughby's "Paradise Laos."  His travelling companion is a Lao friend who owns a Thai restaurant in, of all places, Ellsworth, Maine.
     There's also a twist on the nostalgia trope.  Nicole Mones wrote in "Beijing Looks Back; in China's capital, food is a way of contemplating the past," that Cultural Revolution-theme restaurants were springing up all over Beijing.  "Nostalgia for rural poverty? For hard labor? For a movement that was designed to obliterate nostalgia itself," she asks.   Like me, she turns to anthropology for answers, discovering that China's loosening of economic restrictions allows Beijingers to consider consuming a choice of many versions of the past.  The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, for those who lived through was horrifying and exhilarating, it's remembered as a time when people lived and died for ideas, not money.  For another version of the past, Mones pays a visit to the newly installed Beijing branch of David Tang's China Club.
    

New York:

Asia de Cuba at 237 Madison Avenue is closed.
Pondicherry at 8 West 58th Street is closed.
Shanghai Cuisine at 89-91 Bayard Street is still Shanghai Cuisine.
Cafe Spice at 72 University Place is closed.

Los Angeles:

Bombay Cafe 12021 West Pico Boulevard is still Bombay Cafe.

1998: Filipinos, Feng Shui and Philadelphians

     In 1998 Gourmet had more than a half century of established approaches to writing about food.  "Specialités de la Maison" reviewed restaurants in New York and eventually San Francisco. Regional writers detailed local specialties, or else these were featured in "Road Food."  With regard to Asia, "Gourmet Holidays" gave detailed advice on a roster of destinations that expanded from Hong Kong and Singapore to Bali and Bangkok.  The reviews of Asian restaurants reflected a parallel growth, from Cantonese Chinese to Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and regional varieties of Chinese.  These articles often always included recipes, and even complete menus.
   The October Gourmet mixed things up quite a bit.  "At Home with Susanna Foo, An elegant dinner with Philadelphia's Doyenne of Chinese Cuisine," was about a woman chef from Philadelphia, not previously acknowledged as a culinary capital for Chinese cuisine.  Foo, a librarian by training, was Mongolian by birth but grew up in Shanghai and Taiwan before coming to the United States.  She cooked in her husband's Hunan style restaurant, studied at the Culinary Institute, in Thailand and Italy before opening a restaurant serving food reflecting her personal odyssey. 
     Other new territory was explored that year.  "Resorts of the Philippines" detailed beach resorts in that archipelago.  Under the heading "Hideaways,"   Gourmet, for the first time placed the Philippines in its roster of Asian destinations.  There was a certain irony here, in that the 1990-1999 was a decade of disaster in the Philippines as they suffered a major earthquake, half-a-dozen typhoons and a drought.
   
     


New York:
Kuruma Zushi at 7 East 47th Street is still Karumazushi.
Kang Suh at 1250 Broadway is still Kang Suh.
Mr. K's at 570 Lexington Avenue is still Mr. K's

San Francisco:
E&O Trading Company at 314 Sutter Street closed for renovation and re-opened.
Thep Phanom at 400 Waller Street is still Thep Phenom

Los Angeles:
Ginza Sushiko at 218 Via Rodeo, Beverly Hills is closed.

Covers

     Choosing a the cover image for Gourmet must have involved arguments and tough choices.  The cover is what moves a magazine from the rack to the cashier.  Asian imagery featured in nine, out of 815, issues of Gourmet.  Half the images dealt with Asian food, and half with immigration and tourism.  In case you were wondering, turkeys and Christmas cookies dominate the cover count. (Images are included for review purposes only, and are copyright Conde Nast.)


The first cover with Asian content.  Henry Stahlhut painted "India" and illustrations for "Curry Hot, Curry Cold" for the August, 1949 issue.

Five years later, for the January, 1984 cover, these Chinese twins were photographed in Manhattan's Little Italy, not far from Chinatown.

In April, 1989, "Taipei is brought to life in the color and symbolism of its shrines, such as the Buddhist temple Lung Shan, a monument of the Chin'ing dynasty built more than two centuries ago." Inside, Fred Ferretti toured the island of "cultural, culinary and geographical surprises."

May, 1989 featured "Chinese style steamed shrimp and scallions," a quick recipe included in the monthly column, "In Short Order."

April, 1991, "The emerald geometry of rice fields," was featured, hinting at Anthony Weller's "Gourmet Holidays: Bali."

March, 1992, Jumbo Floating Restaurant, off Aberdeen, a familiar Hong Kong Site, accompanied Fred Ferretti's column, "A Gourmet at Large."

April, 2003, Song An's photograph, "Red, hot and beautiful," fronted "China Bold," Fushia Dunlop's piece on new interpretations of Sichuanese cooking.

June, 2006, harked back to Trader Vic's Asian-influenced-Polynesian-themed "Tiki" fare.

May, 2008, Grilled shrimp drizzled with Japanese dressing was the bait for "Learning Japanese," in the Cooking Vacations  issue.

The 1970s: Stirred Up

The Domino Theory in Blue and White Napkin Rings, Lucey Bowen, 2012

     In the 1970s, Gourmet had to contend with turbulence and television.  In the search for "good living," the first is best ignored.  The turbulence in Asia, was war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  Nixon's overtures to mainland China served to discredit both the really-old-China-hands from the colonial era, and to marginalize the immigrant Nationalist Chinese perspectives.  
     And how to compete with television?  With food porn, of course.  Photo-essays replaced black and white drawings to accompany the writing.    To illustrate articles about India, Japan, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore, Gourmet obtained the service of Ronny Jacques, who captured mouthwatering images of food and people.  Lillian Langseth-Christiansen was the author. While there's no doubt about her writing and cooking chops,  Langseth-Christiansen might seem a curious choice for an Asian voice.   For the earlier issues of Gourmet, she recalled her youth in New York and Vienna as the daughter of a wealthy, opera-loving, gourmand and oenophile and his doting wife.  Her family and her governesses enculturated her palate, strengthening the ties of flavor and occasion.  She and her brother were periodically asked to recall the tastes of some marvelous meal in some fairy tale setting ordered by her father. 
     She determined, at age fourteen, to return to Vienna and attend Franz Hoffman's Wiener Werkstatte.  She had exquisite taste in all things. She provides a cosmopolitan, dare I say European, perspective on how to visit, shop and eat in the cities of the safe parts of Asia.  
     

The 1960s: Thoroughly Modern

Sketch by Lucey Bowen of Russell Wright designed platter for Shun Lee Dynasty, 1966

     Diners and critics who wanted their Chinese restaurants decorated in "authentic" style would have looked askance at the decor of Shun Lee Dynasty.  The owners had commissioned the very modern Russell Wright to design the restaurant from floor to ceiling and fork to chop-sticks.  Why wouldn't the owners hire the premier American designer of the time?  Wright had worked to develop native handicrafts in Cambodia, Vietnam and Taiwan.  Both the founder of Shun Lee and his partner were Nationalist Chinese who came from Taiwan to the United States.  They could not now return to the Communist mainland where Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution that would last a decade.
     Meanwhile, memories of World War II cooled, and the Japanese economic recovery entered the "Golden Sixties."  A young Japanese wrestler named Rocky Ayoki opened Benihana.  Bringing a style of Japanese grilling, teppan-yaki, together with a knife-wielding, food-flipping chef at every table, the restaurant soon became a fad on par with the hoola-hoop.  Nonetheless, I detect disdain in Margaret Bennett's "Has Anybody Here Seen Sushi?" about her adventures searching for sushi in Tokyo with her minimal language skills.  She refers to a venerable gentleman in a kimono, from whom she asked directions, as "probably the friendly, neighborhood white-slave network representative."
     Understandably, travel to Mainland China is neglected.  Curiously, an essay explains how to grow a garden of Chinese vegetables in the United States.  India and Southeast Asia are the focus.  Nostalgia pervades essays on the difference between Anglo-Indian curry and "authentic" Indian curries.  The authors of these pieces, and one about "Rijstaffel" in Java are written by old "Asia Hands," first, second or third generation veterans of the British or Dutch colonial service.
     Was the focus on Southeast Asia a reflection of the Cold War concern with a communist takeover there and the "Domino Theory?"  In 1964 and 1965, lengthy articles on "The Spice Heritage" appeared.   The first is nothing short of a complete review of European trade with Southeast Asia from the Romans through the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the British.  The next delves into the particularities of growing, trading and consuming cinnamon and its relative, cassia bark.  Pepper and cloves received the same treatment. These histories are a subtle reminder of the long history of colonialism in the region.  They stop well short of the twentieth century.
     Perhaps the most important event in the orientation of American eating goes unmentioned in the magazine.  In 1965, the Immigration Reform and Nationality Act replaced the national origins quota system with one based on skills and family relations.  Asians were no longer excluded from immigration quotas.  The next decades would bring peoples and their cooking from places not previously represented on the American scene.
 
     

1997: A Flag is Lowered, Another Raised

Silk, Drawn by Lucey Bowen from Photograph of Silk at Jim Thompson Thai Silk, Bangkok, in 1997 Gourmet.

    

     In Gourmet's cast of characters Fred Ferretti is synonymous with Hong Kong, which he'd written about for decades.  It's natural that he write the feature "Hong Kong 1997," where he detailed the changes anticipated when Hong Kong reverted from Crown Colony status to that of a special administrative region of China in June of that year.  The consensus seemed to be that outside of the removal of "all overtones of British sovereignty," the important things, food and free market economics ("One country, two systems.") would remain paramount.
     William Warren's "Shopping for Thai Crafts" describes a market of a very different sort, that for locally made handicrafts.  It seems that the west still has an insatiable desire for the silks and ceramics of the Orient.

   

New York:
Joe's Shanghai at 9 Pell Street is still Joe's Shanghai.
Seryna at 11 East 53rd Street is closed.
Korea Palace at 127 East 54th Street is still Korea Palace.
Wu Liang Ye at 36 West 48th Street at 46 East 29th Street is still Wu Liang Ye.
Sushi Zen at 57 West 46th Street is still Sushi Zen.

Los Angeles:
Le Colonial at 8783 Beverly Boulevard is closed, but note San Francisco and Chicago locations.
Seoul Jung at the Omni Los Angeles, 930 Wiltshire Boulevard is closed.
Jozu at 8360 Melrose Avenue is closed.
Yujean Kang's at 8826 Melrose Avenue is Yujean Kang's at 67 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena.
All India Cafe at 39 South Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena is All India Cafe with other locations in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
Obachine at 242 North Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills is closed.

1996: Kitchen Evolution

Crab over glutinous rice, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph accompanying "Chefs of Asia," Gourmet, October, 1996.

     Perhaps I exaggerate, but Fred Ferretti's Gourmet, 1996, feature "Chefs of Asia," was a new fusion of some diverse cultural and societal trends.  Previous travel articles and restaurant reviews often identified the chefs and managers of Asian hotels and local restaurateurs.  Celebrity chefs had been around even before television, but they were either French, British or American.  Ethnic Asian restaurateurs and chefs in the San Francisco and New York had been mentioned by name, with short biographies.  "Chefs of Asia" featured eight  chefs and their signature dishes, photographed on their home ground.   In Shanghai, Taipei, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Jakarta, they are not anonymous cooks turning out traditional standards.  They are inventors, "keeping tradition in a modern manner."  They refine and combine in new ways.
Feretti's thesis is audacious.  "All of Asia's cooking, " he says, "is rooted in China."  Chinese migrants ot Southeast Asia brought with them their ingredients and techniques, and adapted  them to the foods of that region.  He could argue that these modern chefs cook "the manifestation of a broad, changing Chinese kitchen."  Perhaps, if you choose to ignore the equally ancient foodways of the sub-continent of India.

See how the restaurants reviewed have evolved or become extinct:

New York:
Nadaman Hakubai at the Kitano, 66 Park Avenue is Hakubai at the Kitano.
Typhoon Brewery at 22 East 54th Street is now Papillon.
Aja at 937 Broadway is closed.
Azusa of Japan at 3 East 44th Street is still Azusa.

San Francisco:
Betelnut Pejiu Wu at 2030 Union Street is still Betelnut.

Los Angeles:
Manhattan Wonton Company at 8475 Melrose Place is closed.
Chaya Brasserie at 8741 Alden Drive, West Hollywood is still Chaya Brasserie.

1995: Golden Ages that Were and Weren't

The Makings of Pho, Drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's 1995 Gourmet Photograph.

     A return to bygone days seems by the mid-90s a haunting, if constant, refrain in the pages of Gourmet.  Leave it to expatriate Frenchmen in New York to judge that Americans were ready for a high-styled Vietnamese restaurant called Le Colonial.
     Elsewhere, Nina Simonds, prepared Americans to travel to Vietnam itself.  As she explained in "Vietnam's Culinary Capitals," the United States had re-established diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and at the urging of veterans John Kerry and John McCain, had lifted trade embargos, although American airlines did not yet fly directly to Vietnam.  After two decades, Vietnam was recovering from war; the GDP had grown by 8 or 9% since 1991, it was not the Vietnam of the French era, nor the years of the American war.  As is her want, Simonds educates the reader to the three distinct styles of Vietnamese cooking: the Chinese-influenced northern, the spicier but more refined of the old imperial capital, Hue, and the even spicier and eclectic southern style.
     Gerald Asher's "The Princely Pleasures of Udaipur" conjured up another retro-fantasy, the palaces-turned-hotels of the Mewar Maharanas.  Visitors could imagine themselves guests of these ancient Hindu rulers. To Asher's credit he carefully distinguishes the Hindu Mewars from the Moguls, and from the Jains, a religion, founded around the same time as Buddhism as a reformation of Hindu practice.
     Takashimaya, home of the Tea Box, was a branch of the great Japanese department store chain.  From a store selling Japanese novelties in the late 1950s, it had grown, with the Japanese economy and tastes, into a store perhaps even more prestigious than Bergdorf-Goodman, its neighbor across Fifth Avenue.  I wonder if the Japanese look upon the 1980s and 1990s as the Golden Age when they colonized America?
 
New York:
Tea Box at Takashimaya, 693 Fifth Avenue is closed.
Otabe at 68 East 56th Street is now Cosi.
Le Colonial at 149 East 57th Street is still Le Colonial and a branch is now open on the site of Trader Vic's in San Francisco.

   

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Broadcast...to Eat

After my trial tour on the theme of music in South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, I treated myself to lunch at the new South of Market Invitational Food Truck Court (opposite Costco) and discovered Dosa Republic, who also have a restaurant in San Mateo.

A trio of engaging young men cheerfully discussed with me the history and semantics of the Dosarrito, the "South Indian Burrito."

Now that's what I'm talkin about; it just gets better and better.  And because of the Old Delhi Lamb Dosarrito, all is forgiven.

Not sure how pork belly works into this, but am going to investigate.

1950s: Cold War Dishes

South India, Not Southern France, drawn by Lucey Bowen from 2009 photograph by Lucey Bowen.

 
     The editorial staples of Gourmet in the 1950s continued to be well-written restaurant reviews, essays on travel and recipes.  Understandably, since travel to France, Italy and Spain was once again possible, those were the main dishes. The provinces of France with their sights, their foods and their wines, were glowingly described and illustrated.
    Asia was dangerous, contested territory. Since the close of the war, American troops had been stationed in occupied Japan, responsible for its military government.  In 1950, as the demilitarization of Japanese forces was completed,  the North Korean invasion of South Korea brought United States forces, into that conflict, and the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan.  Then, in 1955, as the Korean conflict began to wind down, military advisers were sent to aid South Vietnam.
     With the exception of missionaries, and the soldiers, nurses, diplomats and journalists directly involved in the conflicts, Americans had little first-hand knowledge of the region.  Years of legislation had denied citizenship, and sometimes entry, to "Hindus, Chinese and Japanese races."  On the West Coast, the discriminatory policy of interning all Japanese, whether foreign or American born, had destroyed the restaurants, grocery stores, farms and other Japanese economic and cultural resources that had existed throughout towns in the West.  While legislation against Chinese immigration had been eased in 1943, the communist takeover of mainland China meant a trickle of Nationalist Chinese would arrive, via Taiwan.
     Gourmet's task was education.  The teachers were various; the good ones had first hand information to impart.  Z. L. Loo's four part series of accounts of his privileged childhood in early 20th Century China.  Editorially, such essays were triple plays.  Recent Chinese history was reviewed, the basics of the Chinese Confucian ethos was explained, and recipes were included.  That they evoke with nostalgia a lost era goes without saying.  Tao Kim Hai's wife wrote about a meal celebrating his birthday while they were stationed in Korea, and later about an early morning gustatory expedition in Thailand.  Tao Kim Hai wrote of himself as a "Disciple of Ong Tao," the Vietnamese kitchen god.  It is an explanation of how, in spite of Vietnamese society's strict hierarchy of occupations, he was attracted to the kitchen before he could crawl.  His mother was a great supervisor of cooks, but she knew chef wasn't a fit occupation for a gentleman scholar.  If readers had been paying attention, they would have wondered about all the male chefs in America's Chinatowns.
    Several Chinese restaurants were found worthy of mention in the "Spécialités de la Maison" column.  The founder of Lum Fong's was born in Canton in 1886, came to the United States in 1915, and established his first restaurant, at 220 Canal Street, in 1920.  In 1940 he opened a second one in mid-town Manhattan at 150 West 52nd Street.  It is claimed that Lum Fong introduced the egg roll to New York.  When describing the restaurant in 1953 and again in 1955, Gourmet's reviewers, as usual, went to some trouble to mention the names of owners, managers, and in this case, a waiter who was the nephew of the late Lum Fong.
     Tom Marvell, author of the "Spécialités de la Maison' column used his review of the Sun Luck restaurant to inform readers that Chinese cuisine could be broken down into four styles: Northern or Peking, Eastern or Shanghai, Southern or Cantonese and Western or Chungking.  He offered the further advice: go in a group and listen to the headwaiter.
     By 1959 another restaurant, East Horizon, at 116 57th Street, and another reviewer, Alvin Kerr, were on the scene.  Kerr also reviewed Esther Eng's at 1085 2nd Avenue.  He remarked on the Chinese theatrical regalia that decorated the restaurant.  He seems to have been unaware that Esther Eng was a major figure in motion pictures. She made films in Hollywood and Hong Kong. According to film scholar Frank Bren, prior to 1950, she was the most prolific film-maker in Chinese cinema and perhaps its first feminist director.  She even gave Bruce Lee his film debut, as a baby,  in 1941!
     Esther Eng is neglected in accounts of Asians in popular American culture in the 1950s. Non-Asians capitalized on the American fascination with the dangerous and contested territory, and appropriated the narrative for movies and books.
     Examples are numerous, but I'll focus on two which formed my understanding of Asia in the 1950s.  When I saw Rogers and Hammerstein's films, Anna and the King of Siam (1956) and South Pacific (1958),  I wanted to be Anna, I wanted to be Nellie.  I whole-heartedly embraced the idea that an English teacher or an American nurse had something to contribute to the King of Siam, or an aging French planter and his mixed-race children.  (Hopefully, it wasn't Fritos, which an advertisement in the September, 1950 of Gourmet lauded as "A Truly Distinctive American Food.")  What did I know?  

The 1940s: Cold Dishes

Back door of the Taj Mahal, drawn by Lucey Bowen from her 2009 photograph.

   
    Gourmet was born 5 years before me, in 1941, but predeceased me, in 2009.     As I pursued this Orienting of Gourmet project, I became curious the earliest issues.  Thanks to EBay I obtained a sampling of copies from the first three decades of the magazine.  I found select articles from those years posted in the Gourmet Archive and I found all issues from 1946 forward in the San Francisco Public Library.
     In the early years, print dominated the magazine.  Only the cover and a few illustrations were colored.  The writing was the main attraction. As expected, many of the magazine's sections and columns persisted until 2009, but I found a vast gulf between their the food culture of the 1940s, and that of the first decade of the new millennium.
     Gourmet's presentation of the culture of the 1940s seems to balance American chauvinism with the increasingly cosmopolitan tastes of a generation exposed to the world by war and travel.  Early Gourmet readers could absorb regional American cuisine in the lore of coastal Maine from Robert P. Tristam Coffin, whose family were early colonists of Nantucket.   Hence the issue of October, 1949, contains both Bill Bancroft's "They Don't Know Beans," about slow cooking pork and beans in the Minnesota woods.  Alternatively, Samuel Chamberlain would have them contemplate a return to France, rebuilding after World War II  and "The Cassoulet," concerned the French dish made from white beans.
     In these early issues of Gourmet, there's a sense of loss.  Writing about the magazine, historian David Strauss speaks of the truism that an anti-modernity stance assumes modernity.  Attempts to regain a lost era were happening everywhere.   Some built mansions in the style that is known as colonial revival.  Some acquired multiple old houses and moved them to a single location and opened museums.  Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown.  Even Henry Ford, whose automobile changed everything about the country, had built his homage to by-gone-days in Greenfield Village.  
     In these early issues, Chamberlain's travel narratives attempted to prove that the delights of pre-War France could be discovered once again.  The same nostalgia pervades the treatment of the few mentions of Asia or Asian food, and the comments are dominated by blinders of racism, ethnocentrism and simple ignorance.
     The issues I obtained, one from 1948 and four from 1949 are representative of the 1940s Gourmet.  In "Spécialités de la Maison," Iles Brody reviewed the China Clipper restaurant.  His first complaint is the decor "Why is it that the Chinese always like to furnish their restaurants in the modern manner?  They think of all sorts of ways to display their eagerness in this respect; not that I have anything against naivete, but how nice it would be if there were Chinese restaurants in the heart of the city which were decorated in the real Chinese fashion.  One in the Ming dynasty décor would be a great success.  Of course I can't think of a disguise for the bar, a thoroughly modern instrument, but a long table might do."  Brody admired the food, especially the winter melon soup. He goes on to describe the owner's niece "Leilani Chung, the sweetest girl you ever saw, who could give you a lesson in eating with chopsticks."
     The owner is described as follows: "Mr. Wing A Chin is the owner of the China Clipper. Mr. Chin seems to have multifarious activities ---he's not only a restaurateur and a scholar, but also a leading export-import merchant on Chinatown's Mott Street."  Brody's  story neglects to mention that the original owner of the China Clipper, Watson Choy, had in 1938 raised three million dollars to help fight the Chinese fight the Japanese.  He was the victim of the first recorded airplane hijacking when in July, 1938, rogue Japanese Imperial Navy Officers commandeered a Pan-Am Hawaii Clipper seaplane en route to Hong Kong, and forced it to land in Japanese controlled Micronesia.
     Welcome to the white-male-world of 1940s Gourmet!  In the September, 1947 issue, Idwal Jones, one of the magazine's West Coast correspondents writes about Quon Lim Kee, doyen of Chinese banquet chefs in Sand Francisco.  Situating Quon as an opium smoker, an master of a cuisine "to which a cook must be born, as to a race."  The story claims the invention of chop-suey on the occasion of Viceroy Li Hung Chang's 1896 visit to San Francisco en route to Europe.
     The August, 1949 Gourmet's cover is a painting by Henry Stahlhut.  Titled "India" it shows what's arguably a platter of curry, a large dish of rice, and an array of small blue and white bowls in the foreground. In the background is a rendering of a ersatz Persian miniature of a feast.  Presumably this cover accompanied the issue's essay "Curry Hot, Curry Cold."  This anonymous essay features another of Stahlhut's illustrations, this time of a buxom female in the Nataraja dance pose, bearing in her numerous hands large and small dishes of Indian food.  Beginning with the discouraging assertion that "Hades to India, merely another word for the same thing," and continuing with the observation India is "the land of diamonds as big as pullet's eggs on plump and princely fingers, yet the land of millions of natives who have never tasted a pullet's egg,"  the essay places Indian cooking firmly in the domestic, female space, and India imagined as a land of inequality.
     In these early issues the equation of manliness with the ability to tolerate spicy-hot food is set out in an essay, "Cardamom-and-Coriander," by James Reynolds.  Reynolds travelled through in India between the world wars.  He's a perceptive interpreter of Indian foodways, observing the ties of caste to the rituals of food preparation.    His essay ends admonishing "If your palate does not relish high hot seasoning, strike from your acquaintance the Hindu brothers, Cardamom and Coriander."
     Tao Kim Hai is a different sort of traveller.  Born in Vietnam in 1905, he received two doctorates from the University of Paris.  As an officer in the French Army he was taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1940.  When liberated he came to the United States. His article, "Joie de Vivre," proposes that "the joy of living is one of the secrets of world peace and of personal success."  It's a largely flattering comparison of the philosophies of the Germans and the French, with instructions for making filtered coffee and proper English tea thrown in.  Hai's voice in distinctive.  He's truly a man of the world.  He's one of the earliest of Asian-born writers for Gourmet and he's interpreting American food culture from an international perspective.  He, and his American wife, would continue to write for Gourmet and for intellectual older brother, The New Yorker.
    I'm not dismissive of the world according to Gourmet, 1940s style.  Far from it. It helps me understand who I am, a curious mixture of cosmopolitan tastes and interests layered over a nomad, a gypsy, examining the past in a fruitless search for a single tap-root of identity.

    
    


 

   

   
 
   
   
   
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