1980, Meals and Restaurant Critics of Yesteryear

   

Characters for Meat and Pig (Still Negotiating how to do Chinese brush painting for calligraphy in ArtRage.)

     In her essay "Pork," the intrepid Nina Simonds shared with us memories of her student days in Taipei, Taiwan. At that time, before Nixon and Kissinger made their overtures to the mainland, only Taiwan offered independent visitors the opportunity to experience the everyday life of the Chinese people.  A vignette of her neighborhood butcher at work introduced the importance of pork in Chinese culture, religion, language, cuisine.  She traced the consumption of pig from 2000 B.C. through the Han, T'ang and Sung dynasties.  Her recipes: everything from pork coins served with Mandarin Pancakes and Scallion brushes to two kinds of spareribs.
     Jay Jacobs visited Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan, then located at 1059 Third Avenue.  The original Uncle Tai, Wan Dah Tai, born in 1919, had come from China to New York in 1967 and introduced New Yorkers to Hunan style food. He won the respect of such food luminaries as the New York Times' Craig Claiborne.  In 1979, he departed for Texas, but left the restaurant in the capable hands and peppery instincts of his Chef Teng, a native of Szechuan, whose food Jacobs, and his two sons, loved.  The restaurant was owned by one David Keh, about whom we will hear more in later years.
     My travels in 1980 took me from New England to the New South.  My old Washington, DC, housemate,  Jill, had moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  She conducted the archaeological portion of environmental impact research for the Tennessee Valley Authority's mining activities, and investigated the region for local produce and bar-b-cue.  Although she was well acquainted with some of the small, part-time smokers north of Knoxville, we checked out Buddy's Bar-b-cue, and I got my first taste of pork,  Tennessee, or rather Alabama, style.
     Somewhere on that peregrination I picked up a paperback copy of Trevanian's Shibumi.  The New York Times labeled it "the most agreeable nonsense in commercial fiction this spring" when first published in 1979.  I fell in love with the book and its hero, Nicholas Hel, and thus, Japan.  The author, Rodney William Whittaker, organized the book along the lines of the Japanese game of go. Whittaker, a film scholar,  had served in Korea.  Nicholas Hel is the illegitimate son of a Russian Countess and a Prussian Count, born in Shanghai between the World Wars.  He and his mother are adopted by the Japanese officer in charge of the occupation of Shanghai.  Hel grows up stateless, but speaking Russian, Chinese, German, French, Japanese and eventually, English.  He's sent to Japan to study go, and becomes culturally Japanese, and eventually a highly paid assassin. He's a Count of Monte Cristo in a very seventies adventure.  Ultimately, he pitted against the American oil interests who dominate the C.I.A.  In a decade which would see a 70% increase in Asian immigration, Nicholas Hel was just the sort of agreeable nonsense to educate me on the Japanese concepts of shibumi (effortless control), sabi and wabi.
     I no longer thought I had something to teach the Oriental, I wanted to be the Oriental.  Is it only stateless bastards and anthropologists who believe that culture can be learned, and isn't racial or inherited?  However, much as I loved Nicholas Hel, I could never master effortless control, especially when it came to food.  Hel and his mistress Hana were well-satisfied with restraint in everything, especially food, choosing small portions of vegetables and brown rice.  My emotions were shown as soon as felt.  I was an enthusiastic cook and an enthusiastic eater.  For me, one taste of something was not enough.

     
     Uncle Tai spread the joys of Hunan style Chinese food to Houston and Dallas, and then in 1987 to Boca Raton, Florida and in 1993 to Atlanta.  He was fortunate to have four sons, each of whom is now responsible for some aspect of Uncle Tai's empire.  Alas, in 2012, a running-shoe store occupies the original restaurant. 
     Jay Jacobs, who also wrote about New York City in Gourmet under the pseudonym Hudson Bridges, died in 2008.
     Rodney Willam Whittaker's literary executor permitted Don Winslow to write another Nicholas Hel story, Satori, which takes him to Mao's China and Vietnam.