1993: Ripe for Change

Chinese chicken rice, Malay saté, Indian curry at the Chatterbox Coffee Shop, Singapore, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph in the January, 1993, Gourmet

     Gourmet's writers did not always traffic in nostalgia, or portray Asia as timeless, or a place whose Golden Age had passed.  Fred Ferretti's 1993 essay "Singapore," takes the city as it was: the result of three decades of determination to make this city of "Many races, one people," the most modern in Asia.  Singapore's foods reflected the mix of inhabitants: Chinese, Malay, Indian and Nonya-Baba or mixed Malay-Chinese.  Carolyn Bates' piece on "Dining in Honolulu," stresses the same slow evolution of the flavorful mix of native Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese foods.
     Chris Yeo, a culture-broker-chef-extraordinaire, exported Singapore's cuisine to Straits Cafe in San Francisco, where it made an indelible impression.  The flavors might have seemed familiar to Chinese and Indian food fanciers, but the combinations were brand new to San Franciscans.  Like the Honolulu mix, this was more than a not marketing concept for restaurant, it was the result of lived experience.
     Meanwhile, other chefs introduced similar changes, sometimes called "Fusion," or "Pan Asian." The Alsatian Jean-George Vongerichten, who'd worked in Bangkok, served his version of Thai food at Vong, in New York.  Wolfgang Puck's Chinois on Main, featuring "an imaginative marriage of Chinese, Japanese, and Thai flavors on a French base," was again reviewed.  Another culture-broker-chef, Bruce Cost, served Chinese and South Asian food at Ginger Island in Berkeley.  East India Grill changed the format of staid Indian restaurants to waiters in T-shirts and "cooking that might be characterized as Cal-Ind."
   
     Meanwhile, Gourmet, in October, 1993, noted a change that removed a beloved place from the food geography of my childhood.  The storied Blue Mill Tavern, former speak-easy and steak-house in New York's Greenwich Village became The Grange Hall.  From the description and reviews of The Grange Hall, I conclude that an authentic piece of mid-century urban history had been ripped out and replaced with a Disneyworld view of farming.

Change has come to many of the restaurants reviewed in Gourmet in 1993:  
New York:
Vong at 200 East 54th Street closed in 2009.
Chiam at 160 East 48th Street is closed.

San Francisco:
Straits Cafe at 3300 Geary Boulevard is now Pot a Pho;  Straits Restaurant in the Westfield Shopping Center and other locations.
Ginger Island at 1820 Fourth Street, Berkeley is closed.

Los Angles
Woo Lae Oak at 170 North La Cienega Boulevard closed in early 2012.
Talésai at 11744 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City is still Talésai.
East India Grill at 345 N. LaBrea Avenue is still East India Grill.
Chinois on Main at 2709 Main Street, Santa Monica is still Chinois.

The Grange Hall at 50 Commerce Street is now Commerce.

1992: Cultural Brokerage

David Chang's China Club, Drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph in March, 1992 Gourmet.

     Gourmet is an aggregate of culture brokers.   A culture broker bridges, links, mediates or interprets one culture to another.   Writers like Fred Ferretti and Madhur Jaffrey employ their knowledge of Asian cultures and journalistic skills to explain, respectively, Hong Kong, and Indian food, to the upper middle-class reader of Gourmet.  Restaurant reviewers like Carolyn Bates perform the same function for multiple Asian cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Viet-namese and so-on.  Restaurant proprietors are also culture brokers, albeit with a different set of skills.  They must perform their cooking and present their food in a manner palatable to those in search of continuity with the food from "back home," and those in search of "but not too hot."   Culture brokers are sometimes demeaned by one or both of the cultures they mediate.  The term "marginal man" emphasizes their position at the edges, away from the center.
     How does one become a culture broker?  Immigration and marriage are two foundational steps.  Many proprietors found themselves opening a restaurant to feed fellow immigrants, and gradually evolved their food and decor to attract a wider audience.  Living on three continents, Madhur Jaffrey, author and actress,  represented Indian culture in the food at Dawat.  Fred Ferretti's wife was Chinese, as was Cafe Kati owner Kirk Webber's.
     Ferretti's "Rediscovering Hong Kong," (There's that nostalgia again.)  alerted me to other culture brokers, lurking just offstage.   He wrote And atop the Old Bank of China Building in the patch of Hong Island known as Central, The China Club has just opened its doors to its re-creation of an Art Deco restaurant of Shanghai: a perfect pastiche of antique Ching Dynasty furniture with 1920s fans and stuffed sofas.  The photographs accompanying the essay illustrated The China Club's dining room.  The China Club was the creation of David Tang, a culture broker of the highest order.  Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Tang was educated in England.  Fluent in both Cantonese and the King's English, he created the luxury lifestyle brand Shanghai Tang.  An ardent patron, collector and dealer in contemporary Asian art, he's described as part scholar-poet-philosopher and part British dandy, almost a Falstaff.  He describes himself as having had to relearn his Chinese-ness after returning from England. Created well before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997,  Tang's China Club became the haunt of movers and shakers of old Hong Kong, the mainland and the international community.  So Tang is a triple-culture broker.
     I visited the China Club in 2010.  I was the guest of a Hong Kong born college classmate,  a member of both the club and "Old Hong Kong."  She, too, was a culture broker, attending college in the United States where she was the first Chinese person with whom I'd ever inter-acted.  While raising her sons to be equally comfortable in China and the U.S, she, as did David Tang, changed her focus from the West back to China.  Like Tang, she thought we, as American visitors, would find the China Club appealing.  We sat at the table in the center of the photograph in the article, reproduced in my sketch above.  Did the ghost of Irene Corbally Kuhn murmur that Shanghai of the 1920's had come back to life?  But wait, there on the wall is that portrait of Mao on a motorcycle.  Not all culture brokers have an ironic sense of humor.

     But that was in the unseeable future.  In 1992 I had become rather like a Chinese scholar-painter.  Hadn't I withdrawn from the hurly-burly of the working life?  While the children were at kindergarten and pre-school, I took classes at the Worcester Art Museum School, and made a run at finishing my dissertation.
     We took the children to Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod, home to generations of my mother's ancestors.
     Thanks to Dick's parents who babysat the children, we spent some of April in Paris.  Here Gourmet's Paris Journal was indispensible, sending us to Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet and other hidden treasures of Paris.
      The Pig Roast and Christmas Open House were well established, even as hamburgers and hot dogs were added for the addition of our children and their friends.
   
New York

Honmura An at 170 Mercer Street is now Niko.

Shaliga Thai Cuisine at 834 Second Avenue is now SUBWAY.

Dawat at 210 East 58th Street is still Dawat.

Tse Yang at 34 East 51st Street is closed.

San Francisco

Cafe Kati at 1963 Sutter Street became Roostertail in 2011.

Los Angeles

Ocean Seafood Restaurant at 747 North Broadway is still Ocean Seafood.

Mandalay at 611 North La Brea Avenue is now Cube Cafe and Marketplace.

Note: The China Club now has a branch in Beijing.

1988: Economic Currents

Drawings by Lucey Bowen, after Gourmet, 1988, photographs accompanying articles on shopping in Hong Kong (upper left) and Bangkok (lower right).

     In his 1988 review of Sushiden in New York City, Andy Birsch, who had replaced Jay Jacobs as reviewer of New York restaurants, broke Gourmet's "no negatives" rule when he referred to "the current economic unease between Japan and the United States."  (The source of this unease was the trade deficit and weak dollar.)   That rule justified the absence of negative restaurant reviews and the omission of bad news, like genocide and famine, in the magazine's early years.
      Let us focus then on good things:  Shun Lee Cafe apparently brought Asian street food to New York menus.  Great Shanghai expanded New Yorker's knowledge of the range of Chinese cooking to include the regional Soo-Hang food from Soochow and Hangchow.  Chin Chin brought Chinese food served in haut (French) style to New York.   Cafe Katsu carried that trend even further in Los Angeles, as did Joss.  Silks seems to have done the same in San Francisco.  Or at least the adjective Japanesque modifying ragout led me to believe.
     The afore-mentioned Sushiden illustrated another trend: it was the offshoot of the largest chain of sushi restaurants in Japan.  Chains might have been bad news for Japan's mom-and-pop sushi bars, but this one was good news for New Yorkers.
     Good news was also the message of Geri Trotta's "Shopping in Hong Kong." China's luxury goods, silk, porcelain, jewels, furs and antiques, were readily available.  With the advent of jet travel, American tourists could visit the emporiums themselves instead of waiting for a clipper ship to come in, as was the custom in the 19th Century.  Good news, too, for Londoners: Hong Kong, the former seat of the British Empire, the former colony was sending young chefs galore to man a slew of elegant new ethnic restaurants in London.
   
     In January of 1988, my daughter was born.   To the surprise of my colleagues, I returned to work, and the round of pig roasts and picnics followed by snowy New England Thanksgivings and Christmases and warm stays on St. John in the American Virgin Islands, continued, like Gourmet's covers.
     And then the bad news of the year: On December 21, 1988, a bomb destroyed Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people aboard the London-to-New York flight were killed.   Suddenly tarnished was our golden age of jet travel.


The currents of change have washed over the restaurants reviewed in 1988's Gourmet:

New York:
Sushiden  at 19 East 49th Street is still Sushiden.
Great Shanghai at 27 Division Steet is now Jing Star.
Samraat at 175 Madison Avenue is USA Dental.
Shun Lee and Shun Lee Cafe at 43 West 65th Street are stull there.
Anatolia at 1422 Third Avenue is now Brasserie Julien.
Chin Chin at 216 East 49th Street is still Chin Chin.

San Francisco:
Silks at the Mandarin Oriental is still Silks.
Plearn at 2050 University Avenue, Berkeley is now Plearn at 1923 University.

Los Angeles:
Joss at 9255 Sunset Boulevard, just beyond Doheny, is closed.
Matsuhisa at 129 North La Cienega Boulevard is still Matsuhisa
Cafe Katsu at 2117 Sawtelle Boulevard is now Restaurant 2117, organic and        
natural Euro-Asian cuisine.

1990: Other Times, Other Rijstafels

Nostalgia for British India is for sale in this Singapore Shopping Mall, Photograph, 2008, Lucey Bowen

   
     Fred Ferretti and Irene Corbally Kuhn fed Americans' appetite for the way things were in Asia before before World Wars I and II,  before the independence of the British, French and Dutch colonies.  "Porcelains and Potstickers" is a shopping and eating expedition through Hong Kong.  In it Ferretti speaks of the pleasure of encountering pieces of the past, and remarks that "so much of Hong Kong endures in one form or another." Writing "In Search of the Indonesian Rijsttafel," Ferretti seeks what he knows to be an artefact of colonialism, the elaborate preparation of dishes called the rice table.
     Kuhn added a postcript to her previous essay on life in Shanghai in the 1930s.  Titled "Shanghai Revisited, A Postscript," I expected it to be a 1988 update.  Instead, it looked back to a visit in 1945.  At that time, she left believing the city would once again thrive.  Looking back in 1988 she thought that Shanghai would remain forever in decline.
     David Massey's essay "Hyderbad" reveals one origin of this nostalgia: literature.  An early exposure to Rudyard Kipling's works put him under India's spell.  (He also mentioned as influence, the adventure books of my childhood hero, Richard Halliburton!)

    
See what the decades have wrought on the restaurants reviewed in 1990 Gourmet:

New York:
Mitali, Gaylord, Passage to India and Nizam, all on East 6th Street; Mitali and Passage to India remain.
Umeda at 102 East 22 Street is now Novita.
Fortune Garden Pavillion at 209 East 49th Street is gone.
Thai Restaurant at 106 Bayard Street is gone.

Los Angeles:
Katsu 3rd at 8936 West 3rd Street is gone.
Robata at 250 North Robertson Boulevard is gone.
Empress Pavilion at 988 North Hill Street is still the Empress Pavilion
Chaya in Venice is still Chaya Venice.

San Francisco:
Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant at 1 Rincon Center is now Yank Sing.
Monsoon at the Opera Plaza is gone, but you can see its design.

1991: The Touristic Panopticon

Mirrored Hall, Jaipur. Drawing (2012) from photograph (2011), both by Lucey Bowen.

     The late 18th Century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham conceived of a building which allowed a central observer to view the activity of everyone in its periphery, whether they knew it or not.  Bentham intended this as a way of "obtaining the power of mind over mind," useful in prisons, hospitals, schools, poorhouses and madhouses.

     Perusing the span of 1991 Gourmet travel articles, I ponder New York as the center, monitoring activity from Jaipur, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Bali, Indonesia; Taipei, Taiwan; and Macau on the Chinese mainland.  Gourmet's writers treated these places in distinctive styles, dictated in part by the history of each place and its relative difference from the reader's mode of life.  Jaipur was much the product of its Singh rulers, one of whom had the city walls all painted pink in 1876 to celebrate the arrival of Britain's future Edward VII.  Bangkok was perceived and presented in visual terms. The Balinese people starred in the article about this Hindu island surrounded by Muslims.  In Macau, not yet returned to China, the exploration was to discover the elements of Portuguese culture that persist in a predominantly Chinese city. Writing about Taipei, Fred Ferretti focused on the food of restaurants found in the grand hotels, occasionally alluding to the history of the island.  Taipei of the time was a fully developed, urbane, international city of business, not unlike parts of Los Angeles.  Surely places are represented in ways not all their residents would choose or recognize.
     There are questions of representation of Asia in writing about the restaurants of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles reviewed in Gourmet's 1991 issues.  Is the reviewer visiting a place primarily intended to serve the ethnic immigrant?  In the early 1990s Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles swelled with former Hong Kong residents, unsure of the outcome of the anticipated 1997 transfer to the People's Republic of China.  This was a group distinct from earlier ones in class and cuisine, and their restaurants were different as well.  Some, like Flower Lounge, were and are comfortable for Chinese customers eating as families.  Non-Chinese customers may feel a bit out of place.  Other restaurants followed the Japanese trend and emulated French techniques for Chinese ingrediants, restrained decor and white table cloths, like Yujean Kang's in Pasadena.  The former represents perhaps the conservative side of immigrant's tastes; the latter an individual chef playing creatively with great traditions of cooking.  Ours is, after all, a free country, even if the food isn't.
   
Alas for the restaurants of yesteryear; some remain:

New York:
Kwong and Wong at 11 Division Street is now Fuleen Seafood Restaurant.
First Taste at 53 Bayard Street is now Three Oceans Restaurant.
Haveli at 100 Second Avenue is still Haveli.
Jewel of India at 15 West 44th Street is still Jewel of India, at least for take-out.

San Francisco:
Flower Lounge Restaurant in Millbrae and 5322 Geary Boulevard is Hong Kong Lounge.
Angkor Palace at 1769 Lombard Street is now The Grateful Dog.
O Chamé 1830 Fourth Street, Berkeley is still O Chamé

Los Angeles:
Yujean Kang's at 67 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena is still Yujean Kang's.
Bombay Cafe at 12113 Santa Monica Boulevard is now All India Cafe.

1989: Triangulating Trade and Rice Tables

Mace and Nutmeg

     Why do Americans fetishize former colonies, like India and Singapore?  Because we are one?  Or because we practice economic colonialism on a scale close to that of the storied Dutch, British and French East India Companies.  
     An egregious example of this romance:  Los Angeles' The Rangoon Racquet Club, reviewed amongst the 1989 issues of Gourmet.  Its colorful proprietor, the Brussels-born Dutch Jew, Emanuel Zwaaf, recreated a legendary British watering hole he'd experienced in Burma near the end of World War II. He called it "the last remaining outpost of the British Empire in the United States."  Beginning in 1964, he served fantasy curries, lumpia, poppadums, clams bourguignonne, mussels provencale and pot-au-feu.  Fusion cuisine, indeed!
     Travel features about "Simla,"the hill station in India; "Singapore" in the 30s and "Mauritius" share this nostalgia for colonial days.  Simla, where the British Raj retreated to govern durring the uncomfortable heat of the approaching monsoon season, seemed permeated with another nostalgia, that of the British for home.  Noel Barber worked on a newspaper in Singapore and observed that in 1938, 45,000 American cargo ships loaded 40% of Malaysia's rubber production and 54% of its tin into their holds.  Naomi Barry's essay on Mauritius touches on the American involvement in the spice trade, especially the above pictured nutmeg, which began just a decade after our Revolutionary War.  Both authors laud the product of successive conquests: a blend of cultures and cuisines.
     Curiously, there was little reflection that the competition between the Dutch, French and English trading companies in southeast Asia had its parallel on athe American Island of Manhattan.  In the review of Angkor Wat, possibly the first Cambodian restaurant in California, no mention is made of disastrous conflicts which had driven the proprietor into exile in 1975.
     Manhattan retains its leadership in trade and restaurants.   The February, 1989 review of Nusantara, notes that it is an outpost of the Indonesian company responsible for Oasis Restaurant in Djakarta.  (Oasis will appear in a subsequent issue of Gourmet in a travel article about Djarkarta.)  The specialty of both is rijstaffel, an over-the-top presentation of the Indonesian staple, rice, with sauces and condiments invented by Dutch colonists in Java to impress each other.  In my European travels, I tried this dish in Amsterdam in the early seventies.
     (I note also that it was in 1989 that Professor of Food Studies, Krishnendu Ray, emigrated from Orissa.  He is the author of some of my bibles on these topics: The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (2004) and Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia. (2012).)
   
     In November 1989 my son was three-and-a-half years old, and my daughter a year-and-a-half.  We decided that I was not happy working full time, and missing out on mothering.  Children tucked into their car seats, I took them on the round of living history museums as my parents had done some three decades earlier.  I included two ones new to me: Plymouth Plantation and Mystic Seaport.  I wanted them to understand the colonial agricultural and seafaring struggles of past generations. 
     After I'd resigned,   I cooked an amazing farewell dinner for all the brilliant women I'd worked with at my high technology company.   My cooking, with the exception of the Bolognese, is not something that was transmitted to me from some line of maternal cooks.  It comes from a desire to feed people well.  I can read, therefore I cook.  I am not afraid to serve a new-to-me recipe to company.  I served the ladies Beef Wellington and Reine de Saba.    
     We established our own version of the Christmas breakfast tradition, with a Open house the saturday before Christmas.  The menu reflected something of each of us and something of both.  Working in high technology in the Boston area meant that we had numerous friends from India and Pakistan, so samosas were on offer.  The recipe came from Julie Sadfi, but of course our friends helped us with on the spot advice.   On our visits to New Orleans we'd purchased the Times-Picayune New Orleans Cookbook, which gave us grits and grillades.  With  Jill and one of Dick's sisters living in Tennessee, we found out where to order a country ham and served it with biscuits.
   

Consider the fate of those restaurants featured in 1989 Gourmet:

New York:

China Grill at 60 West 55th Street is still China Grill.

Nusantara 219 East 44th Street is now Ben and Jack's Steakhouse.

Darbar at 44 West 56th Street is now Uncle Jack's Steakhouse.

J Sung Dynasty at 511 Lexington Avenue is S Dynasty.

David K's at 1115 3rd Avenue is a Walgreen's Drugstore.

20 Mott Street is a building under construction.

San Francisco

Angkor Wat at 4217 Geary is now Hanuri Korean Barbeque.

Yujeans at 843 San Pablo Avenue, Albany is now White Lotus Thai Cuisine.

Los Angeles

Restaurant Shiro at 1505 Mission Street, South Pasadena is still Restaurant Shiro.

Rangoon Racquet Club at 9474 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills is a Bank of America building.

1987: Women's Kitchens

Drawing by Lucey Bowen, of the Red Fort, after Christopher Barry's photograph illustrating
Louise Nicholson's "Delhi's Cuisine and Craftsmen," Gourmet, September, 1987

     In the Gourmet's geography of the cuisines of the colonizers, the colonized and the dislocated, women created the sense of hearth and home that food delivers.
     The 1987 review of San Francisco's China Moon Cafe introduced Barbara Tropp.  Tropp interrupted her study of Chinese poetry at Princeton to learn "the meaning of eating to the Chinese."  Apprenticed to a Taipe'i gentleman who lived his days in pursuit of flavor, she wrote the Chinese equivalent of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Had she not died at the age of 53, I think her fame would have been equal to Child's.  Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, like Mastering, ties each culinary procedure to the culture that produced it.
     Cecelia Chiang, who founded the Mandarin restaurants, brought the diversity of Chinese cuisine to America.  Her journey began in 1942, when the Japanese invasion of China forced her flight from Beijing.  First in San Francisco in 1962, and then in Los Angeles, she introduced the diverse foods of Northern China to Americans who had known only watered-down Cantonese dishes.  Chiang's son, Philip, is the co-founder of the restaurant chain, P.F. Chang's China Bistro.
     1987's Gourmet featured Madhur Jaffrey in her role as food consultant to Dawat restaurant in New York.  Delhi-born Jaffrey is a woman of many roles, including cook, cinema and television actress, and writer.  Now, for half-a-century she has been the face of India and Indian cooking to the United States and the United Kingdom.  Bringing things full circle, her most recent film, "Today's Special," featured Aasif Mandvi, Senior Muslim Correspondent of "The Daily Show," in the now familiar story of immigrant restauranteurs and their assimilated children.
     "Cuisine and Craftsmen of Delhi,"was the subject of Louise Nicholson's essay for the September, 1987 issue.  In it was the first use I've found of the term foodie. Prior to this, Gourmet called them, among other things, food-niks.   Nicholson, like Tropp, immersed herself in a culture that wasn't her own. Then as now, she was an erudite guide to food, but especially the arts and crafts of India.
     Like my parents, I found myself drawn into the pre-industrial world of New England through an old house.  My father's Sherman, Connecticut house had been sold; no one was using it regularly.  In Maine we found a property of a slightly later vintage.  "Big house, little house, back house, barn," is the rule of thumb for Maine farms.  Most grew by addition from the simple two-room, one-and-a-half story building of the same type as our Sherman house.  "Maine House," as it quickly came to be called, had a huge central chimney, with ovens and boilers.  The rooms of the "big house" could sleep eight, and the back house held a hefty supply of wood for three woodstoves, as well as a screened porch next to the brook.  The house could hold all manner of winter holiday celebrations and summer vacation visitors, all in a setting that could look like Currier and Ives. That the economy and population of the place had been in decline since the Civil War meant to us, only that real-estate prices were low, but schools and grocery stores were far away.
   
 
A 2012 update on the restaurants reviewed in the 1987 issues of Gourmet is below:

New York
Tommy Tang's at 323 Greenwich Street is now Gingino Trattoria and Take-Away.
Dawat at 210 East 58th Street is still Dawat.
Nishi NoHo at 380 Lafayette Street is now Chinatown Brasserie.
Bukhara at 148 East 48th Street is no more.
Kom Tang at 32 West 32nd Street is still New York Kom Tang Soot Bul House.

San Francisco
Masa's at 648 Bush Street is still Masa's.
The Golden Turtle at 2211 Van Ness Avenue is now part of the Academy of Art University.
China Moon at 639 Post Street is now Bahn Thai BBQ and Noodles.

Los Angeles
The Mandarin at 430 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills is now The Camden House.  (Note that P.F. Chiang's are everywhere!)

Trader Vic's at 9876 Wilshire Boulevard in the Beverly Hilton Hotel is still Trader Vic's.

1986: Establishing Family Traditions

After Gourmet 1986 photograph accompanying Nina Simonds' "Steaming the Chinese Way."  Lucey Bowen, 2012

     Colonization is a man's job, at least in the early stages of trade or invasion and conquest.  Gourmet's Asian travel pieces were heavy with the history of masculine colonial dominance.   "Please Pass My Peppers"  was Aubrey Menen's essay on the spice trade.  He's acutely tuned to the French and British mercantile pursuits in southern India, and the dispossessions that followed.  In Fred Ferretti's article on Singapore, I learned that the most esteemed of Singapore cooking is that of Nonyas.  This is the cuisine of the Malaysian women who married overseas Chinese settlers, another form of colonization.

     The great scholar of colonization, Albert Memmi, observed that the colonizer is often not inclined to leave the colony because he is able to lead a more comfortable life there.  Hence, Irene Corbally Kuhn's nostalgic memories of life in the foreign concessions of Shanghai.  In the 1920's, she and her husband, working as journalists, found that wages for locals were so low, "one could afford a houseful of servants."  She's unapologetic.

     At this time, Gourmet had an established policy of avoiding controversy.  After all, how would guilt or recrimination fit into "good living?"  While detailing the odyssey of the proprietor of Cambodia House Restaurant in San Francisco, Carolyn Bates makes no mention of Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge, the reasons for the owner's exodus.
     Consumption, the goal of Gourmet's domestic restaurant reviews, can be a masculine pursuit. For example, competitive eating, now the specialty of Anthony Bourdain and others, was doing well in the '80s.  Jay Jacobs delights in hot foods and things unappetizing to American palates: sea cucumbers at Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn.  Fred Ferretti, in Singapore, is introduced to the notorious stinky fruit, the durian, often outlawed on public transportation in southeast Asia.
     The masters of sexualized colonization were surely the French, who were smitten with Viet-namese women in their all-covering, all-revealing ao-dai dresses, and left behind great coffee, good french bread for banh-mi and a relatively graceful colonial architecture.  The Japanese were not colonized until the Occupation but Japanese chefs soon became enchanted with French methods.  The Chaya Brasserie in Los Angeles was an offshoot of Le Marée de Chaya, in turn the off shoot of a 300-year old-Japanese-teahouse.
     In March of 1986, I became the mother of a son.  We were sufficiently recovered to stage the  pig roast, although it was a bit disconcerting to watch my husband hold the three-month-old in his arms and explain the roasting pig to him.  We trained him as a traveler as well.  He slept across our laps on the overnight flight to England. My six-foot-and-change husband stashed him in a back-pack for rides on the London underground, with nearly fatal results on one of the rounded pre-war cars. 

See below to learn what happened to the Asian restaurants reviewed in 1986 Gourmet.

New York:

Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn at 40 East Broadway is now the Golden Seafood Restaurant.

Azuma Ya at 406 East 64th Street is now Fatty Fish Restaurant.

Chez Vong at 220 East 46th Street is now Beijing Pavilion Restaurant.

Sagano at 3 East 44th Street is now Azusa of Japan.

Indochine at 430 Lafayette is still Indochine.

Mitali West at 296 Bleecker Street is now Mainland India. 

(Mitali East, the original Mitali, at 334 East 6th Street, is still Mitali East.)

Grand Palace Restaurant at 94-98 Mott Street is now The Grand Harmony Palace.

Tang's Chariot at 236 East 53rd Street is now Peking Duck House.

San Francisco:

Cambodia House Restaurant at 5625 Geary Boulevard in now John Campbell's Irish Bakery.

Dynasty at Oak and Franklin is now Mandarin Villa.

China House at 2237 Powell Street is now China House Bar and Restaurant.

Los Angeles:

Chaya Brasserie at 8741 Alden Drive is still Chaya Brasserie.

Horikawa at 111 South San Pedro Street is now Izakaya and Bar Fu-ga.

Royal Khyber at 1000 North Bristol, Newport Beach is part of a shopping center.