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.