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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1994: Fusion Fizzles, Korea Sizzles

Architectural Detail, Korean Folk Village, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Gourmet, April, 1994 Photograph.

     How are we to gauge the effect of Gourmet's writing about Asia and Asian food on the American public?  The continued success of the magazine in the 1990s, as measured in advertisement and circulation indicates a receptive audience.  Other measures might be the increasing depth and breadth of coverage.  Another illustration of success might be the additional menus which feature Asian food, with recipes included.
     Fred Ferretti's "Seoul, Kimchi and Culture"  added Korea to the list of possible destinations, and foods, for hungry travelers.  (This is probably associated with Korea's representation at the U.N. beginning in 1991.)
    1994 issues featured not only the recipes of Nina Simonds' "Sizzling Stir-Fries, Chinese on the Lighter Side," but complete menu's for "A Pan-Asian Luncheon on Maui," and "A Taste of Thailand."  Food historian Grace Lanier Norville has pointed out that recipes made "the good life" accessible to the mostly white middle class, cooking for their families.  Others have argued that Americans colonized ethnic restaurants, causing modifications to traditional menus.  They've also pointed out that Gourmet's recipes for home cooks literally domesticate Asian food and subtract authenticity.  Cooking Asian food rather than dining in a restaurant brings the foreign closer to hearth and home, but without the perceived risk of language barrier or different retaruant etiquette.  Appreciation of a culture and society must increase with knowledge of the techniques involved in producing its food.  However, the simplified recipes might give the illusion that these are simple foods.
     "Fusion" food, Eastern and Western, or multiple Asian cuisines, proved sometimes successful, and other times fragile; seemingly dependent on the whims of American fashion and the creativity of individual chefs.
   
Here's how history has rewritten the Asian restaurants of 1994:

New York:
China Grill at 60 West 53rd St. is still China Grill.
Zen Palate at 663 Ninth Avenue is still Zen Palate with additional locations at 115 East 18th Street and 239 West 105th Street.
Shun Lee Palace at 155 East 55th Street is still Shun Lee Palace.
Hatsuhana at 17 East 48th Street and 237 Park Avenue is still Hatsuhana.
Diwan Grill at 148 East 48th Street is still Diwan Grill.

San Francisco:
China House Bistro at 501 Balboa Street is now Yuubi Sushi.
Kyo-ya at 2 New Montgomery Street is still Kyo-ya.

Los Angeles:
Zenzero at 1535 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica is closed.
Shiro at 1550 Mission Street, South Pasadena is still Shiro.
Cinnabar at 935 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale is closed.


Daniel at 20 East 76th Street in Manhattan is Cafe Boulud.