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.