2004: It's About More than Food

Peppers feature in Northern Thai food, drawing by Lucey Bowen from Gourmet, 2004, photograph.

    Perhaps the most celebrated piece of writing in Gourmet's 2004 issues was David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster."  It's a mad ramble of a piece which begins with a celebration of Maine's lobster industry and ends with Wallace raising all sorts of questions of the sort not previously addressed in the magazine devoted to "the good life."

    Other articles that year celebrated Bangkok and the fish sauce of Vietnam but are imbued awareness of the illusory nature of tourism and travel.  Perhaps this is most obvious in "Salaam Bombay," dedicated to India's Bollywood film industry.

     The sheer physicality of traveling by bicycle is an antidote to touristic illusion.  As a high school graduation present we asked Connor to accompany us on a cycling trip.  He voted to split the trip between France and Ireland, and we obliged.  Except for the heat, the cycling and the food were better in France than Ireland.  We continued to follow the no fast food rule.  I remember: Connor ordering Pizza Americane at a restaurant on the outskirts of Les Eyzie.  It proved to be pizza crust covered with French fries, hamburger and cheese sprinkled on top.  I would like to say that such a thing was never served in the United States, but soon Connor would discover the civic specialty of Pittsburgh: Primanti's sandwiches, all of which contain an order of french fries, coleslaw and tomatoes.

     My routine of triathalon training and tutoring was about to be modified.  In the fall I began attending the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's friday docent training lectures.  The curriculum was designed to complement Avery Brundage's collection of Asian art.  It paralleled the Museum's chronological and geographical ordering of the collection by beginning in India, and over the course of three years, encompassing Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. Under the direction of a wonderful teacher, Yu Chun-Hui.  The overview I'd taught in my 6th grade social studies classroom was just a start.  

New York:
Oriental Garden at 14 Elizabeth Street is still Oriental Garden.
Big Eat at 97 Bowery is closed.
Joe's Ginger at 113 Mott Street is closed.
Joe's Shanghai at 9 Pell Street is still Joe's Shanghai
New Green Bo at 66 Bayard is Nice Green Bo.
Jing Fong at 20 Elizabeth Street is still Jing Fong
Golden Unicorn Restaurant at 18 East Broadway is still Golden Unicorn Restaurant.
Big Wong at 67 Mott Street is still Big Wong.
Ping's Seafood at 22 Mott Street is still Ping's.

San Francisco:
Cetrella Bistro and Cafe at 845 Main Street, Half Moon Bay is still Cetrella.

2003: All Things Revisited

Mountains around Hiroshima, Watercolor on paper, Lucey Bowen, 2003. 

     Would I be wrong in thinking that the sense of dread and uncertainty which came into my life was shared by the editors of Gourmet and its readers?  My evidence is the special supplement "A Guide to America's Best Roadfood," Jane and Michael Stern's paean to food worth-stopping-the-car-for.  More proof was provided by assigning the adventurous Anthony Bourdain to cook - on a cruise ship, sorry, a floating condominium called The World.  

     According to Ruth Reichl, New York was especially tense, trying to find cheer in the opening of Jean-George Vongerichten's 66, his homage to Chinese cooking.  On the West Coast, Caroline Bates found Singapore's Nonya Cuisine in, of course, Los Angeles.  Nicole Mones extolled Juon Yuon, one of the world's hot spots for Chinese food, located in a strip mall in the San Gabriel Valley, east of L. A.  Mones' first contributions to Gourmet were her twin pieces on Beijing and Shanghai in 1999.  Mones, a New China hand, had done business in China since 1977, and written two novels, Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light.  The heroines of both novels are Caucasian women, fluent in Mandarin, experts in their fields of Chinese history or culture, and conflicted about their assimilation into Chinese society.

     Fuschia Dunlop, another New China Hand, contributed a piece on restaurants in Chengdu, in Sichuan province in China's southwest; a bit farther afield than your average tourist might travel.  

     My own voyage into the East had begun.  In 2003, San Francisco had a Japanese language station,  KTSF broadcast two Japanese television series, Kinpachi Sensei and Sakura.  The former dealt with a middle school teacher's character lessons for his teenage students, a group with issues recognizable to American audiences: demanding parents, sexual identity, drugs. The latter followed an  Hawaiian-born-Japanese-American girl teaching English in a small town in Japan. Both shows introduced me to contemporary Japan, and were broadcast with subtitles.  The Japanese epic Mushashi, a tale of meditation and swordplay, was also featured.  KTSF showed Project X, a documentary series about the inventions which helped Japan recover and advance after World War II.  The theme music was from China's 12 Girl Band.

      It was all new to me, and I began trying to absorb it all.  My notebooks began to fill up with watercolors of the most basic of characters, those for infinity and water.  Soon I was hooked on Asian culture.  My husband instigated my first trip to Asia.  Japan was our destination, with a stop in Hawaii on the way home. Here's why: my father-in-law worked on the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  My husband thought it was important that our children see Japan first hand.  Hiroshima was the must see, as was Pearl Harbor on the way back.  Connor and Fiona were game; Japanese pop culture was ascendant in their world.  Dick and I studied Japanese at a nearby high school.  I purchased tapes for the children and me to practice with as we commuted to school and sports. 
     Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hida Takayama, where Sakura taught school, all were on the itinerary.  Friends from Dick's work in high technology sent us to their favorite restaurants.  We stayed in a ryokan, an old style inn. We rode subways and bullet trains.  With or without husband and children I visited museums and shrines, places I'd read about, although not necessarily in Gourmet.  
     I remember: Tokyo's heat, the pond covered in blooming lotus in Ueno Park, the deafening noise of cicadas in Kyoto, groups of the elderly practicing tai-chi in the early morning, or dancing bon odori in festivals.  

     

New York:
66 at 241 Church Street is closed.

Los Angeles:
Nonya at 61 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, is closed.
Juon Yuan at 140 West Valley Boulevard, No 210, San Gabriel is till Juon Yuan.
Green Village at 140 West Valley Boulevard, No. 206-207, San Gabriel, is closed.
Chung King at 206 Garfield Avenue, Monterey Park is still Chung King.

2002: Close Ups

Dim Sum at Hong Kong Flower Lounge, drawing by Lucey Bowen from Gourmet, 2002 photograph.

     Magazines are "put to bed" months before they are published.  Hence the first allusion to 9/11 occurs in the January, 2002 issue.  "A Brand New Start of It" detailed the slow recovery of the city as reflected in restaurants below Canal Street.  Lower Manhattan had become a community fused by fire, but the author, Jonathan Gold soon left the city to return to the West Coast. There he described a major shift. The best Asian restaurants followed their customers from San Francisco proper to the suburbs that surround the Bay, and the malls that are there commercial heart.
     Maybe I'm imagining this, but it seems that security dominated the travel choices.  Essays on Mauritius, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bali promised islands of spiritual peace and luxury.  Even the country formerly known as Buddhist Burma was recommended as a peaceful destination.
     A reflective, critical note sounded again in the "Culture Notes: Dining on Faith." In the essay by Chitrita Banerji, she told how her Muslim Bengladeshi husband and her Bengali Hindu mother clashed over the mother's Brahmin traditions of food purity.  The mother's preparation of the son-in-law's favorite dishes finally quelled the quarrel.

     Born in New York, but resident in California since 1993, I could understand Gold's flight, as if distance from Ground Zero could diminish the sense of fragility.
     Once again, when school was out, Connor and Fiona travelled to Connecticut, and Dick and I to France.  This time we cycled south and I competed in a small triathlon in Cahors.  Finishing dead last, I was awarded a fine bottle of vin de Cahors.  Returning to California I began serious preparation for the climax of this exercise-to-eat regimen:  Ironman Florida in November.
     Down the windswept Pacific Coast Highway I cycled for hours.  One day I misjudged a change in pavement and fell from my bike, tearing a tendon in my shoulder.  It was painful, but I continued to train.  In Florida, I completed the two-and-a-half mile swim and the one hundred and ten mile swim, but by twenty minutes, I missed the cut-off for starting the twenty six mile run.
     After Christmas my shoulder was cleaned up by the surgeon, but I'd lost the desire to spend endless hours on the bike.  I wouldn't miss the aches and pains.  I wouldn't miss the saccharine energy bars and chemical drinks. I wouldn't miss riding alone with only my thoughts to keep me company.  I would miss the outdoors, and being a body moving through the landscape.

See what the decade has wrought on these restaurants:

New York:
Pakistan Tea House at 176 Church Street is still Pakistan Tea House.
Jewel Bako at 239 East 5th Street is still Jewel Bako.

San Francisco:
Yee's Restaurant at 1131 Grant Avenue is still Yee's Restaurant.
Koi Palace at Serramonte Plaza, 365 Gellert Boulevard, Daly City is still Koi Palace.
Fatima Seafood Restaruant 1132A S. DeAnza Boulevard, San Jose, is still Fatima's.
ABC 873 E. Hillsdale Boulevard, #B5, Foster City is still ABC.
Daimo 3288A Pierce Street, #A118, Richmond is closed.
Pacific East Seafood, 3288 Pierce Street, Richmond, is still Pacific East Seafood.
Hong Kong Flower Lounge at 51 Millbrae Avenue, Millbrae, is still Hong Kong Flower Lounge.
Cheung Hing at 22145 South El Camino, Millbrae, is still Cheung Hing.
Chef Ding at 2214 South El Camino, San Mateo, is still Chef Ding.
Hot Pot City at 500 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Hot Pot City.
Café Ophelia at 516 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Cafe Ophelia.
Lu Lai Garden at 210 Barber Court, Milpitas is Chili Garden.
Golden Island at 286 Barber Court, Milpitas, is still Golden Island.
Mayflower at 428 Barber Lane, Milpitas, is still Mayflower.
Darda Seafood at 296 Barber Court, Milpitas is still Darda Seafood
Yen Ching at 1616 Washington Boulevard, Fremont, is closed.
Little Sechuan Express at 34420 Fremont Boulevard, Fremont, is closed.
3.6.9. Shanghai at 46831 Warm Springs Road, Fremont, is now Aberdeen Café.
A & J Restaurant at 10893North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still A&J Restaurant.
Taipei Stone House at 10877 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Taipei Stone House.
Joy Luck Place at 10911 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Joy Luck Place.
South Taste at 10825 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino is Southland Flavor Café.
Silver Wing at 10885 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is still Silver Wing.
Porridge Place at 10869 North Wolfe Road, Cupertino, is closed.

2001: Enters the Outlaw

Doorway near Kerala, drawn by Lucey Bowen. from her photograph.

     An old friend, foodie, and fellow Gourmet aficionado observed of the magazine's audience in the 1940s, 50s and 60s:  "There used to be men who were not gay and considered it manly to be knowledgable about food and wine."  Add men who consider it macho to ingest the hottest of curries, hot sauces, organ meats, and voilà, there is Anthony Bourdain, profiled in August, 2001.  He'd just published an un-masking of himself and the New York restaurant world,  Kitchen Confidential, and was about to launch his television career with A Cook's Tour,  "a socio-cultural essay on the role food plays in various cultures," but what got "everyone's attention was the extreme eating that Tony engages in."
     The essay, "Kitchen Cowboy," is not about food or travel, although the author followed Bourdain to Mexico for the filming of the series.  It is about a new kind of culture broker.  The twenty-first century culture broker is post-colonial, post-modern, even post-literary. He's all sauced with ironic self-reflection, rarely found in reality television stars.  Not incidentally, the thrust of Bourdain's comments is his Mexican-born kitchen staff that are producing the great French food of Manhattan.
     In retrospect, the greater irony lies in Gourmet's writing about Bourdain.  Yes, he's a famous author and chef.   However, the medium of television, and soon the internet could prove as reliable as the magazine in providing the information and the intimate knowledge of food and place that had been Gourmet's specialty.
    The magazine's graphics had become lyric and evocative.  The travel articles illustrated increasingly exotic destinations reflecting the ever growing sophistication of the audience.  In Kerala, an Ayurvedic spa awaits.  Restaurant reviews had often included a bit of the life story of the owner or chef, but now he or she is the story, as in the Toronto based Sesur Lee and his fusion food.
     2001 was Gourmet's 60th Anniversary.  The September issue was a retrospective. Ruth Reichl commissioned food historian Anne Mendelson to capture the spirit of the magazine's six decades in six one page summaries.  Memorable quotes and recipes followed.  You will remember Anne Mendelson as the biographer of the Rombauer-Beckers of The Joy of Cooking, who I quoted in writing about Alice Richardson in July, 2011.
     I didn't read Gourmet that September.  No sooner had it arrived than we awoke to the news of destruction of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.  I wrote in my journal of the enduring feelings of desolation and hopelessness.
     I'm reading her summaries now, a decade later, as I prepare to perform the same sort of analysis on Gourmet's final decade of representing Asia and Asian cooking.  9/11 was the event which would shape the decade, but how do my perceptions from my narrow perspective compare with Mendelson's?  I'm reassured that she sensed much of what I've described.  She wrote of the early Gourmet thusly: "a more intangible , but supremely important element of the magazine's identity was an intense fixation on the past as the standard of meaning." She expressed beautifully the hunger of travelers at that time to experience "a kind of time travel through physical travel."
     She characterized the magazine in the 1970s as pervaded by the sense of loss, a sense that the country and the world were growing ever more homogenous.  She noted that Gourmet was late in recognizing the importance of farming and of new immigrants.   Indeed she wrote that Gourmet was late in paying attention to the food that "New Immigrants"  were bringing and eating.

     France was still the focus of my travel and food fantasies.  Inspired by our stay in Southern France and by my continuing dedication to my-exercise-to-eat triathlon endeavor, Dick and I booked a biking and eating tour through the Dordogne region.  My notebooks filled with drawings and recipes for goat cheese salad with lardon.  The children went to summer school at my father's WASP boarding school in Connecticut.
     When all returned to home, the two teenagers in high school, with all the drama and after-school-sports.  Their school year would be marked by what we saw on television when we woke up that morning.  Four days later, I was to compete in a triathlon on the Pacific Coast.  Unlike many sporting events that week, it was not cancelled, but dedicated to all those who had died.  As a family, we stood as taps echoed across the water and we sang the national anthem with tears in our eyes.  Plunging into the frigid ocean, I felt cleansed.

   


New York:
Sweet-n-Tart Restaurant at 20 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 76 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 136-11 38th Avenue, Flushing is closed.

San Francisco:
Ana Mandara at 891 Beach Street is still Ana Manadara.
Masa's at 648 Bush Street is still Masa's.

Los Angeles:
Restaurant Katsu at 11920 Ventura Bourlevard, Studio City is still Katsu.
Banh Cuon Tay Ho #4 at 9629 Bolsa at Westminster is still Banh Cuon Tay Ho.

2000: Not Lost in Translation

Mutton Curry, rice pancakes and cashew rice in Kochi, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ann Williams photograph, Gourmet, 2000.

    Gourmet's writers and readers always strove to be cosmopolitan, knowledgable of and comfortable in many countries and cultures.  In the new millenium, Ruth Reichl's writers transformed cosmopolitism with further explorations of the Asian diaspora, and hybrid voices which arise from it.
     In "A Cook and His Castle,"  Chicago's Chinatown-raised-chef Ken Hom, told why he made his home near Cahors, France.  His daily life is Asian fusion.
      The author of "Pilgram's Progress," was American-born Leslie Chang whose Beyond the Narrow Gate,explored "the bond of immigration and what an American identity is."  In the 21st century Gourmet, it follows that she wrote a moving account of the culinary transitions English settlers made in the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies.  The other side of the immigrant coin was the moving piece "My Dragon-Dancing Years," Fae Myenne Ng's story of being re-introduced to her mother's Chinese-food-as-medicine ways in order to please a dying Caucasian friend.
    Those pieces give us a hint of Gourmet for the new millenium.  The magazine's layout and table of contents reflected a new spirit.  The restaurant reviews are unchained from their bi-coastal tethers.  Fine dining is to be found in between, in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, Arizona.  Of significance is that these featured restaurants, featuring everything from Northern Thai specialties to unfussy Asian fusion.  And as in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, some of the best places are found in strip-malls and suburbs, reflecting the changed demographics of Asian immigration.
     Some things remained constant.  Jane and Michael Stern's endless quest for America rolled on, chronicled in their road-food section, "Two for the Road." Road-food, the name for what's served in the homiest local places says much about American culture and contrasted to the street-food that was featured in a Jonathan Gold's "The World's Greatest Street Food."  In the United States we approach the local by car; in Singapore, pedestrians can, in the same hawker center, sample food from every one of the half-dozen ethnic or cultural groups that make up Singapore's population.
     There's also a sense of rewriting the familiar.  "The Spice Route" could have been the title of an article on pepper in Gourmet of the 1940s.  In 2000, it's an in depth account traveling and eating in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, about as far from the Taj Mahal as you can get and still be in India.


     My preoccupations that year had a lot to do with my sense that I was growing old.  No doubt some of that concern arose from knowing that my children were growing up and consequently away.  Those years would probably be the last that they would happily vacation with us.  So when school was out for the summer, we planned a trip which took us to France, naturellement.  We rented a house with a swimming pool in the south, near walled cities like Carcassone.  Once again I imposed the no-fast-food rule.  In fact, each child would be expected to shop and cook.  Before departure each selected and practiced a recipe.  Connor chose pissaladiere  from Julia, the Provencal version of the teen-ager's staple, pizza, but made with mille-fuille pastry dough onions and olives,  anchovy on the side, please.  Fiona chose Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic.
     Our well-trained travelers adhered to the no-fast-food rule as we travelled south by train from Paris and picked up our hired car.  Paraza, the village where we rented, is on the Canal du Midi, once an important artery between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic port of Bordeaux.  No more.  Only yachts and barges, sleeping and feeding tourists, traverse its peaceful waters,  The village itself is almost deserted for nine months of the year.  A family from Sweden uses the former home of the mayor as a summer house.  Once a week a travelling butcher sets up shop.  When he appeared, Fiona and I went to purchase the chicken for her dish.  What an education for her to see the complete  chicken, head, feet and all, and to reply "non" when asked if she wanted those parts.  The chicken dish was a huge success. For his pizza dinner,  Connor elected to invite our landlord, an eccentric Welsh painter, who lived summers in his studio next door. A trip back towards Narbonne to the nearest supermarche was required.  How civilized to find pre-made  mille-fuille.  The painter arrived with a large jug of the wine which is still dispensed from the caves of the local Commune.  Another suces fou.
     Back home, I plunged into the compensatory physical activity of triathlon: swimming, biking and running. While my husband was at work and the children at school, I trained.   My extremely slow pace meant that for hours I was alone, on the bike or on the running trail.  I had hours to meditate.  
     Where was I going? What was I going to do for the rest of my life, after  the children departed for college.  Except for the limitations of age, I could do anything I wanted.  I didn't yet know what that was.

New York:
Sono at 106 57th Street is now BLT Steak.
Thalia at 828 Eight Avenue is still Thalia, but with a different focus.

Phoenix:
Hapa is closed.

Las Vegas:
Lotus of Siam, 953 East Sahara Avenue, Suite A5 is still Lotus of Siam.


San Francisco:
Firecrackers at 1007 1/2 Valencia is closed.
Angkor Borei at 3471 Mission is still Angkor Borei.