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.

1985: What Do Brioches Have To Do With It?

Setting for Gourmet's October, 1985, Chinese Banquet.
Drawing by Lucey Bowen after photograph.

      Restaurants reviewed in Gourmet, whether Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, or Malaysian served at least two audiences.  The first was almost always immigrants, hungry for a taste of home. The other was the European or African-American wanting to eat food that wasn't just like home, but wan't too strange, and was served in a setting more elegant than home.

     Resolution of the possible conflicting wants of these two audiences came in a variety of ways.  In 1985, the deregulation of Japanese banking had begun to inflate the Japanese "bubble economy."  The legendary insularity of Japan to foreign influence was over, and Tokyo itself developed the concept of Seryna,

the Japanese equivalent of The Four Seasons restaurant. Strikingly, extravagantly handsome, it was a jewel set in a mid-town pocket park in Manhattan.  The food was influenced by Chinese and European cooking.  Wealthy Japanese and other business men loved it, and its geisha-like servers.
     In New York, Cuisine de Saigon, was one of the first Vietnamese restaurants to so call itself. The bitter memories of the Vietnam conflict were fading.  The owners had come to New York in 1968 as part of the Vietnamese mission to the United Nations, and could not return.  

     At Fu's,  also in New York, manager Gloria Chu was outspoken in condemning the "old immigrant experience" in which youngsters "get stuck in menial jobs all their lives."

     California's long history of Asian immigration prompted another innovation.  In the old Chinatown of Hanford, California, third generation Chinese American Richard Wing had fed escargot to Chaing Kai Shek's ambassadors at his Imperial Dynasty restaurant.  Wolfgang Puck took this concept to Hollywood with his Chinois.   Puck admitted "I don't know anything about Chinese food. This is a way to learn it."  The restaurant fused French technique with Japanese, Thai and Southeast Asian ingredients.  I wonder if an immigrant from those places would find comfort in the food or the prices.

     Both restaurant reviewers, Jay Jacobs in New York, and Caroline Bates in California provided the personal history of the restaurant owners.  Jacobs and Bates visited each restaurant multiple times, so that they could engage with the owners and staff in a personal way.  Sometimes the stories heard hint at the faraway conflicts which brought the owners to the United States.  Fragrant Vegetable Restaurant in Monterrey Park was a Chinese restaurant serving the vegetarian cooking of Buddhist monasteries.  The chef learned his craft in a temple in Saigon, before he was forced, probably by the Cultural Revolution, to flee to Hong Kong .

     These vignettes serve two purposes. By affecting to know the owner or chef of a restaurant,  a male customer appears in control.  They also appear to make the experience of these restaurants more authentic, a key component of the gourmet experience.  The most authentic travel story was Lesley Blanch's piece, "Afghanistan Remembered."  Blanch, who died in 2007, at age 103, lived in Afghanistan in  the early 1960s.  Her 1985 memories of the people and food of the region are tinged with the tragic awareness of subsequent revolutions and invasions.  How much authenticity do we really want with our food?

   
     The October, 1985 issue of Gourmet provided the menu and recipes for "A Chinese Dinner," replete with four cold plates and five main dishes.  That issue also featured Jacques Pépin's method for making brioches.  I made brioches.  I don't think I've ever made them again.  No matter.  By following that recipe, I partook of Gourmet's crusade to make fine living available to a wide audience through food.
     Our travel that year was strictly western hemisphere.  To escape the Massachusetts winter, we to Dominica in the West Indies.   It has the distinction of having the only surviving intact tribe of Carawak Indians, and virtually no beaches.  Having been a British possession, the cooking is undistinguished, and being an island, almost all food imported. 
     In the Spring we flew to England itself, and took the recently revived Orient Express to Venice.
     My adherence to the middle class aspirations of Gourmet held tight in July.  In honor of my sister's wedding I cooked the exact Rehearsal Dinner menu from the previous month.  The main course was "Pistachioed Turkey Ballottine."  Little did we imagine that deboned turkey would become a family tradition for Thanksgivings to come. 

The fate of the restaurants featured in 1985 Gourmet is mixed:
New York:    

Fragrant Vegetable Restaurant is gone.

Cuisine de Saigon ar 154 West 13th,  New York City, is now in hands of third generation.
Seryna next to Paley Park is now Valbella, northern Italian.
Kumio "Yama" Koyama of New York's Yama opened his own restaurant at Fort Lee, NJ called Yamagata!! at 1636 Palisades Ave Fort Lee, N. 
At Nirvana Club One, Julie Sahni was executive chef; hers was my first Indian cookbook.
California
Robata Grill is still in Mill Valley, CA.
Chinois is still Chinois.
Fortune Garden Pavillion replaced by Richard Sandoval's Pampano,  upscale Mexican.
Katsu at 1972 Hillhurst Avenue in Hollywood's Los Feliz, is now En Sushi

Mike's Chinese Cuisine at 5145 Geary, SF is now Old Shanghai.

Lesley Blanch is remembered and read.

1984: The Pinafored Chinese Twins in Little Italy

Chinese Twins in Little Italy, Gourmet, 1984

     The pair graced the cover of Gourmet in January, 1984.  In fact, the feature article was on New York's Little Italy, not neighboring Chinatown.  And that was that for Asia in America that first month of the year.
     Back in New York, and back in Chinatown, Jay Jacobs reviewed Say Eng Look, notable for its Shanghai style food, not its decor. In November, Jacobs found Szechuan Village Inn, at 1st Avenue and 89th Street.  Not very far from   
     Jacobs found Darbar, housed in a duplex at 44 West 56th Street.  The interior of the restaurant incorporated sandalwood screens, tiles, carpets, paintings and sculpture, all commissioned in India and installed in the restaurant.  Its Mogul, or northern Indian style of cooking was excellent.        
     Continuing in the magazine's traditions of explaining the Spice Route and the nostalgic memoires of early issues of  Gourmet,  Julie Sahni wrote "An Indian Spice Sampler" a recollection of the cooking of her childhood in Kanpur in north central India.  This piece, part memoir, part ethnography, indoctrinated the reader into the power of spices, and was followed by over a dozen recipes.    
      Meanwhile, Jay Jacobs travelled to China.   In 1984, with the re-unification of Hong Kong with the People's Republic still more than a decade away, the restaurants of Hong Kong were far superior to those in Beijing or Chengdu, the markets filled with edibles and in-edibles that lured Jacobs in ways that jade jewelry did not.  His piece, "The Lone Marketeer: Hong Kong," was also written with a very personal slant.  Before arriving in Hong Kong, Jacobs had stayed three days in poor village in outlying Anhui province.  The contrast to sleek, free-wheeling Hong Kong almost unhinged him.  He investigated the Kowloon market.   The term "Foodie" had not yet been coined. He called himself a "fooder."
      Fred Ferretti offered an alternative, grand hotel dining.  In "Hong Kong, Sans Chopsticks."  Ferretti opined that in decades prior, alternatives to the outstanding Chinese food of Hong Kong were few.  By the early eighties, the enormous wealth of the city brought with it a demand for grand cuisine of other places: France, Malaysia, Spain, Japan, Switzerland, Germany. Ingredients were flown in from everywhere.  You can see the international economy eating.
       "Foodnik" was still the coinage to describe a dedicated gastronomer like Nobuyoshi Kuraoka of Hyotan Nippon, at 109 East 59th Street in New York.  Beautifully equipped with a sushi bar and decorated with Kyoto tiles, the menu was extensive, the food unusual and good.
      Jacobs was not so jaded as not to appreciate his discovery in New York of China Garden, and its proprieter, Tam Choi Lam.  Jacob's observed, not for the first or last time,  the difficulties an "Englished Chinese menu" create.
      The Big Island of Hawaii, was historically a stepping stone to California in Asian immigration.  Carolyn Bates didn't dwell on the history of contract laborers imported tom Hawaii to work the sugar and pineapple plantations, but many of the establishments she visits are the creation of Japanese Americans.  She described The Akatsuka Orchid Gardens, Restaurant Fuji, the Yamaguchi Family's Kalapana Store and Drive-Inn and Susuma Nakagowa, a retired government scientist who raises mullet in ancient fish-ponds for the Seaside Restaurant.  On their website, I learned that the Nakagowa family has long-standing tie to Hawaii.  Susuma's parents, Seiichi and Matsuno opened the restaurant in 1921.  The fishpond was destroyed by the 1946 tsunami and rebuilt twice since.  Tellingly, Susumu served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and his fellow veterans helped rebuild the pond in the early 1980s.  In focusing on Hawaii's volcanic geology and on the remnants of the original Hawaiians, Bates obscured Hawaii's troubling 20th Century history.
    Given Hawaii as a melting pot of all manner of Asian peoples and foods, and its relative proximity to San Francisco, it's not surprising to find innovative mixes there.   The fusion phenomena of Japanese-French appeared in San Francisco with Masa's.  Masaka Kobayoshi learned his arts and skills in Tokyo and France.  He had cooked French food in New York and the Napa Valley.  The food served to Carolyn Bates seemed to have been Japanese in its visual aesthetic and in the purity of falvors, yet French in its sauces.  
     Caroline Bates opined that San Francisco has cornered the market on Vietnamese cooking in California, with Garden House, the newest addition, at 133 Clement Street.  Southeast Asia was also represented by Prakas Yenbamroong's Talesai, at 9043 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where his mother, Vilai, was chef.  

New York:
China Garden, in 2012, is a pizza parlor.
Hyontan Nippon is gone now, replace by a convenience café.
     
Hawaii:
The Seaside is still owned and operated by the Nakagawa family.
   
San Francisco:
In 2012, Masa's is still a destination restaurant, albeit many chefs later;  and now the food is called California French.  I note that the pastry chef is Hong Kong born, California educated Maggie Leung.
Talesai is  still there, run by the third generation, Kris Yenbamroong, who was born in LA, but returned to Thailand to complete his education. He returned to take over management of the restaurant and still relies on his grandmother's recipes.
Garden House, with a different chef and now Le Soleil Authentic Vietnamese , it re-opened in February, 2012 after redecoration.

1983: Restaurants: Thresholds for Immigrants

Chairs in Surakarta kraton museum, Java, drawn from Gourmet

     Gourmet had long treated New York as the dining capital of the country.  Eventually it had admitted California to a regular restaurant review column, alternating Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Yet, more than a third of the 1980s wave of Asian immigrants, especially those from the Philippines, China, South Korea and India, settled in California. 

      

     In New York, Jay Jacobs reviewed Shanghai Manor, an "uptown" Chinese restaurant.  Interestingly, although he applauded the cooking, he listed the quibbles of a irritated cosmopolite:  westerners treat appetizers and soups in un-Chinese ways; why do menus say crispy instead of the perfectly good adjective crisp?  Jacobs devoted a review to Pamir.  He began by locating the Pamir Mountains in Afghanistan.  The owners of Pamir, seven brothers and sisters of the Bayat family, were Pashto speakers, originally from Kabul. Jacobs found the food reflected Afghanistan's location near India and Iran.  
     At Flower Drum in New York, Jay Jacobs found another remarkable immigrant, Pao Peter Lee.  Jacobs wrote that Lee belonged to the "last generation of restaurateurs born in what is now the People's Republic of China."  The fortunes of war and politics drove him from Beijing to Taiwan, via Wuhan and Chongqing  Lee came to America in 1953 to attend an international conference of  police chiefs.  He worked, he studied and he became an interpreter at the United Nations. He saved.  Ten years later he opened his restaurant, and by Jacobs description is was first rate.  Peter Pao Lee was many things in addition to restaurateur, including an expert in tai chi.    He learned the 108 Yang family form of Tai Chi from his grandfather.  

    Back in the realm of David Keh, this time to Auntie Yuan.  With the assistance of one Ed Schoenfeld, the restaurant was geared to American tastes, based around the cooking of particular Taiwanese cooks, but incorporating the nouvelle cuisine developed in France.
     Jacobs dedicated his column to Takesushi, a temple to the rite of eating fugu, the tiger blowfish of deadly toxin.  The next month, he featured Toons, a Thai restaurant in Greenwich Village.  In addition to explaining the prevalence of fish sauce in Southeast Asian cooking, Jacobs dwelt on the importance of street, or sidewalk food, and in Toons' menu as appetizers.  The remainder of his review was devoted to making parallels between the French treatment of foods like frog's legs and crab served in its shell to Thai food, perhaps to build a launching pad to Thai food from the French restaurants and recipes which numerically dominated Gourmet's pages.
     Perhaps Geri Trotta's Indonesian junket prompted Jay Jacobs' discovery of the Indonesian Tamu, recounted in the June issue.  The owner, Andi Sangkala, hailed from Sulawesi, fourth largest of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago.  Jacobs thought Tamu the only Indonesian restaurant in New York City.  The number of Indonesian immigrants in the United States tripled between 1980 and 1990, most lived in Southern California.


     In California, Caroline Bates ventured to Santa Barbara to visit Bangkok West, a restaurant run by one Pathon Jittayasotorn and his wife, and numerous brothers and sisters, recently arrived from Bangkok. La Petite Chaya's Japanese food with French influence first succeeded in Japan, and then was launched in Los Angeles. This fusion concept, the idea of applying Japanese thinking to a French base, was already several years old.  Was a concession to American tastes, or was it the Japanese, with their expanding economy who explored this?  Or is it the some molecular similarity between Japanese Kaiseki, the special refined small plates that go with the tea ceremony, and the French menu de degustation or tasting menu?
     Bates began her March review of Korean Palace with the observation that Korea seldom gets credit for a cuisine of its own.  She was impressed with the individuality and vitality of the cooking at this San Francisco restaurant.  The owner and his wife, Nam Kun Song and Un Hui, created what a homey and welcoming place that  featured dishes influenced by Japan, like ku jul pan, a Korean version of obento presentation, and uniquely Korean ones, like bibim bab, a salad said to be of Buddhist origin.   
     For Christmas, Bates decided on Indian food for a post Nutcracker feast, largely because The Kundan had opened in the just completed Opera Plaza condominium near the San Francisco Ballet.  She observed that San Francisco was the country's reigning capital of Indian cooking.  The focus, as with The Gaylord and The Peacock is Mogul, or northern Indian cuisine, served formally.  

      Travelling in Jogjakarta, central Java, Geri Trotta happened on a performance of the dance drama of the the Ramayana, in front of the Prambanan temple. Trotta observed the Jogja dance style, created by a sultan in the Eighteenth Century. She visited the many Hindu temples or Candi as well as Borobdur, the world's largest Buddhist monument. The Hindu epic Ramayana is wildly popular in a county which recognizes six religions but Islam is the principal creed.

     Elisabeth Ando wrote about lunch at the Sanko-In, a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo.  Ando observed that in Japan, the very best vegetarian fare was found at Buddhist temples.  The Sanko-In luncheon was the creation of nun, Yoneida Soei.  Ando described each course, and also gave detailed instructions on travelling by train to the Tokyo Suburb. 

   In the midst of a icy New England winter, Dick and I took a page from the December issue of Gourmet, 1982, and went "Scuba Diving in the Bahamas" off Andros Island at a resort called Small Hope Bay Lodge.  In October, we retraced together the Maine adventure I'd previously enjoyed alone.  We had duck and pork curry at Aubergine and camped in Blue Hill.  We cooked over a wood fire.  In rain and fog, we hiked the carriage trails of Mount Desert from Northeast Harbor.  At the Central House we had bouillabaise and steak with bernaise sauce.  The next day we climbed the rocks of Mount Desert in bright and hot sun.  The next day we walked to Jordan Pond House for popovers.
     I might have remained in this East Coast to the Caribbean axis, had I not not been sent to Silicon Valley for training in computer software.  I made my first trip west of the Great Divide.  I checked into Dinah's Motor Hotel, with its collection of Asian art and and its Japanese garden.  My instructor, a young Vietnamese woman, invited me to dinner---at a French Restaurant.  My friend Patrick took me for Mongolian Bar-b-cue in Mountain View, another friend guided me to the Asian Art Museum and the Japanese Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.  On we went to the Japan Center on Geary, with its Kinokinuya Bookstore.  In my journal,  I wrote "I feel very much a citizen of the world, powerful because I am able to cope with change."


New York:
Shanghai Manor is currently home to a Chinese restaurant, Lychee House, who claim to serve a "modern Chinese,"  and they still serve crispy fish.
Pamir is gone, and the intervening years no kinder to Afghanistan.
Flower Drum Leaving New York, Peter Pao Lee took Flower Drum Restaurant to Palm Springs.  Lee died in 2008, but his students continue to teach Tai Chi.



Los Angeles:
La Petite Chaya is still going strong, as can be seen in its offspring, Chaya, with branches all up and down the Pacific Coast. 
Bangkok West

San Francisco:
Korean Palace at 631 O'Farrell, still houses a Korean restaurant,  Dong Baek, 
which from its yelp* reviews seems to merit a visit.
The Kundan is gone from Opera Plaza, replaced by a Max's Opera House Cafe.

1982: Not Quite Ready for Durian, the stinky fruit?

Gamelan player, Central Musuem, Jakarta, from a photo by Michael Oppersdorf

     Where there's peace, tourism thrives.  Where there's war,  the metropole gets a taste of a new cuisine.  If it's good, cosmopolites want recipes.  That's why travel articles, restaurant reviews and recipes are the staples of Gourmet's representation of the Asia.
     Geri Trotta was at first dismayed with Jakarta, with its European hotels and Continental food.  At first it seemed too European, too modern, so she immersed the reader in the history of Indonesia; its combination of land and sea, its Hindu roots, the arrival of Islamic and Christian traders, especially the Dutch East India Company. At the Wayang Museum, she found “a world within a world of puppets from the various islands.”  In two paragraphs she summarized the world of puppetry, so crucial to Indonesian society.  She also told the story of another pillar of Indonesian culture, Iwan Tirta, who revived the craft of batik.  She ended her piece by repeating her observation that Jakarta was a disquieting city, where luxury and squalor co-existed, giving a “raw vitality resulting from the collision of cultures, East and West.”
    The establishment of diplomatic relations with China expanded tourism.  Jay Jacobs spent three weeks in the People’s Republic of China, where he “stuffed his face continuously.”  He realized that the dishes he ate in China were simpler and more clearly defined than what he’d eaten in American Chinese restaurants.  Returning to Manhattan, he found the cooking at David K’s Cantonese Kitchen more like the dishes he ate in China.  David Keh was said to have changed the image of Chinese food in America. In New York he brought introducing Sechuan food uptown. (You may remember that David Keh was the owner of Uncle Tai’s.  Eventually, Uncle Tai’s closed because David Keh didn’t approve of unionized labor.)
     In 1982, according to Caroline Bates, the customers at Chef Monkgorn Kaiswai’s Thai Gourmet were more familiar with Chinese food than Thai.  The restaurant featured unusual dishes from Thailands northeastern area.  The customers were drawn from the neighborhood.  
     Bates observed the changing demographics of Asian population.  In San Francisco and Los Angeles, Asian communities formed outside of the central Chinatown or Japantown.  Small gems of restaurants like Thai Gourmet were to be found just off the freeway and off the tourist's map.
     Bates reviewed Mango Bay in San Francisco.  In 1982 it opened at 298 Gough Street.  The original founders of Mango Bay felt that previous restaurants featuring the islands cuisine were “too ethnic and too limited.”  Bates opines that “only a homesick Filipino” was likely to lament the changes they made.  Lumpia, Philippine egg rolls, reflect a cuisine that's basically Malaysian, with influences from the Asian mainland and Spain.  Actually, there were a lot of homesick Filipinos.  The Filipino community in San Francisco had become more visible because of the fight to preserve the International Hotel, home to many aging Filipino veterans of World War II.
     I didn't take myself to any of these places, but that year I met my own version of Nicholas Hel, a tall thin engineer who liked to cook Peking Duck and lobster.  Having attended M.I.T.,  Legal Seafood was a favorite.  The best night out, however, was Maison Robert.  For dinner,  the women dressed in silks and the men in tweed and suede.  We were seated at the round table in the center of the room.  We consumed the French influenced food and wine, and the group decided to share one of each of the desserts.  "Take a bite, and pass to your right." Then there was the contest to see who could hold a spoon on their nose.  No effortless control for me.

New York:
David K’s Cantonese at 1395 Second Avenue is Szechuan Chalet.  David Keh died in 2003.
Los Angeles:
Thai Gourmet at 8650 Reseda Boulevard, Northridge
San Francisco:
Mango Bay at 298 Gough Street is gone.  After a stint in the International Food Court at Yerba Buena Gardens, Mango Bay migrated down the Peninsula to Redwood Shores, along with the growing Filipino community.

Maison Robert, in Boston's Old City Hall, closed in 2004.