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.

1993: Ripe for Change

Chinese chicken rice, Malay saté, Indian curry at the Chatterbox Coffee Shop, Singapore, drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph in the January, 1993, Gourmet

     Gourmet's writers did not always traffic in nostalgia, or portray Asia as timeless, or a place whose Golden Age had passed.  Fred Ferretti's 1993 essay "Singapore," takes the city as it was: the result of three decades of determination to make this city of "Many races, one people," the most modern in Asia.  Singapore's foods reflected the mix of inhabitants: Chinese, Malay, Indian and Nonya-Baba or mixed Malay-Chinese.  Carolyn Bates' piece on "Dining in Honolulu," stresses the same slow evolution of the flavorful mix of native Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese foods.
     Chris Yeo, a culture-broker-chef-extraordinaire, exported Singapore's cuisine to Straits Cafe in San Francisco, where it made an indelible impression.  The flavors might have seemed familiar to Chinese and Indian food fanciers, but the combinations were brand new to San Franciscans.  Like the Honolulu mix, this was more than a not marketing concept for restaurant, it was the result of lived experience.
     Meanwhile, other chefs introduced similar changes, sometimes called "Fusion," or "Pan Asian." The Alsatian Jean-George Vongerichten, who'd worked in Bangkok, served his version of Thai food at Vong, in New York.  Wolfgang Puck's Chinois on Main, featuring "an imaginative marriage of Chinese, Japanese, and Thai flavors on a French base," was again reviewed.  Another culture-broker-chef, Bruce Cost, served Chinese and South Asian food at Ginger Island in Berkeley.  East India Grill changed the format of staid Indian restaurants to waiters in T-shirts and "cooking that might be characterized as Cal-Ind."
   
     Meanwhile, Gourmet, in October, 1993, noted a change that removed a beloved place from the food geography of my childhood.  The storied Blue Mill Tavern, former speak-easy and steak-house in New York's Greenwich Village became The Grange Hall.  From the description and reviews of The Grange Hall, I conclude that an authentic piece of mid-century urban history had been ripped out and replaced with a Disneyworld view of farming.

Change has come to many of the restaurants reviewed in Gourmet in 1993:  
New York:
Vong at 200 East 54th Street closed in 2009.
Chiam at 160 East 48th Street is closed.

San Francisco:
Straits Cafe at 3300 Geary Boulevard is now Pot a Pho;  Straits Restaurant in the Westfield Shopping Center and other locations.
Ginger Island at 1820 Fourth Street, Berkeley is closed.

Los Angles
Woo Lae Oak at 170 North La Cienega Boulevard closed in early 2012.
Talésai at 11744 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City is still Talésai.
East India Grill at 345 N. LaBrea Avenue is still East India Grill.
Chinois on Main at 2709 Main Street, Santa Monica is still Chinois.

The Grange Hall at 50 Commerce Street is now Commerce.

1992: Cultural Brokerage

David Chang's China Club, Drawn by Lucey Bowen from Ian Lloyd's photograph in March, 1992 Gourmet.

     Gourmet is an aggregate of culture brokers.   A culture broker bridges, links, mediates or interprets one culture to another.   Writers like Fred Ferretti and Madhur Jaffrey employ their knowledge of Asian cultures and journalistic skills to explain, respectively, Hong Kong, and Indian food, to the upper middle-class reader of Gourmet.  Restaurant reviewers like Carolyn Bates perform the same function for multiple Asian cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Viet-namese and so-on.  Restaurant proprietors are also culture brokers, albeit with a different set of skills.  They must perform their cooking and present their food in a manner palatable to those in search of continuity with the food from "back home," and those in search of "but not too hot."   Culture brokers are sometimes demeaned by one or both of the cultures they mediate.  The term "marginal man" emphasizes their position at the edges, away from the center.
     How does one become a culture broker?  Immigration and marriage are two foundational steps.  Many proprietors found themselves opening a restaurant to feed fellow immigrants, and gradually evolved their food and decor to attract a wider audience.  Living on three continents, Madhur Jaffrey, author and actress,  represented Indian culture in the food at Dawat.  Fred Ferretti's wife was Chinese, as was Cafe Kati owner Kirk Webber's.
     Ferretti's "Rediscovering Hong Kong," (There's that nostalgia again.)  alerted me to other culture brokers, lurking just offstage.   He wrote And atop the Old Bank of China Building in the patch of Hong Island known as Central, The China Club has just opened its doors to its re-creation of an Art Deco restaurant of Shanghai: a perfect pastiche of antique Ching Dynasty furniture with 1920s fans and stuffed sofas.  The photographs accompanying the essay illustrated The China Club's dining room.  The China Club was the creation of David Tang, a culture broker of the highest order.  Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Tang was educated in England.  Fluent in both Cantonese and the King's English, he created the luxury lifestyle brand Shanghai Tang.  An ardent patron, collector and dealer in contemporary Asian art, he's described as part scholar-poet-philosopher and part British dandy, almost a Falstaff.  He describes himself as having had to relearn his Chinese-ness after returning from England. Created well before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997,  Tang's China Club became the haunt of movers and shakers of old Hong Kong, the mainland and the international community.  So Tang is a triple-culture broker.
     I visited the China Club in 2010.  I was the guest of a Hong Kong born college classmate,  a member of both the club and "Old Hong Kong."  She, too, was a culture broker, attending college in the United States where she was the first Chinese person with whom I'd ever inter-acted.  While raising her sons to be equally comfortable in China and the U.S, she, as did David Tang, changed her focus from the West back to China.  Like Tang, she thought we, as American visitors, would find the China Club appealing.  We sat at the table in the center of the photograph in the article, reproduced in my sketch above.  Did the ghost of Irene Corbally Kuhn murmur that Shanghai of the 1920's had come back to life?  But wait, there on the wall is that portrait of Mao on a motorcycle.  Not all culture brokers have an ironic sense of humor.

     But that was in the unseeable future.  In 1992 I had become rather like a Chinese scholar-painter.  Hadn't I withdrawn from the hurly-burly of the working life?  While the children were at kindergarten and pre-school, I took classes at the Worcester Art Museum School, and made a run at finishing my dissertation.
     We took the children to Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod, home to generations of my mother's ancestors.
     Thanks to Dick's parents who babysat the children, we spent some of April in Paris.  Here Gourmet's Paris Journal was indispensible, sending us to Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet and other hidden treasures of Paris.
      The Pig Roast and Christmas Open House were well established, even as hamburgers and hot dogs were added for the addition of our children and their friends.
   
New York

Honmura An at 170 Mercer Street is now Niko.

Shaliga Thai Cuisine at 834 Second Avenue is now SUBWAY.

Dawat at 210 East 58th Street is still Dawat.

Tse Yang at 34 East 51st Street is closed.

San Francisco

Cafe Kati at 1963 Sutter Street became Roostertail in 2011.

Los Angeles

Ocean Seafood Restaurant at 747 North Broadway is still Ocean Seafood.

Mandalay at 611 North La Brea Avenue is now Cube Cafe and Marketplace.

Note: The China Club now has a branch in Beijing.

1988: Economic Currents

Drawings by Lucey Bowen, after Gourmet, 1988, photographs accompanying articles on shopping in Hong Kong (upper left) and Bangkok (lower right).

     In his 1988 review of Sushiden in New York City, Andy Birsch, who had replaced Jay Jacobs as reviewer of New York restaurants, broke Gourmet's "no negatives" rule when he referred to "the current economic unease between Japan and the United States."  (The source of this unease was the trade deficit and weak dollar.)   That rule justified the absence of negative restaurant reviews and the omission of bad news, like genocide and famine, in the magazine's early years.
      Let us focus then on good things:  Shun Lee Cafe apparently brought Asian street food to New York menus.  Great Shanghai expanded New Yorker's knowledge of the range of Chinese cooking to include the regional Soo-Hang food from Soochow and Hangchow.  Chin Chin brought Chinese food served in haut (French) style to New York.   Cafe Katsu carried that trend even further in Los Angeles, as did Joss.  Silks seems to have done the same in San Francisco.  Or at least the adjective Japanesque modifying ragout led me to believe.
     The afore-mentioned Sushiden illustrated another trend: it was the offshoot of the largest chain of sushi restaurants in Japan.  Chains might have been bad news for Japan's mom-and-pop sushi bars, but this one was good news for New Yorkers.
     Good news was also the message of Geri Trotta's "Shopping in Hong Kong." China's luxury goods, silk, porcelain, jewels, furs and antiques, were readily available.  With the advent of jet travel, American tourists could visit the emporiums themselves instead of waiting for a clipper ship to come in, as was the custom in the 19th Century.  Good news, too, for Londoners: Hong Kong, the former seat of the British Empire, the former colony was sending young chefs galore to man a slew of elegant new ethnic restaurants in London.
   
     In January of 1988, my daughter was born.   To the surprise of my colleagues, I returned to work, and the round of pig roasts and picnics followed by snowy New England Thanksgivings and Christmases and warm stays on St. John in the American Virgin Islands, continued, like Gourmet's covers.
     And then the bad news of the year: On December 21, 1988, a bomb destroyed Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 people aboard the London-to-New York flight were killed.   Suddenly tarnished was our golden age of jet travel.


The currents of change have washed over the restaurants reviewed in 1988's Gourmet:

New York:
Sushiden  at 19 East 49th Street is still Sushiden.
Great Shanghai at 27 Division Steet is now Jing Star.
Samraat at 175 Madison Avenue is USA Dental.
Shun Lee and Shun Lee Cafe at 43 West 65th Street are stull there.
Anatolia at 1422 Third Avenue is now Brasserie Julien.
Chin Chin at 216 East 49th Street is still Chin Chin.

San Francisco:
Silks at the Mandarin Oriental is still Silks.
Plearn at 2050 University Avenue, Berkeley is now Plearn at 1923 University.

Los Angeles:
Joss at 9255 Sunset Boulevard, just beyond Doheny, is closed.
Matsuhisa at 129 North La Cienega Boulevard is still Matsuhisa
Cafe Katsu at 2117 Sawtelle Boulevard is now Restaurant 2117, organic and        
natural Euro-Asian cuisine.

1990: Other Times, Other Rijstafels

Nostalgia for British India is for sale in this Singapore Shopping Mall, Photograph, 2008, Lucey Bowen

   
     Fred Ferretti and Irene Corbally Kuhn fed Americans' appetite for the way things were in Asia before before World Wars I and II,  before the independence of the British, French and Dutch colonies.  "Porcelains and Potstickers" is a shopping and eating expedition through Hong Kong.  In it Ferretti speaks of the pleasure of encountering pieces of the past, and remarks that "so much of Hong Kong endures in one form or another." Writing "In Search of the Indonesian Rijsttafel," Ferretti seeks what he knows to be an artefact of colonialism, the elaborate preparation of dishes called the rice table.
     Kuhn added a postcript to her previous essay on life in Shanghai in the 1930s.  Titled "Shanghai Revisited, A Postscript," I expected it to be a 1988 update.  Instead, it looked back to a visit in 1945.  At that time, she left believing the city would once again thrive.  Looking back in 1988 she thought that Shanghai would remain forever in decline.
     David Massey's essay "Hyderbad" reveals one origin of this nostalgia: literature.  An early exposure to Rudyard Kipling's works put him under India's spell.  (He also mentioned as influence, the adventure books of my childhood hero, Richard Halliburton!)

    
See what the decades have wrought on the restaurants reviewed in 1990 Gourmet:

New York:
Mitali, Gaylord, Passage to India and Nizam, all on East 6th Street; Mitali and Passage to India remain.
Umeda at 102 East 22 Street is now Novita.
Fortune Garden Pavillion at 209 East 49th Street is gone.
Thai Restaurant at 106 Bayard Street is gone.

Los Angeles:
Katsu 3rd at 8936 West 3rd Street is gone.
Robata at 250 North Robertson Boulevard is gone.
Empress Pavilion at 988 North Hill Street is still the Empress Pavilion
Chaya in Venice is still Chaya Venice.

San Francisco:
Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant at 1 Rincon Center is now Yank Sing.
Monsoon at the Opera Plaza is gone, but you can see its design.

1991: The Touristic Panopticon

Mirrored Hall, Jaipur. Drawing (2012) from photograph (2011), both by Lucey Bowen.

     The late 18th Century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham conceived of a building which allowed a central observer to view the activity of everyone in its periphery, whether they knew it or not.  Bentham intended this as a way of "obtaining the power of mind over mind," useful in prisons, hospitals, schools, poorhouses and madhouses.

     Perusing the span of 1991 Gourmet travel articles, I ponder New York as the center, monitoring activity from Jaipur, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Bali, Indonesia; Taipei, Taiwan; and Macau on the Chinese mainland.  Gourmet's writers treated these places in distinctive styles, dictated in part by the history of each place and its relative difference from the reader's mode of life.  Jaipur was much the product of its Singh rulers, one of whom had the city walls all painted pink in 1876 to celebrate the arrival of Britain's future Edward VII.  Bangkok was perceived and presented in visual terms. The Balinese people starred in the article about this Hindu island surrounded by Muslims.  In Macau, not yet returned to China, the exploration was to discover the elements of Portuguese culture that persist in a predominantly Chinese city. Writing about Taipei, Fred Ferretti focused on the food of restaurants found in the grand hotels, occasionally alluding to the history of the island.  Taipei of the time was a fully developed, urbane, international city of business, not unlike parts of Los Angeles.  Surely places are represented in ways not all their residents would choose or recognize.
     There are questions of representation of Asia in writing about the restaurants of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles reviewed in Gourmet's 1991 issues.  Is the reviewer visiting a place primarily intended to serve the ethnic immigrant?  In the early 1990s Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles swelled with former Hong Kong residents, unsure of the outcome of the anticipated 1997 transfer to the People's Republic of China.  This was a group distinct from earlier ones in class and cuisine, and their restaurants were different as well.  Some, like Flower Lounge, were and are comfortable for Chinese customers eating as families.  Non-Chinese customers may feel a bit out of place.  Other restaurants followed the Japanese trend and emulated French techniques for Chinese ingrediants, restrained decor and white table cloths, like Yujean Kang's in Pasadena.  The former represents perhaps the conservative side of immigrant's tastes; the latter an individual chef playing creatively with great traditions of cooking.  Ours is, after all, a free country, even if the food isn't.
   
Alas for the restaurants of yesteryear; some remain:

New York:
Kwong and Wong at 11 Division Street is now Fuleen Seafood Restaurant.
First Taste at 53 Bayard Street is now Three Oceans Restaurant.
Haveli at 100 Second Avenue is still Haveli.
Jewel of India at 15 West 44th Street is still Jewel of India, at least for take-out.

San Francisco:
Flower Lounge Restaurant in Millbrae and 5322 Geary Boulevard is Hong Kong Lounge.
Angkor Palace at 1769 Lombard Street is now The Grateful Dog.
O Chamé 1830 Fourth Street, Berkeley is still O Chamé

Los Angeles:
Yujean Kang's at 67 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena is still Yujean Kang's.
Bombay Cafe at 12113 Santa Monica Boulevard is now All India Cafe.