Chinese Restaurants
My grandmother was a meat and two cook (or three if you count dessert). Eating out meant a seafood house. China was a poor nation and the Chinese ate weird things like thousand-year-old eggs and bird' nest soup. Why would anyone want to eat in a Chinese restaurant?
So I was out of college and working in Baltimore before I ever tasted Chinese food (except canned Chow Mein at a friend's house, and that was awful!). I had gotten a civil service job as a computer programmer trainee at the Social Security Administration. I absolutely hated it. After six weeks, I landed another civil service position as a cardiac cath lab tech at the Public Health Service Hospital. Unfortunately, in the job switch, my checks got messed up and I went over a month without getting paid!
I ran out of money and I ran out of food. It didn't occur to me to call home. I knew nothing about wiring money then, so I didn't know they could help. I also thought they might say, "We told you so" and pressure me to come back to Philly. So on Sunday morning, on my fourth day with no food, I went to the Newman Center at Hopkins, where I had been going to mass. I went up to Phil Cunningham, the priest, after the service and told him my predicament and asked for some help. The answer I got was not what I expected. "Sure, wait till I'm done here and I'll take you out to lunch!"
Phil took me to a Chinese restaurant in one of the local apartment buildings, a fancy one by my standards and Chinese restaurant standards: white tablecloths! When he asked what I wanted I told him I had never had Chinese food, so he said he would order. He ordered pork fried rice and sweet and sour chicken, moo goo gai pan and mu shu pork. When all this food started arriving at the table, he looked at my face and said, if I ate with a fork he wouldn't be able to get any food, I was looking at it all so hungrily. So he had the waiter take away my fork and give me chopsticks! If hunger is the best sauce, it is also the best teacher of how to use chopsticks! I was grateful for the mu shu pork with its little pancakes, though, My fingers get tired on chopsticks about halfway through the meal, no matter how hungry I am. There were lots of left-overs for me to take home, of course. The back checks started coming the next day, and I have loved Chinese restaurants ever since.
In med school, 16 of us would get together and go down to Chinatown in Philly. We would order 12 dishes to share, there would be plenty of food and splitting the check evenly, it was the absolute cheapest way for impoverished students to eat out.
When I moved to southern Delaware, there was Jimmy Wu's. My boyfriend and I ate there a lot. Their sweet and sour chicken and pork was like none other: they breaded and fried the meat separately and added it to their own sauce, which was not that artificially red stuff, but had pineapple and bell peppers in it and the meat was still hot and crispy in the sauce. Their chef was really good, though the place was not greatly appreciated by most of the people I knew, particularly after they added the Gentlemen's Club/strip club in the adjoining room. My most memorable dinner there was on a very cold winter night. I had kept my coat on when I sat down, and over my whiskey sour and his Gibson, told my boyfriend that I couldn't take the coat off because I had nothing under it! The look on his face! Or rather the looks on his face, since it kept changing during dinner. He couldn't decide whether to believe me or not!
Seaford added two more Chinese restaurants and a Chinese take-out, this for a town of 7000 people that also had seven pizza parlors (one of them, Pizza King, was also the best local restaurant for American cuisine), all the major fast foods restaurants, a Friendly's, an Applebee's and one prix-fixe French restaurant, very small. I don't think anyone ever ate at home. With the kids, I started eating at the Chinese restaurant next to the Food Lion on grocery night. That gave me the chance to taste every single thing on the standard Chinese menu, over about two years. My favorite was always Chicken with garlic sauce (still is), since I like spicy food, but I never hit anything I didn't like.
When my grandmother came to live with us, we would do take out from the Great Wall. As I said, my grandmother was a meat-potato-veggie person, with an occasional excursion into spaghetti and her wonderful baked spaghetti. When she came to live with us at the age of 94, she tasted her first Chinese food, her first pizza, her first taco, her first chili, her first lasagna. She would carefully fill her plate with food, start at one side and eat to the other, scraping her plate clean no matter what I served. She never took seconds, and she always ate everything. Even noodles, which she despised, because she had grown up with spaetzles every single day as a child and still hated them. However, to the day she died, when she walked into the dining room and saw the little containers of Chinese food, I could see her shoulders slump. She never did learn to like it but she ate it.
If I was disappointed at how much more Chinese food cost outside of Philly's Chinatown, it was even more so when I moved to Tennessee. One local restaurant didn't make my chicken with garlic sauce, Fulin made it but the price was absurd, a local take-out made it well, but changed hands and the kitchen got so filthy I stopped eating from there. Thai, sushi, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Asian fusion are more popular here than the standard Chinese restaurant menu, so my Asian food tastes have expanded, though never enough to include sushi.
A Korean restaurant has just opened in Murfreesboro. It's odd that I've never tasted Korean food (well except for a Korean barbeque taco at Taco Loco) since the neighborhood I grew up in became largely Korean. Our movie theater became a Korean grocery store and a local diner and pizza parlor are Korean restaurants. But whenever I returned to the old neighborhood, I became my grandmother's child; who would want to eat Korean? So I'm looking forward to trying it. Sadly though, I'm sure I will never again sit across from a man who is wondering if I have anything on under my coat!
So I was out of college and working in Baltimore before I ever tasted Chinese food (except canned Chow Mein at a friend's house, and that was awful!). I had gotten a civil service job as a computer programmer trainee at the Social Security Administration. I absolutely hated it. After six weeks, I landed another civil service position as a cardiac cath lab tech at the Public Health Service Hospital. Unfortunately, in the job switch, my checks got messed up and I went over a month without getting paid!
I ran out of money and I ran out of food. It didn't occur to me to call home. I knew nothing about wiring money then, so I didn't know they could help. I also thought they might say, "We told you so" and pressure me to come back to Philly. So on Sunday morning, on my fourth day with no food, I went to the Newman Center at Hopkins, where I had been going to mass. I went up to Phil Cunningham, the priest, after the service and told him my predicament and asked for some help. The answer I got was not what I expected. "Sure, wait till I'm done here and I'll take you out to lunch!"
Phil took me to a Chinese restaurant in one of the local apartment buildings, a fancy one by my standards and Chinese restaurant standards: white tablecloths! When he asked what I wanted I told him I had never had Chinese food, so he said he would order. He ordered pork fried rice and sweet and sour chicken, moo goo gai pan and mu shu pork. When all this food started arriving at the table, he looked at my face and said, if I ate with a fork he wouldn't be able to get any food, I was looking at it all so hungrily. So he had the waiter take away my fork and give me chopsticks! If hunger is the best sauce, it is also the best teacher of how to use chopsticks! I was grateful for the mu shu pork with its little pancakes, though, My fingers get tired on chopsticks about halfway through the meal, no matter how hungry I am. There were lots of left-overs for me to take home, of course. The back checks started coming the next day, and I have loved Chinese restaurants ever since.
In med school, 16 of us would get together and go down to Chinatown in Philly. We would order 12 dishes to share, there would be plenty of food and splitting the check evenly, it was the absolute cheapest way for impoverished students to eat out.
When I moved to southern Delaware, there was Jimmy Wu's. My boyfriend and I ate there a lot. Their sweet and sour chicken and pork was like none other: they breaded and fried the meat separately and added it to their own sauce, which was not that artificially red stuff, but had pineapple and bell peppers in it and the meat was still hot and crispy in the sauce. Their chef was really good, though the place was not greatly appreciated by most of the people I knew, particularly after they added the Gentlemen's Club/strip club in the adjoining room. My most memorable dinner there was on a very cold winter night. I had kept my coat on when I sat down, and over my whiskey sour and his Gibson, told my boyfriend that I couldn't take the coat off because I had nothing under it! The look on his face! Or rather the looks on his face, since it kept changing during dinner. He couldn't decide whether to believe me or not!
Seaford added two more Chinese restaurants and a Chinese take-out, this for a town of 7000 people that also had seven pizza parlors (one of them, Pizza King, was also the best local restaurant for American cuisine), all the major fast foods restaurants, a Friendly's, an Applebee's and one prix-fixe French restaurant, very small. I don't think anyone ever ate at home. With the kids, I started eating at the Chinese restaurant next to the Food Lion on grocery night. That gave me the chance to taste every single thing on the standard Chinese menu, over about two years. My favorite was always Chicken with garlic sauce (still is), since I like spicy food, but I never hit anything I didn't like.
When my grandmother came to live with us, we would do take out from the Great Wall. As I said, my grandmother was a meat-potato-veggie person, with an occasional excursion into spaghetti and her wonderful baked spaghetti. When she came to live with us at the age of 94, she tasted her first Chinese food, her first pizza, her first taco, her first chili, her first lasagna. She would carefully fill her plate with food, start at one side and eat to the other, scraping her plate clean no matter what I served. She never took seconds, and she always ate everything. Even noodles, which she despised, because she had grown up with spaetzles every single day as a child and still hated them. However, to the day she died, when she walked into the dining room and saw the little containers of Chinese food, I could see her shoulders slump. She never did learn to like it but she ate it.
If I was disappointed at how much more Chinese food cost outside of Philly's Chinatown, it was even more so when I moved to Tennessee. One local restaurant didn't make my chicken with garlic sauce, Fulin made it but the price was absurd, a local take-out made it well, but changed hands and the kitchen got so filthy I stopped eating from there. Thai, sushi, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Asian fusion are more popular here than the standard Chinese restaurant menu, so my Asian food tastes have expanded, though never enough to include sushi.
A Korean restaurant has just opened in Murfreesboro. It's odd that I've never tasted Korean food (well except for a Korean barbeque taco at Taco Loco) since the neighborhood I grew up in became largely Korean. Our movie theater became a Korean grocery store and a local diner and pizza parlor are Korean restaurants. But whenever I returned to the old neighborhood, I became my grandmother's child; who would want to eat Korean? So I'm looking forward to trying it. Sadly though, I'm sure I will never again sit across from a man who is wondering if I have anything on under my coat!
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