CHINESE FOOD AND POLITICS IN CHICAGO, 19O5-07

The early years of the Chinese restaurant boom saw the forging of close links between food service and political agendas.  In 1905, the powerful and famously corrupt Democrat alderman Hinky Dink Kenna was leasing the space above his saloon (at the corner of Clark and Van Buren) to the King Yen Lo Restaurant, managed by Chin Foin.  Hinky Dink seems to have become a patron of Chin's.  As related elsewhere on this website, he called on Chin to do political work for him.











In 1907, the Baohuanghui or Empire Reform Association decided to open its own restaurant in the U.S. as a way of raising funds to support its activities within China.  Settling on Chicago as a potentially profitable location, it called the new restaurant King Joy Lo (瓊彩樓 or in Mandarin, "Qiongcai Lou"), invested a large sum of money in equipment and decorations, and chose Chin Foin to be the manager.  Although bitter arguments over the disposition of profits were to follow, these did not affect the reputation or quality of the restaurant itself, which soon came to be seen as one of the finest in Chicago.  An unpublished paper by Jane Leung Larson tells the story of the founding of King Joy Lo and the subsequent international political quarrels about it.  We hope to be able to reproduce that paper here within the next few weeks.

Part of the story has already been published in Jane Leung Larson, "New Source Materials on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui," Chinese America:  History and Perspectives  (San Francisco:  Chinese Historical Society of America), 1993.

The stereo comes from the fabulous website of Bill & Sue-On Hillman, at http://www.erbzine.com.  It is reproduced here with the Hillman's permission.
This is a new page, aimed at exploring the historical side of Chinese food, food supplies, and restaurants in the Midwest.  Contributions are welcome -- just email us at webmaster@ccamuseum.org.
"CHOP SUEY,"  a lecture given by Ben Bronson and Soo Lon Moy at CAMOC on October 29, 2005. 

Several of our members take a special interest in historical Chinese-American cuisine.  That cuisine may not always have been of gourmet quality but it was of great economic and cultural importance, to both Chinese and non-Chinese Americans.
Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC)
Raymond B. & Jean T. Lee Center
Celebrating the Chinese-American cultural heritage of the Midwest
(More food information will be added soon)








...
"IMPERIAL FOOD,"  a talk given by Yuen Wai-chee on 22 July 2004 at a CAMOC fundraising event

Barbeque Foods: Peking or Cantonese styles?

Once a customer asked me, which kind of duck is more tasty -- Peking Duck or Cantonese roast duck?  He was crazy to expect me not to be biased. 

Peking duck may have the advantage of sharing the same name with Peking University and Peking Man, the only three things that have been allowed to keep "Peking" in their names instead of being changed to "Beijing".  But you know what?  The English word "Peking" is in fact Cantonese!  I feel that is a tribute to Cantonese cooking, a tradition I was brought up to honor.

I started working in a Hong Kong restaurant when I was twelve years old.  I came to Chicago as a young man and have always been in the cooking business.  I enjoy my work  I do the roasting myself, ducks, pigs, and chickens. 










Two years ago a renowned chef in France committed suicide because his rating went down o阮ne rank. 

I’ve never liked ranking systems;  they turn friends into enemies and make satisfied people unhappy.

My nicknames in Chinatown are "king of Chinese BBQ" and "the roast-pig guy.”

Whatever the label may be, I know for sure that I will not kill myself just because people don't rank me high enough. You see, I am a lucky and happy man.

That is, I was happy until Chuimei asked me to look at several 18th century Chinese court paintings.

What is more, she even expects me to comment on them.  The task, as the Cantonese saying go, is like pulling a cow up to a tree top.  When I protested, Chuimei said it is the heart that matters and that everyone can tell a good story from his or her own heart. 

So, bear with me, folks.

I looked at two paintings showing  Emperor Qianlong and his group having fun outdoors. 

The first painting shows that a deer was being prepared and boiled.  Here is the full painting [NOT SHOWN HERE]

The other painting is called Four Dinner Scenes Beyond the Great Wall and is by G. Castiglione.  Here is a detail that shows cooks preparing sheep for dinner.












It is quite clear that in both cases the animals were cut into portions and boiled in large cauldrons. 

I want you to take another closer look at the deer painting first.
Cooking deer started from slaughtering, broiling, roasting, and placing on suitable serving utensils, before reaching the lips of the ruler. 

But look at the size of the fire: it is very small.  The imperial BBQ team did not  roast the animal whole.  Instead, it was sliced and then roasted, which I think would make the meat dry and less tasty, but shorten the cooking time.

Is it possible that the emperor was not democratic enough for a huge BBQ party?  Was the meat being prepared for him alone?

My way of roasting pigs and ducks is different from the imperial style. I roast them whole. 

Let us look at the sheep painting again. 

The chefs were native Mongolians, and I have heard that in Mongolia they prefer to boil their meat, not roast it.

Well, I suppose that might be so.  Not even the emperor dared to upset local customs by roasting instead of boiling.

But we Cantonese like to fry or roast our meat.  Some people even think that the best way to eat Peking duck is to have it roasted by a Cantonese chef.  Do you agree? 

Try for it yourself, at any good Cantonese restaurant, and let me know what you think.

Thank you.
PAGE INDEX

Chinese Menu from Good Housekeeping, 1897.  19 May 2006
Chicago restaurant bill of fare, 1903.  29 Dec 2005
Chinese food and politics in Chicago, 1905-1907.  7 Dec 2005
Chinese restaurants move down-market, 1910-1960.  21 Nov 2005
Mandarin Inn Easter menu, 1921. 30 Nov 2005
Chop Suey article by Monica Eng.  3 Nov 2005
Chop Suey essay by Chuck Hayford.  9 Nov 2005
Chop Suey lecture slides.  Ben Bronson & Soo Lon Moy.   29 Oct 2005
Chinese barbeque talk.  Wai-chee Yuen.  22 Jul 2004
Tea book list, from 2004-2005 tea lectures
Miscellaneous notes. 06 Feb 2006
TEA BOOKS

IN CONNECTION WITH CMF/CAMOC's 2004-5 LECTURES ON TEA (SEE LECTURES) HERE ARE SOME CLASSIC BOOKS ON THE SUBJECT

Fortune, Robert  A Journey to the Tea Countries of China  (London: John Murray, 1852)
[by the observant Scottish botanist who first "smuggled" (in fact, openly exported) tea plants from China to India, excellent but out of print]

Blofeld, John   The Chinese Art of Tea  (Boston: Shambala, 1985)
[an informed insider's view by a noted Buddhist teacher; out of print but available in 2nd-hand bookstores]

Okakura, Kazuo  The Book of Tea  (Charles E. Tuttle, 2000; with new introduction by Liza Dalby) 
[probably the most influential book on tea in the English language; may be bought from Amazon.com or downloaded free from the Internet: see http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/769]

Lu Yu  Cha Jing ["Tea Classic"] (written in the 8th century and reprinted many times, but mostly in Chinese)
[we are not sure if the complete Cha Jing has ever been translated, but Lu's book has been the bible of serious tea drinkers for 1200 years]


RECENT BOOKS ON TEA, NOT YET CLASSICS, INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING.  ALL MAY BE PURCHASED FROM AMAZON.COM AND OTHER ON-LINE BOOKSTORES. 

All the Tea in China
by Kit Chow, Ione Kramer (Contributor)

All About Green Tea
by Victoria Dolby Toews, et al

Not All Teas Are Created Equal: A Mingcha Guide to Premium Chinese Tea
by Lee Kwan, Leo Kwan

A Pocket Guide to All the Tea in China
by Kit Boey Chow, et al

Tea Basics
by Wendy Rasmussen (Author), Ric Rhinehart (Author)

The New Tea Book
by Sara Perry, Alison Miksch

20,000 Secrets of Tea
by Victoria Zak (Author)

The Way of Tea
by Km Chuen Lam (Author), Kai Sin Lam (Author)\

The Tea Book
by Dawn L. Campbell

The Green Tea User's Manual
by Helen Gustafson (Author)

The Book of Green Tea
by Diana Rosen

The Tea Companion
by Jane Pettigrew, et al

Tea & Etiquette
by Dorothea Johnson, James Norwood Pratt (Introduction)
Chop Suey article by Monica Eng (Chicago Tribune)

Monica Eng's excellent newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune, "The Rise and Fall of Chop Suey" is now available on the website of the Honolulu Advertiser:
the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Jan/04/il/FP601040308.html

First published on November 3rd, the article features an interview with Soo Lon Moy and Ben Bronson, respectively a director and an advisor of the Chinese-American Musuem of Chicago.

In Eng's words, "I recently sat down to my first-ever plate of chop suey with Bronson and Moy at Lakeview's Orange Garden, one of Chicago's oldest Chinese-American emporiums. There we loaded up on chop suey, chow mein, egg foo yong, moo goo gai kow and lots of conversation. The following is an edited transcript of our talk ..."

Chop Suey essay by Chuck Hayford (Northwestern University)

Chuck Hayford has contributed this PDF file, "What's So Bad About Chop Suey?" featuring an amusingly negative comment by anthropologist Hugh Baker and a classic recipe for chop suey by the early Chinese-American writer Winifred Eaton.  Her recipe does not include celery.
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES   

    One of our readers comments as follows: "The writer is forgetting Shanghai Terrace in the Peninsula Hotel, which certainly ranks with the city's best Asian restaurants.   Further, I would say that Szechwan Restaurant on Michigan Avenue definitely qualifies as fancy and ranks with or outranks Chicago's top Vietnamese restaurants (I can only imagine the places referred to above are Le Colonial and Pasteur -- Chicago has no other dressy Vietnamese restaurants)."

She is right about Shanghai Terrace, which certainly is expensive enough to deserve six stars although perhaps fewer crossed knives and forks.  Conceived and run by the high-end Peninsula Hotel chain, it serves China-oriented pan-Asian food aimed as much at rich businessmen as at gourmets.  Szechwan Restaurant, on the other hand, does not appear on most lists of Chicago's top Chinese restaurants.  We'll give it another chance.

  Check out the eatingchinese.org website.  It contains a lot of data on such subjects as Chinese-American foods, making xiaolong bao, the role of Chinese food in American Jewish culture etc.

   Also, take a look at the description of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas' (New York) former exhibition, "Have You Eaten Yet?: The Chinese Restaurant in America," September 14 through June 30, 2005.  MOCA has dismounted the exhibition but still must have detailed information about it, including an enormous collection of historic Chinese restaurant menus of which CAMOC is envious.

   An excellent, very funny review of the MOCA show by novelist Gish Jen appeared in the on-line magazine Slate.  Titled "A Short History of the Chinese Restaurant from Stir-fried Buffalo to Matzoh Foo Young," Jen's review includes several images of historic menu covers and closes with this paragraph:










   Wikipedia has many pages on various sorts of Chinese food, including the Chinese-American kind.  The Wikipedia view of Chinese cooking in the U.S. contains doubtful ideas like

"In the 19th century, Chinese restaurateurs invented American Chinese cuisine when they modified their food for American tastes. First catering to railroad workers, they opened restaurants in towns where Chinese food was completely unknown,"

and less-than-useful observations like

"American Chinese food tends to be cooked very quickly with lots of oil and salt."

But the website does present a good deal of valuable information as well as links to such topics as the nature of General Tso's Chicken (which is controversial) and Caribbean Chinese cuisine (which sounds wonderful). 
Tai Dong Restaurant, 1961
Chiam Restaurant, 1952
Guey Sam Restaurant, 1958
Hoe Sai Gai Restaurant, 1939
Joy Yen Lo Restaurant, 1920
King Joy Lo Restaurant, 1910s
Mandarin Inn Restaurant, 1911
Won Kow Restaurant, 1942
CHINESE RESTAURANTS MOVE DOWN-MARKET, 1910s-1960s

These postcards are from Bob Salika, a knowledgeable collector in the Chicago area.  They are important because, unlike most historical photos of restaurant interiors, postcards are closely dateable (1).  This means that we can trace changes in restaurant design over time, using images chosen by the owners themselves to show their restaurants at their most impressive and appealing.

The biggest change one sees in such pictures is that Chinese restaurants in the early days were larger and more richly decorated than those of later times.  The most luxurious appeared soon after Chicago's Chinese restaurant boom began in 1901.  Several of those that were already in operation by 1910, including Mandarin Inn, King Joy Lo, and Joy Yen Lo, had as much social prestige as the city's most expensive French and German restaurants.
The move down-market may have begun in the 1930s during the Great Depression.  High-end Chinese restaurants frequented by rich Chicagoans gradually disappeared, to be replaced by Chinese restaurants aimed at the middle classes.  Some of those restaurants were large, to be sure, and some -- notably the splendid art deco rooms of Hoe Sai Gai, were spectacularly decorated.  Some still had live music and dance floors -- in fact, as Charles Sengstock has shown, Chinese restaurant-night clubs supported a number of Chicago's leading dance bands (2).  However, all this was gone by the end of World War II in 1945.  From the mid-1940s onward -- interestingly, from just about the time that the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 -- Chinese restaurants held a different place in American society.  They remained important to members of other ethnic groups, who often ate in them.  They still provided a decent living for many Chinese-Americans.  But they were smaller, more affordable, and less expensively decorated.

Why did this happen?  Why is it still true in 2005 that no Chinese restaurant in Chicago (with the possible exceptions of the pan-Asian Shanghai Terrace and the European American-owned and -staffed Opera) is as fancy as those of the 1910s?  Why does Chicago have two- and three-star restaurants run by Thai Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Japanese Americans but no Chinese American-run restaurant with that ranking?

We suspect that the move to less expensive restaurant operations is connected with the fact that economic opportunities for Chinese-Americans began to expand in the postwar years.  But we have not quite figured out how this worked.   Did the community simply start investing in education rather than buildings?  Was the cause more complex?

If you have ideas about the subject, we would like to hear them.  Please email us at webmaster@ccamuseum.org.

(1) Guide to Dating Curt Teich Postcards, http://www.lcfpd.org/docs/teich_guide_dating.pdf
(2) Charles Sengstock, That Toddlin' Town: Chicago's White Dance Bands and Orchestras, 1900-1950.  U. of Illinois Press, 2004.
"The epic kitsch of the exhibit is balanced by touching recollections, on video and in notebooks, of what it was like to work and grow up in Chinese restaurants, both in America and abroad. I loved the many humble, vivid accounts and encourage others to take these in, as one may, sitting atop rice-sack-cushioned stools. While resting there, one might also appreciate the beauty and intelligence of the exhibit and the absence of cliché. There is no red; there are no lanterns or fortune cookies. Here, in the heart of Chinatown, in a kitsch-filled room, one finds, happily, kitsch-free thought."


Specially Prepared
Easter Sunday Dinner

MENU

Queen OlivesHearts of Celery

Choice of
Blue Points on Half Shell
Canape Lorenzo

Choice of
Chicken Gumbo, New Orleans
Consomme Colbert

Choice of
Filet Mignon, Bouquetiere
Fancy Easter Lamb, Saute, Demi-Glace, Mint Jelly
Roast Maryland Turkey

Chestnut Dressing, Cranberry Sauce
French PeasCreamed Whipped Potatoes
Salad, Myron Herrick

Choice of

Ice Cream with Wafers
Strawberry Shortcake
Roquefort Cheese with Toasted Crackers
Demi-Tasse

Served from 5:00 to 8:30 P.M.
$2.00 Per Plate

Noon Luncheon Served Every Day
Chinese and American Menu, 75 cents

Home Dressed Chicken Dinner
Evert Sunday, 5:00 to 8:30 P.M., $2 Per Plate

CHIN FOIN, President
Wabash Avenue at Congress St.

MANDARIN INN EASTER MENU, 1921

The following appeared in the March 27, 1921 issue of the Chicago Tribune.  It will be seen that high-class Chinese restaurants in those days served a good deal of non-Chinese food.
Stereo Photo of King Yen Lo Restaurant, 1900s-1910s
25c  to    40c
55c  to    80c
     30c
     30c
     35c
75c  to $1.00
     25c
15c  to    25c
75c  to $1.00
     30c
    15c
     30c
     30c
     15c
     15c
     15c

CHICAGO RESTAURANT BILL OF FARE, 19O3

The newspapers of Chicago began to notice the boom in Chinese restaurants almost as soon as it began in 1901.  A 1903 article in the Tribune titled "Chop Suey Fad Grows: Chicago's Appetite is Becoming Cultivated to Chinese Dish of Mystery," includes the bill of fare of one unnamed Chinese restaurant:


Chop suey and rice
Chicken chop suey and rice
Mo Gu chop suey and rice
Foo Young dove and rice
Chicken rice soup
Chow man [mien]
Boiled chicken
Roast pork
Fried chicken
Chow Mar man [mien]
Yet Gor man [mien]
Canned Chinese [lychee?] nuts
Steak and green peppers and rice
Wu Lung [Oolong] tea
Su Sin [Jasmine] tea
Sung Su [?] tea

The writer describes the food in Chinese restaurants as interesting but mostly mysterious.  He concludes "At least, every one knows what fried chicken means."

Chicago Daily Tribune, Jul 19 1903, p 43
FOOD ARTICLES ON OTHER PAGES

Mythical American Chinese Restaurants, Part I 1849 & 1882.   30 Aug 2005
Mythical American Chinese Restaurants, Part II 1881.     15 Feb 2006
The Chinese theater and cafe at the World Fair, 1893          Mar 2005
The boom in Chinese restaurants begins, 1901                  6 Jun 2005
The cleanness of Chicago's Chinese restaurants, 1926     19 Dec 2004
CAMOC's Tofu Exhibition, 2006
MENU FROM GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE, 19O3

This menu is only relevant to Chicago because it is from an article in a magazine that was widely read here in the Midwest.  It not only was one  of the first descriptions of a Chinese meal that most local European-Americans could have seen but it included the names of dishes in Chinese characters as well as in translation.
The title of the article was "A Chinatown Dinner, Eaten by Americans, and Said to Have Been Much Enjoyed."  The dinner had been hosted by one Col. Robert M. Floyd at a restaurant on "Pele" (i.e., Pell) Street in New York's Chinatown, "under special instructions from the Chinese consul."  Ivory chopsticks were supplied along with porcelain spoons and ordinary forks.

The writer says that the guest's favorite dish was suey be-gop, "delightfully prepared" pigeon.  Their least favorite was boiled abalone, described (to Easterners and Midwesterners ignorant of Pacific seafood) as "a dish that takes three days to cook and then is tougher than ever; it is a shell fish with characteristics of rubber shoe."

Good Housekeeping, vol 24, pp 234-5, 1897
榮棧燒臘 - 阮偉池親力親為