long beach california history chop suey restaurant

#LONG BEACH CALIFORNIA HISTORY CHOP SUEY RESTAURANT CODE#
#LONG BEACH CALIFORNIA HISTORY CHOP SUEY RESTAURANT TV#

Ditto kung pao lo mein (“kung pao” is code for “cashews and peanuts”), kung pao vegetables, fried rice, chili-garlic fried rice, and hot & sour soup. You want chow mein with chicken or shrimp? There it is.

Here, they manage to walk and chew gum at the same time, with no trouble at all. This is a classic Chinese restaurant and not a classic Chinese restaurant at the same time. One bite, and it’s clear - and the food travels very well.ġ8349 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia 56, Can you be both post-modernist Indian and old school Chinese at the same time - with a menu that often combines the two? Nanking Indo-Chinese manages that hat trick, which is no small accomplishment. I’m told the original chef from Chinatown is making the dishes. And aside from not offering my much-loved cold noodles with sesame and chicken, I’m happy as a clam to grab an order to go, which emerges from the kitchen with crazy speed. There’s Slippery Shrimp, Slippery Chicken and Slippery Tofu, along with sweet & sour chicken, sweet & sour pork, beef with broccoli, Szechuan beef, Szechuan chicken, string beans and a handful of fried rice dishes. Yang Chow 2.0 is not far from Long Beach Airport, with a handful of tables and a limited menu. The original Yang Chow in Chinatown (with a branch is Pasadena) has been a much-loved destination for those hungry for a cult collection of Chinese dishes - especially the Slippery Shrimp, a dazzling, and deeply addictive creation of chubby shrimp, tender and firm textured, battered, crisped, then cooked in a sauce that’s both sweet and spicy at the same time. Let us begin, then, with a Chinese restaurant that exists for takeout only - the perfect restaurant in these difficult times. There’s an Edward Hopper painting called “Chop Suey” - which is not of food, but of two women, seated in a restaurant, with a sign out the window that reads “suey.” Louis Armstrong recorded a song in the 1920s called “Cornet Chop Suey.” It was culinary jazz. Since there was no bok choy or white radishes or soybean sprouts to use, celery, bell peppers and onions became the ingredients of choice, with shredded meat added, and enough soy sauce to turn the white rice black. The name may (or may not) come from the Cantonese sap seui, which translates as “mixed leftovers.” It was a mishmash, created in the mid-1800s by Chinese immigrants to make their native food more appealing to American taste, what there was of it. Or at least you were if your basic diet consisted of white bread and deep-fried everything.Ĭhop suey is the defining dish when it comes to Chinese-American cooking. And an hour later, in the old American anti-vegetable parlance, you were hungry again. It was something you ate on Sunday nights with family. It meant chicken chop suey, pork fried rice, sweet-and-sour something or other, egg foo young, and lots and lots of tea. For meals consisting of one from column A, two from column B, white rice and fortune cookies at meal’s end. Rather, the box is for the classics of Chinese-American cooking. I guess dim sum will work okay in the boxes. Some years ago, the Smithsonian paid tribute to the container with an exhibit called “Sweet & Sour: A Look at the History of Chinese Food in the United States.” And the phrase “sweet & sour” is especially apt, for this is not a container built for searing spices of Szechuan and Hunanese cooking. This white, waxed container more often than not comes with a red drawing of a pagoda on the side (which is, of course, Japanese) and the words “Enjoy” and “Thank You” emblazoned on the top, and over the fold. And for most Chinese restaurants, it’s still the standard for takeout.

#LONG BEACH CALIFORNIA HISTORY CHOP SUEY RESTAURANT TV#

It was also used, for many years, for honey - and was until after World War II, when Chinese takeout competed with pizza for the food most Americans took home to eat while watching The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on small black-and-white TV screens. The Chinese food takeout container was born in the last decade of the 19th century, when it was known as an “oyster pail” because, well, it was used for to-go orders of oysters. It’s technically an isosceles trapezoid solid, a three-dimensional representation of a high school geometry problem.

It is, easily, the most iconic to-go container in culinary history - a Totem of Takeout, an origami box built for noodles, pork, shrimp and chicken.

Long beach california history chop suey restaurant