What's In A Quiet Wok?

My educated guesswork on a subtle change in my old local Chinese restaurant

My latest American Diary column at Discourse Magazine is out, and it’s a long bit of informed speculation answering a question I had from a recent visit to New Jersey: Why was my old local Chinese takeout joint so quiet the last time I went there?

I remember it, or any of them, like this:

There was a certain smell in these places as soon as you walked in. The smell of steamed rice and hot oil. Deep-frying egg rolls and barbecued ribs (of course they’re dyed red, and I wouldn’t have it any other way). Vaporized soy sauce and cooking wine. I was at my local Chinese supermarket in Northern Virginia the other week, where there’s a food court and Cantonese BBQ stall. It must have been a busy day, because the air had that same perfect, classic Chinese food scent to it.

What I really remember, though, in those takeout places was the noise. These places were always whirlwinds of activity. I remember the flames surrounding the woks as the chefs tossed them and clanged them back on the range, the sound of cleavers on cutting boards, the whoosh of the gas jet burners, the phones ringing, and the ladies at the counter somehow managing to hear an order and shouting it back to the kitchen and nothing getting lost in between.

The last couple of visits, there was this unusual, disquieting quiet. The woks weren’t clanging. The burners weren’t whooshing. The cooks were quietly, deliberately packing the food into the takeout containers. I had this weird feeling that I was watching people who’d never run a Chinese restaurant take over and act out a description of the job.

And I thought back to a conversation I’d had a couple of years ago with a Chinese-American real-estate developer (who’s involved with the D.C.-area housing advocacy scene, which is how I know him):

My interlocutor here told me that like most older Chinese immigrants, his parents, from southern China, loved dim sum and Cantonese food. The sort of food that was once pretty much what “Chinese food” meant in America, at a level of authenticity above the standard Americanized fare—which itself is descended from Cantonese cuisine.

The trouble was that, as southern China developed and immigration patterns within China and between China and the United States changed, there just weren’t that many more Cantonese people coming to America to open or work in restaurants. And so this “type” of restaurant that was once all over the place is harder to find now, or is no longer serving the same food on paper with quite the same technique or familiarity. The cooks and maybe even the owners aren’t acquainted with it like the first or second generations.

Then he told me that one of the places his parents can find some of their favorite old classics is a Vietnamese-owned restaurant, in a heavily Vietnamese shopping center (Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia—worth a visit if you’re anywhere nearby). Why? Because Vietnam’s proximity to southern China meant that some of the Vietnamese people coming to or in America today are more acquainted with that general cuisine than most of the Chinese people coming to America today.

Something similar happened with one of the old-school pizzerias in my New Jersey hometown:

Growing up, we also went often to Jack’s Pizza, on Main Street in Flemington. I don’t know who Jack was—the place was owned by Sal and his son Joe, who took over at some point for a few years and then sold. Today, Jack’s Pizza offers a Latino menu alongside the old Italian menu.

Sal must have been born in the 1920s. I can’t remember if I ever learned where he was born; if he wasn’t from Italy, his father certainly was. In other words, in the 1990s in these small towns, there were still businesses that could directly trace themselves back to that old Ellis Island era of immigration, and whose original owners, in some cases, were still around.

Today, many of those links have been broken. The second or third generation often went off to college and took white-collar jobs, instead of inheriting a restaurant….It isn’t that only Italians can make great pizza, or that only Cantonese immigrants can make great Americanized Chinese food. It’s more that your best chance of making great pizza is simply being someone who grew up with it and had eaten and made a ton of it. Which, of course, favors Italians from Italy or their children. And those are the people who, over time, are filtering out of this old-school restaurant world.

In other words, my quasi-backed-up theory is that in the years since I was a kid, the Chinese immigrant workforce in America has changed enough that some of the tacit knowledge and passed-on ways of cooking for and running these ubiquitous restaurants have changed or been lost in subtle ways.

And then I think of comments I’ve seen over the years reading about old restaurants, either out of interest or learning about places or buildings to feature in this newsletter. I’m thinking of comments like “Three Chefs had the best pancakes I’ve ever had in my life” or “No machine today can make frozen custard like the one in the defunct Frozen Dairy Bar.”

I’ve wondered for a long time whether there really is anything to those reminiscences. I think it was that ice cream machine that got me on to this. The machine was from the 1940s, and served for many years in a now-defunct ice cream shop in Falls Church, Virginia. Someone bought their fabled machine, of which there are only a few left in America, there was some local chatter about the resurrection of that long-lost frozen custard, and then that place closed.

I’m not sure where the machine ended up, or if it’s still in use or even still in existence. (I may still write my “in search of the best frozen custard ever made?” piece if I can find out some details about this machine!) But the point is that, supposedly, something about how this heavy vintage machine made the ice cream was superior to any machine in production today. And in theory I suppose that’s testable or measurable.

I’m curious if any of you have examples of anything like this—anecdotes, or “anecdata,” that feel like little data points in a story nobody really notices. Do you have any example of actually finding out a “secret” to some old recipe or food item or method of doing something that was a kind of aha! moment? Like, that’s why grandma’s pancakes had that je ne sais quoi to them!

Is this “real but subjective”—like the idea that “food tastes better when made with love” or “my nonna is the best cook in the world”? A kind of culinary placebo effect? Or is there some subtle factor at play that truly makes it true?

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I want to think about a laterally related question here that popped into my head while working on the original column: when was the last year there was an American who didn’t know what pizza is?

I know this isn’t strictly answerable, because there’s always someone who doesn’t know something. In the real world, there are very few 100 percents. (Do 100 percent of U.S. homes have running water? No—more like 99.6 percent.) But what I mean is, by what year was pizza mainstream enough that basically everyone knew what it was, and nobody really still reacted like “How do you pronounce that word?” or “What is this weird eye-talian stuff these wops are bringing over here?” There were menus that told you how to pronounce “pizza” in the 1950s or 1960s.

I guess the broader form of that question is when did Italian food and culture stop being “ethnic” and just become one piece of the variety of America?

Or did it never become that way outside of the Northeast, where every little strip plaza has a pizzeria?

I had a very progressive “creative nonfiction” professor in college, years ago. I remember in some piece I wrote something about how Chinatown is American culture, and she said, you know, maybe in New York, maybe not in Alabama. I also worked a biblical reference into an essay about mountaintop mining (“the coal barons must think they’re prophets, because they are making low the mountains and filling the valleys up”—I think that’s pretty good) and she went, you know, a lot of people wouldn’t get a biblical reference these days. (Speak for yourself, I wanted to say, although I suppose she did get the reference and just assumed everyone else was a cultural ignoramus.)

But I did sort of take her admonition to heart, in the broad sense that my central Jersey childhood, informed by the proximity to two big cities, was not by any means the totality of America. And that it’s easy to read a narrative of cultural conformity or triumph into the simple fact that a thing is popular in the place you grew. So make of that all what you will.

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Related Reading:

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

Toot One’s Own Horne

Hook, Line, and Sinker

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