NEW YORK OBSERVED

A Love Affair, Dumplings on the Side

By Patricia Volk

• March 26, 2006

IT'S a yin-yang kind of thing.

New York Jews love Chinese food because it doesn't mix meat with milk. But half an hour later we complain we're hungry.

We love Chinese food because it's nothing like what we cook at home. But we get anxious when we can't tell what it is:

"Is this gray thing pork?"

"Omigod, you think it's pork?"

"It tastes like chicken."

"Oy."

New York Jews love Chinese food because you don't need a tie and jacket to eat it. We love it because the portions are big enough to share and Chinese restaurants are open on Christmas Day. We love it because Chinese waiters, like Jewish families, are kid-centric.

There's an e-joke making the rounds:

"According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5766. According to the Chinese calendar, it's 4703. That means for 1,063 years, Jews went without Chinese food."

Jews probably first tasted Chinese food around 718, the date on a bill of sale found in China and written in Judeo-Persian. By the 1920's, my grandmother was taking my mother to a Chinese restaurant on West 181st Street, above the Coliseum movie theater.

They went Thursdays, Alma's night off. (New York Jews gave their housekeepers Thursday and every other Sunday off.) My grandmother Nana Polly ordered chicken chow mein. Mom was allowed only to nibble from the bowl of crispy noodles. My grandfather, a restaurant man, was familiar with an urban myth concerning cats.

When Mom was 15, she met Dad. In that timeless Jewish dating ritual, he cupped her hand and tried to teach her how to use chopsticks. "Your father showed me 6,000 times," she says. "I didn't get it 6,000 times."

Although he came from a kosher home, Dad introduced her to sweet and pungent pork. "He wanted to educate me about other countries' food," she says. "Once" -- she rolls her eyes -- "I had to eat an anchovy."

In New York in the 1950's, Chinese food meant Cantonese-style. Every dish contained so much cornstarch, the ingredients appeared suspended.

Paul Novograd, my sixth-grade classmate and now the owner of Claremont Stables, ate at Sun-Wah on Broadway and 87th Street. "We had endless discussions with non-English-speaking waiters about splitting up the orders," he recalls. "What if you got two from Column A and one from Column B? It was just like the Buddy Hackett routine."

When I was 7, my parents and grandparents began taking us for Sunday dinner at the old Ruby Foo's on West 52nd Street. You'd walk through a dim entrance lined with beautiful bowing ladies wearing embroidered cheongsams. A towering porcelain Buddha in green robes presided over the dining room. His earlobes hung to his shoulders, something I worried would happen to my grandmother, who liked big earrings.

Dinner started with ribs, followed by entrees like war hoo hip har and moo goo gai pan. They arrived on stainless steel pedestal dishes with matching covers. The steam could frizz your hair.

Poppy, my grandfather, had permanently forsaken pork by way of thanking God for my grandmother. But just as we were about to dig in, he'd turn to my sister and me and say, "Darling, may I have one of those?" It was, of course, a test. He didn't want the ribs. He wanted to know if his granddaughters were selfish or generous, which in the end translated to, "Do you love me enough to give me a rib?"

My father's mother, Granny Ethel, kept kosher. No pork crossed her lips, at least not in front of Grandpa Charles. Before we'd "go Chinese," she'd swear me to secrecy, an unnerving betrayal. She would put on sunglasses and a hat, and look both ways before climbing upstairs to a Chinese restaurant with a vertical neon sign blinking, "Chopsuey." In the restaurant, Granny ordered almond char sue ding and ate with her sunglasses on. Were Chinese restaurants kept dark so kosher Jews couldn't see other kosher Jews?

By the 1960's, Paul Novograd was eating Shanghai cuisine at Chun-Cha-Fu in the Greystone Hotel on Broadway and 91st Street, and I was finally in Chinatown, always at Hong Fat, where the waiter cleaned the table by pouring hot tea on it and swiping it with a rag. To order, locals pointed to signs on the walls. Everything was written in Chinese except "Not Responsible for Coats." People knew about Hong Fat because it was so cheap. If you ate at Hong Fat, eventually you'd see everyone. It was the Cafe de la Paix of Mott Street.

When I met my first husband, we ate at a Chinese restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street in Morningside Heights. Dinner would go smoothly till we got to dessert. The waiter couldn't say "pistachio." He'd offer three choices of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla and moo-foo-STAZ-eeyo. Andy would look at him and say, "Chocolate, vanilla and what was that last one?" He thought this was funny. I should have known then. I would have been better off marrying Jerry, who tried to make waiters laugh by pretending to order in Chinese. He'd point to the letters on the menu and say, "I'll have a little box with a line through it and an upside down L, and an order of X with a lightning bolt and pi."

BY the 1980's, Sichuan restaurants were everywhere. The food was spicier, less stewed. Soon it was mixing with other cuisines. You could get cuchifritos with your orange chicken and sushi with your shrimp balls. The late Bernstein-on-Essex featured kosher chicken liver lo mein served by Jewish waiters wearing skull caps with tassels.

I began to wonder whether Chinese food in China was anything like Chinese food in New York. So on a recent trip to China, I packed a takeout menu from Empire Szechuan on 97th Street and Broadway. I gave it to Ellen, the local tour guide for our group. She promised to circle any New York dishes we ate on the trip.

Ellen agreed to warn us about "funny food" at meals. So at the Grand Hotel in Beijing I skipped the sea delicacy called big tan, composed of fish lips, fish bladder and tortoise apron. I steered clear of bowls of fried beetles, deer horn and the much-vaunted ostrich leg tendon. I avoided the four hot pot basics: ox tripe, pig blood, duck intestine and ox throat. In Guilin, where the specialty is dog, I went temporarily vegetarian. You don't see people walking dogs in Guilin. It would be like a New Yorker walking a turkey.

Ellen ate everything. When I asked, "What's that?" no matter what it was, she said "fungus."

From my Empire Szechuan menu, she circled thai ho fun (sliced chicken with bean sprouts), yeung-chow (fried rice), curry-flavored Singapore rice noodles, Peking duck, General Tso's chicken and mushroom with gluten. Everything else was news to me: The Schiaparelli-pink winter melon with snow-white flesh and microscopic black seeds. Warm walnut pudding on the road to Dazu. Roast goose buns and, on a mercilessly hot day, long strings of cucumber in a broth with shaved ice.

I never once encountered chop suey or chow mein. And no matter how many ribs I gnawed, not one came close to the heaven of Ruby Foo's.

NEW YORK OBSERVED Patricia Volk is the author of "Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family." Her new novel, "To My Dearest Friends," will be published by Knopf next year.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/nyregion/thecity/a-love-affair-dumplings-on-the-side.html