The Chinese in Toronto from 1878. Arlene Chan
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Название: The Chinese in Toronto from 1878
Автор: Arlene Chan
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: История
isbn: 9781459700949
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A tremendous expansion of restaurants occurred between 1917 and 1923, with an increase of 900 percent from 32 to 202 establishments.74 The restaurants in Chinatown served mostly Chinese food. Two restaurants, Hung Fah Low and Jung Wah, gained some notoriety at 12½ Elizabeth Street. The clientele were mostly Chinese and the few non-Chinese were predominantly Jewish, there to enjoy Chinese food. Vaudeville actors, who performed nearby at the Shea’s Hippodrome Theatre on Bay Street or the Casino Theatre on Queen Street, were known to frequent the restaurants in Chinatown. Actor Edward G. Robinson, whose stage career peaked in the 1920s and subsequent screen career culminated in over 100 films, claimed that “12½ [Elizabeth Street] was the best place to eat.”75
Not all visitors to Chinese restaurants were welcomed customers, however. In 1919 the Toronto Star reported a major disturbance when a mob of 400 men raided Hop War Low’s café at 31 Elizabeth Street, stole $300, and then proceeded to smash the store windows of neighbouring Chinese businesses, including Louis Ling’s barber shop at 11 Elizabeth Street, Kwong Chun’s store at 6 Elizabeth Street, and Wing Ching Tank’s grocery store at 8 Elizabeth Street. The incident was allegedly caused by a remark made by the waiter as he refused to serve some soldiers the previous evening. Toronto Mayor. Thomas Church strongly condemned these actions and quickly restored order.89
A Chinese restaurant at 31 Elizabeth Street made the news when it served a sumptuous banquet, featuring an eight-course menu with birds’ nest soup, sturgeon’s fins, whole breaded chicken, fish rolls Manchu-style, lichee duck, chicken with mushrooms, and grilled squab. Dr. McCulloch and his wife were the hosts for the guest of honour, Dr. C.H. Yen, who was in Toronto from Beijing for post-graduate work. Another dinner guest was Bishop William White, whose work as a missionary in China for 38 years established 11 Anglican churches. During his mission there, he amassed a collection of Chinese cultural and art objects that he donated to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library. At age 60, he became the first curator of the museum’s Chinese collection and the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Toronto.
Outside of Chinatown, Chinese mostly operated small cafés and hamburger joints, typically furnished with booths and counters. These catered to Canadian — not Chinese — customers and served Western food, like roast beef, steaks, apple pie, and ice cream. Lithuanian men were known to pick up box lunches from Chinese lunch grills during the week, on their way from boarding-houses to factories in the east end of the city.76 The main attraction was the price, which was much more reasonable than non-Chinese restaurants. A typical meal cost only 20 cents for soup, sandwich, and dessert.77 By 1923 the first Western-style Restaurant Owners’ Association was established in Toronto, with members in other cities and towns across Ontario.
There were two types of Chinese restaurants: one for Chinese clientele in Chinatown, the other for non-Chinese outside of Chinatown. Toronto Quick Lunch, at 301 Yonge Street in 1922, likely served Western fare, like roast beef and hamburgers.
Chinese restaurants in the 1930s provided “cheap meals,” a “bonanza for the many unemployed men who crowded the city during the Depressions years,” as recalled by George Heron in his memoirs.
On Queen Street near Sherbourne there were a couple of these restaurants which offered full course meals for 15 cents. By full course is meant soup, a Salisbury steak or fish main course with vegetables, a piece of pie and a drink of tea, coffee or milk. Not only that, each had plates piled high with white and brown bread.78
In 1929, as an 18-year-old, Doyle Lumb worked at the Rex Café on Yonge Street, near College Street. He recalled, “The Rex Café was considered one of the best restaurants. Got paid $3 a week. I worked every day, including Sunday, seven days a week from ten in the morning to ten at night.”79 Later, he owned the Kwong Chow Restaurant. Another early Chinese remembered working at both a laundry and restaurant:
If you were Chinese, there were only two things you could do — run a laundry or a restaurant. Our family did both. When I came home from school, I had to work in the restaurant, then I’d jump over to the laundry, work there before running back to school. You know, we didn’t serve Chinese food — nobody ate Chinese food then!80
Gradually, along with the standard Western fare, restaurants began serving Chinese food adapted for the Canadian palate. Their owners were unknowing innovators in making the Chinese restaurant business an ethnic specialty that would eventually attract loyal fans.
The most popular Chinese dish was chop suey, meaning “mixed bits.” It consists of a hodgepodge of meat and vegetables in a starchy sauce. Food lore has it that chop suey was likely introduced to North America in 1849 during the gold rush, which attracted thousands of Chinese fortune-hunters to California.81 According to Andrew Coe in his book, Chop Suey, that this dish was invented in American restaurants or by Americanized chefs for the visits of a Chinese diplomat named. Li Hongzhang in 1896 is urban legend.82 Another version of its origin is that a Chinese restaurant didn’t know what to feed an important American dignitary, so the cooks tossed odds and ends into a pot and called it chop suey.83 Other stories link the origins of chop suey to the early Chinese settlers, who brought this dish as an Chinese local specialty from the Guangdong province. The dish was a stir-fry of chicken giblets, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, tripe, dried seafood, and whatever else was at hand.
Regardless of its origins, non-Chinese diners asked for this chop suey dish and a dedicated following blossomed. Restaurant owners adapted by replacing all the foreign and unfamiliar ingredients with ones that were common in North American households. Already a hit in New York City by the 1880s, it was further popularized when Sinclair Lewis wrote in his 1920 novel, Main Street, that “the Babbitts and Rieslings went festively to the movies and had chop suey at a Chinese restaurant.”
Chop suey eventually made its way north to Canada and grew in popularity. Harry Lem, owner of Lichee Garden, recalled his early days as a waiter in Oshawa, where American engineers from the General Motors plant insisted on ordering chop suey.84 Due to the dish’s popularity, many Chinese restaurants, like International Chop Suey House, named their eateries accordingly.
Chow mein, literally translated as “fried noodles,” was another dish that looked Chinese and appealed to the Canadian palate. Chow mein consists of boiled noodles that are stir-fried with an assortment of meat and vegetables; however, the Westernized version bears little more than faint resemblance to the original. Legend has it that a Chinese cook accidentally dropped some Chinese noodles into a pot of hot oil and turned them into crispy, brittle noodles. The deep fried noodles of the Western-style chow mein are not considered Chinese cuisine. But the ever-growing popularity of chop suey and chow mein gained these dishes permanent places on menus as Chinese Canadian cuisine. Soon, other items were added, like sweet and sour chicken balls, egg rolls, and egg foo young, all popular for Canadian diners but noticeably absent from menus catering to Chinese clientele.
Another food item that became associated with Chinese restaurants was, and remains to this day, the fortune cookie. Contrary to popular belief, fortune cookies are not a Chinese dessert. It is true that, in the Yuan dynasty, rebels hid secret messages in cakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, but this was a single occurrence. Some credit Japan as the country of origin because of references to generations-old family bakeries making fortune cookie-shaped crackers outside Kyoto, and Japanese literature and history mention them many years before the first reports of American fortune cookies.85 СКАЧАТЬ