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In Search of Lost Restaurants
Hidden away in Oregon, I found a culinary memory
If you were a certain kind of broken-family kid in the 1970s, you know the restaurant I’m talking about. A rundown joint on the border between a “good” neighborhood and a part of town more down on its luck; a place your father would take you to at the end of a divorced dad weekend before handing you back to your mother. It would advertise itself not as Chinese but as “Cantonese.” The booths would be both plush and threadbare. The waitstaff accommodating but aloof. The napkins, as one New Yorker wrote of his favorite Cantonese back in the day, starched and looking and smelling like fortune cookies.
It had been years since I’d seen such a restaurant. I assumed they’d all gone extinct. But the other day, after sneaking out of an academic conference, I found one, alive and well and living in the sleepy college town of Corvallis, Oregon.
Jade Garden (perfect!) sits on a desolate corner a block off of the tonier strip of downtown. It caught my eye through its lettering. Employing what I later discovered was something referred to as “wonton”, “chopstick ”, “chop suey”, or “kung-fu” font the signage beckoned me closer with a long lost incantation:
Food To Go · Cantonese Cuisine · Lunch · Dinner · American · Cocktails
