In the 1940s, nearly every restaurant in New York’s Chinatown had a “Chop Suey” or “Chow Mein” sign over its door. Among the exhibits in “Have You Eaten Yet?: the Chinese Restaurant in America” at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas are a souvenir fan and a couple of menus from “Broadway’s Most Popular Chinese-American Restaurant.” They’re part of the eccentric collection of a Chinese food fanatic named Harley Spiller, who has spent the last eight years collecting ephemera-from menus to matchbooks, cookbooks to song lyrics-all relating to the Chinese-American culinary experience. In fact, to view the only concrete evidence that the chop suey palace even existed, you have to go down to Chinatown. Today Chin Lee is a near-forgotten part of the city’s culinary memory, its Theater District building now covered with giant billboards, and a Latin nightclub occupying the upstairs space. You signal the waiter, point to the beef chop suey on the menu and say, “I’ll have some of that.” It’s the midpoint of the Chop Suey Era in American dining, and you want to share in the fun. The kitchen churns out hundreds of gallons of the stuff daily, to be shoveled down by hundreds of thousands of happy customers every year.
You look around at the other tables and see big platters heaped with steaming mounds of brownish stew, either over rice, for chop suey, or noodles, for chow mein. You can have a club sandwich or a ham omelet, if you must, but the top of the menu lists Chin Lee’s specialties, which are chow mein and chop suey-six kinds of “chop sooy” to be precise. A black-bow-tied Chinese waiter hands you the menu for the 70 cents dinner, and you scan the choices. On the dance floor, it’s strictly catch-as-catch-can, with gum-chewing shopgirls from Gimbel’s dancing with shopgirls, while Wall Street clerks look on hungrily, and a gaggle of girlfriends from the Bronx tries to catch the eyes of a group of slumming Princeton boys. On the main floor, dozens of white-clothed tables surround a dance floor and an all-Chinese jazz orchestra wailing away at breakneck pace, while above there’s a second floor, with more tables and a balcony overlooking the dancers. He finds you a table off in a far corner and disappears, leaving you to survey the surroundings. The entrance is on 49th Street, under a movie-theater-style awning that lures you up a brightly-lit flight of stairs to a coat check, a crowd of people milling about and the clatter of plates and the noise of a frantic jazz band.įinally, the unsmiling Chinese maître d’ nods your way, pulls menus off a pile and leads you through a maze of tables crowded with shouting, smiling, eating diners. Around them, the words “DINING,” “DANCING” and “NO COVER CHARGE” are spelled out by blinking yellow bulbs.
It’s winter of 1939 and the big, bamboo-style letters on the sides of a building at Broadway and 49th Street blaze forth the name “CHIN LEE” late into the night. A 1940s menu from Chin Lee Restaurant in New York.
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