The Food Critic

 

    I sometimes harbor a desire to be a food critic. You know, sitting in a restaurant like any other customer while scribbling in a tiny notebook, “The ambiance delightful, the staff friendly, but the escargot regrettably undercooked and the calamari the texture of bicycle innertubes” or “The tofu is the consistency of wintered-over cow patties but not nearly as savory” or “The pizza dough is tough enough that I expect to find a lug nut.”

     Several factors have squashed this desire. Having been born and raised as far from an ocean as one can get in North America, I am ill-equipped to comment on a huge category of dining experiences because I have a flatlander’s distrust of saltwater bugs like clams, crabs, oysters, abalone or shrimp. Any impartial assessment of seafood other than halibut or mahi mahi is off the table. 

    And there is a good chance that my trailer trashy palate is not delicate enough to assess high-brow dining. My go-to foods are things like macaroni and cheese, beef hot dogs, Spam with yellow mustard on poofy white bread, burgers, fries, pork and beans from the can, peanut butter/grape jelly sandwiches, cheap microwaved pot pies, and a full rack of Fig Newtons at midnight. Nevertheless, Mama Coincidence served me a sweet opportunity to become a food judge, but I never took advantage of the deal.

     In the fall of 1974, I worked as a janitor in the Tenderloin, a seedy section of downtown San Francisco full of peep shows, sex appliance salesrooms, cheap taverns, and street people. At noon every day I fled that neighborhood and walked east, past elaborately decorated department stores windows and gilded banks, toward the bay, the piers, and ships longer than football fields.

    On one such walk I ambled along Kearny Street a few blocks off Chinatown, across the street from the International Hotel, and spotted a deep red wooden sign about the size of a cafeteria tray hanging perpendicularly above a single entrance door. In simple text it read “Hunan Restaurant.” Having no idea what that meant, I went inside. 

    The entire establishment occupied the area of a double car garage. A stately gentleman with salt and pepper hair sat at a wooden table. He looked up from a newspaper, stood, introduced himself as Henry Chung, shook my hand, and declared that I was very welcome to the Hunan as his first customer. Would I grant him the pleasure of cooking a lunch for me? I said “Sure.”

     While lighting the flame under one of two brick wok stoves, he asked if I liked my food hot. Never having eaten cold Chinese food, I said that I did prefer warm food. He smiled, chopped, and stirred. I read about the demise of the Haight-Ashbury in his newspaper. Fifteen minutes later he brought two identical plates of noodles, veggies, and beef in a thick brown sauce and pulled up a chair across from me. “Shall we dine?”

     Hunan is a province in south-central China, a mountainous region with large rivers and lakes, not unlike far eastern Oregon except warmer. The area is well suited for the cultivation of peppers and garlic, both of which dominate its cuisine. The first bite of noodles was deliciously exotic and spicy enough to sear the pin feathers off a duck. Mr. Chung had not meant hot as a measure of temperature. I asked if he sold beer.

    “Not yet.” He pointed to a paper taped to the front door informing the public that he had applied to the City of San Francisco for a permit to serve wine and beer in his restaurant. “But we can fix that. Watch the shop.” and stood from the table then walked out the front door. Five minutes later, he returned with two tall sweaty Budweiser beers, popped the tops and sat one in front of each plate. 

     The food was great. That is my review. A year later there were long lines of folks waiting to get a seat in Henry Chung’s tiny restaurant. A year after that the food critic for the New Yorker, the son of Alger Hiss, beat me to the critical finish line when he deemed the Hunan Restaurant to be “the best Chinese restaurant in the world.” 

    I ate at Henry Chung’s place maybe ten times after that first day. Each time, when I walked in his door he would stop cooking or washing dishes and come to shake my hand and ask about my health and my family, even after he opened a much larger establishment up the hill. Henry Chung was a true old school gentleman and a wonderful chef, almost my friend. He died in 2017, aged 99, but his family is still burning tastebuds in three San Francisco locations, each called Henry’s Hunan Restaurant.