As I previously wrote after doing my Goldthread 2 video interview with Clarissa Wei four years ago, doing a video interview can be a tiring, day long proposition. In that video, which has since garnered over 1.25 million views, we started off with dim sum at the now defunct Ocean Star Seafood restaurant in Monterey Park, where we examined my collection of Chinese restaurant menus, headed over to San Gabriel Square where the camera crew followed me as I walked in and around that and neighboring shopping centers passing a number of Chinese restaurants, followed by a drive over to Bistro Na's in Temple City for an Imperial Chinese meal.
It was deja vu all over ago less than a year later as I did a video interview with Gabrielle Chang of the now defunct Hong Kong Apple Daily News. We started with dim sum at Lunasia in Alhambra, where we examined my collection of Chinese restaurant menus, and then headed over to the Atlantic Times Square shoping center in Monterey Park, where the camera crew followed me as I walked down Atlantic Blvd. passing a number of Chinese restaurants.
So a couple of weeks ago, it was deja vu all over, all over, again, as I did a similar San Gabriel Valley video interview with Tzu-i Chuang Mulligan, Taiwanese-American celebrity chef and Chinese social media star. This video was for a Chinese magazine and website called WHYNOT/Wainao, with their US group headquartered out of Washington DC. I had met with the production team headed by Rachel Chen late last summer, and at that time they said they would be back to shoot in November. However that got postponed until April, then May, then they pivoted back to April.
Unlike Clarissa Wei and Gabrielle Chang who were both quite familiar with Los Angeles, this group started with little knowledge of Los Angeles or the San Gabriel Valley, so it was a longer process to develop an agenda and specific shooting locations. In the end, it turned out quite well. Initially they were going to start with a walking tour of San Gabriel Square too, except when they got there a lot of the storefronts were boarded up due to renovation. Actually a lot of those storefronts were not restaurants, and the majority of the restaurants were still operating. But visually, that would not have looked good. So I pointed out the three other centers within a stone's throw of San Gabriel Square, so they settled on the one across the street next to the San Gabriel Hilton at 227 W. Valley Blvd.
Like many interviews I've done over the years, all advance contact was with the video's producer, and there's little or no contact with the interviewer until showtime. That was pretty much the case here, with the interviewer Tzu-i. We pretty much arrived at the mall at the same time and quickly began shooting. There were two camera operators and two producers.
However, they quickly stopped when the producer Rachel said that what we started to talk about was best covered in the interview portion at the restaurant, and we should walk around the mall and limit the discussion to the mall and the other centers in the immediate vicinity. So we walked around that mall, having to do several takes because pedestrians got in our way as we were walking. We also stepped in the line of mall auto traffic a number of times, indicative of the more casual nature of this shoot. All this activity at the mall took over an hour.
Initially they wanted to eat at a restaurant in one of the four centers clustered there, at a favorite restaurant that had a special significance to me. Well, d'oh, even if there were such a restaurant (and there wasn't), it probably would have closed down years ago and been replaced. After throwing around the names of other restaurants, Bistro Na's resonated with them. They sent an email to Bistro Na's asking if they could have lunch there and film an interview with me, but they didn't get a reply. I told them to call them on the phone. I don't know if they did that, or whether they just went in person, but they ended up getting a private room and made contact with the head chef, who was very accommodating and even gave us a tour of the kitchen at the end of the day. Right before I left from home the producer asked if I could bring a copy of my Chinese restaurant listing and my menu collection. I told them the restaurant list no longer existed in hard copy, but I did bring the menus.
When we got to Bistro Na, we shot a segment of Tzu-i going through and asking about some of the menus.
The restaurant then brought out Bistro Na's famous Emperor's Jar, a multi-ingredient broth with multiple additional ingredients. The protocol was to start off with the soup.
Then add additional ingredients such as purple rice and some kind of pear extract.
After filming us partaking this dish, they decided that they wanted a tableful of dishes to be on the table during the entirety of the main interview, which meant that (1) the interviewer and I were given 15 minutes to eat some food so we wouldn't have to go hungry during the interview, and (2) the rest of the crew couldn't eat any food until after the interview.
I thought the interview was open ended, so I leisurely answered the questions that Tzu-I put forth. But then the assistant producer Vivian said we needed to wrap up quickly. Tzu-I said that was fine since she was almost done and we only needed to conclude. But I'm thinking, wait a minute. An important part of the story is how the San Gabriel Valley came to be with the background of housing segregation both in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley itself, and we hadn't even broached the subject. So when Tzu-i asked me to make a conclusory statement about my journey from being a kid who didn't eat Chinese food and was exposed to very little Chinese culture, into a current day Chinese food "expert", I pivoted my response to say how I have seized my opportunity to inform people about the history of Chinese Americans,. I then segued into how the era of segregated housing in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley being a onetime hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity flipped into the San Gabriel becoming the well known giant Chinatown that it has become.
After the interview ended, everybody got to partake of the spread that had been ordered. Naturally the visual and culinary star of the show was the signature crispy shrimp.
Having eaten at Bistro Na's numerous times, I was a little surprised that they would serve a dish as spicy as this angus beef with peppers. The entire production crew were China natives, and one of them bolted out of the private dining room after digging into this dish, because of the spiciness.
In contrast, the spicy cold chicken was only mildly spicy, despite appearing to be very spicy.
The Beijing style Zhajian noodle is brought out first in its component parts.
Then mixed up to be served.
Their tofu skin salad is one of their best dishes that we always order.
Chef Su's fabulous pork feet jelly.
Snow pea leaves.
Fantastic tofu sticks.
Capped by the dessert sampler box.
After the shooting we got the kitchen tour. They showed us how the crispy shrimp was made.
This being the final product.
2:30pm so it's relatively quiet.
And spotting a tub of pork belly on the way out.
This video shoot basically was two thirds of the one with Clarissa Wei for Goldthread back in 2019, reprising the Valley Blvd/San Gabriel Blvd. and Bistro Na's venues, without the initial morning dim sum scenes. But with travel time, it was nearly six hours, which for me these days, is a good day's work.
