John Wooden Picks Baylor to Beat Gonzaga in Monday's NCAA Basketball Championship Game

Of course, John Wooden passed away several years ago and didn't make this specific prediction but the wisdom of his principles live on.  Everybody knows legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden both as one of the greatest coaches ever, and also as one of the most insightful minds ever associated with athletics with sagacious observations both as to life and athletics.  In my opinion the most insightful thing he said, and probably considered heretical by most people with associated sports is that under the proper circumstances, a loss may actually be a good thing for a competitor's experience.  In particular, when a team is on a long winning streak, he noted that the quality of its performance begins to diminish.  Wooden referred to winning streaks as becoming burdensome, which often leads up to an unexpected losing performance. It's not clear exactly why, but it's probably a combination of different factors.    Maybe the team starts playing not to lose, rather than trying to win, with keeping the streak alive becoming a distraction, whether conscious or not.  Maybe the team becomes overconfident.  Maybe opponents dig down deeper.  Maybe it's something totally subliminal.  And even if the team with the winning streak continues to win, quite often it's clear that the team is laboring under the pressure of the streak.   But whatever the reason, it is not unusual for teams on long winning streaks to stub their toe against an opponent that seemingly doesn't match up.  Indeed, this is borne by the fact that no team that has entered the NCAA basketball tournament unbeaten has gone on to win the championship and complete a perfect season in 45 years.  The last two superteams to reach that point, UNLV in 1991 and Kentucky in 2015 suffered stunning losses in the national semi-final game.

Now if the loss is suffered in a relatively meaningless game, the loss can be beneficial, as in today's parlance it's like hitting a reset button and you can again return to your former level of excellence.  But if that loss occurs in the sudden death NCAA tournament, it can't be remedied.  To me it's clear that if that the 2015 Kentucky team, which reached 38-0,  had suffered a loss, say during the SEC tournament, that there's no way that anyone would have come close to them during the NCAA tournament and they would have sailed to the championship.

Of course things are a little more complicated than saying teams are more susceptible to a loss when on a winning streak, as there have been some impressive winning streaks in sports history.  One corollary rule is if you are vastly superior to your opponent, that opponent won't beat you no matter how badly you play.  Given that the college basketball season ends with the sudden death NCAA tournament, entering the tournament on a long winning streak is not a good thing, as the team will be facing a string of high calibre opponents.   Another corollary is that consecutive wins from a prior season probably shouldn't count because each year's team is a different entity.  And of course, if two teams with long winning streaks meet, one of them will have to win.

So yes, a loss can be therapeutic.  In John Wooden's last season as UCLA coach in 1975, they suffered a humiliating 21 point loss to a mediocre Washington team near the end of the regular season.  Now they weren't on a long winning streak at the time. But after that loss many observers concluded that the 1975 UCLA team wasn't that good and it wasn't going far in the NCAA tournament.  But indeed that team did win it all with some great play in the NCAA tournament.
 

So based on this, 31-0 Gonzaga is ripe for a loss,  Indeed it could be argued that UCLA' close loss to Gonzaga was made possible in part by Gonzaga being weighted down by their winning streak, and had Gonzaga suffered a loss, perhaps in its conference tournament, it would have been refreshed and played better against UCLA.  

In addition, Gonzaga's win over UCLA was highly emotional, and with a quick turnaround to the championship game there could be a reduction in focus further increasing chances of a win by Baylor.

Spotlight On Uighur Food

With all of the attention being given to the treatment of Uighurs in Mainland China, it's not surprising to see that focus is also being drawn to Uighur cuisine.  This was evidenced by a message recently received from my friend and food journalist Clarissa Wei, who asked me if she might add some quotes from me on the topic for an article she's writing on Uighur restaurants.  I'll leave Clarissa's article for a substantive discussion of Uighur food in Southern California, but it did bring back memories of my earlier quest for Uighur food when I first heard about it roughly 15 years ago.

I believe my interest in Uighur food started with comments on the old Chowhound food message board, where somebody brought up the topic of these non-Han, Islamic minority peoples in Northwest China, and how some of them had made their way to Northern Virginia, outside of Washington DC.  While there were no Uighur restaurants in the United States at the time, there apparently were events where Uighur food was served.

I caught a break in 2007 when we decided to do a fly and drive vacation starting in Portland, ME and then hitting Quebec City, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Niagara Falls.  In Montreal we encountered what was then the only Uighur restaurant in the Western Hemisphere, Restaurant Uyghur, in Montreal's Chinatown.  It was truly an adventure, seeing the Central Asian staff, none of whom looked "Chinese" and eating handmade noodles and dumplings.  Indeed that trip to Montreal Chinatown was a real event for me, seeing what, like Los Angeles New Chinatown in the 1950s, was an inauthentic tourist trap (the layout of Montreal Chinatown was eerily similar to the central plaza of Los Angeles Chinatown), yet which boasted the only Uighur restaurant in the hemisphere, along with one of the few dragon beard candy shops in the hemisphere to boot.

As a result, I was well prepared for the arrival of Uighur food in the Los Angeles area.  The first entrant, and still the O.G. of Uighur food today was Omar's Restaurant on New Avenue in San Gabriel which opened in 2010.  To this day I remember that first meal there with the homemade noodles that were at least a foot long, maybe 18 inches, and a proprietress who bore a striking resemblance to HAPA actress and comedian Amy Hill, an observation which was also echoed by a restaurant reviewer.

My next Uighur food encounter was also the most interesting.  Both Restaurant Uyghur and Omar's Restaurant were located in Chinese communities and were classified generically as Chinese restaurants.  However my 2012 visit to Kashkar Cafe in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn was completely different.  Brighton Beach is the most interesting community I've visited in the United States.  Walking down the main drag Brighton Beach Ave. and then over to the beach, nobody was speaking English.  Everybody was speaking Russian.  Now I know how non-Chinese feel when walking around Chinatown, but you hear more English in Chinatown than in Brighton Beach.  Even most of the young people were not speaking English.  I made my way down to Kashkar Cafe.  The waiters and staff were European looking, consistent with reports I had read that it was not a truly Uighur restaurant, but owned by Uzbeks.  I looked at the menu and it didn't look like the Uighur menus in Montreal or San Gabriel.  My guess is that there was more Central Asian food at Kashkar.  Anyway, the manty I ordered filled with equal parts of ground meat and onions was the perfect dish--the best dish of the trip and also representative of Uighur food.  I walked a couple of blocks to the beach and ate them up there.

Since that time Uighur food has begun to spread.  In the Los Angeles area a second branch of Omar opened in Artesia, Silk Road opened in Industry and Dolan’s opened in Alhambra.  Mr. Lamb opened and closed in Rowland Heights as did Kashgar Grill In Irvine, pictured here.   

 

Kroken opened in San Diego and a number of Uighur restaurants opened in the San Francisco area, including the China based Eden Silk Road restaurants which operate in China under the Herembag banner.  An interesting episode was my visit to Uyghur Taamliri in San Francisco, which was among the most difficult eexperiences I ever had finding a Chinese restaurant.  The directions were simple--it was on Lincoln Way, right across from Golden Gate Park  But when I got to Lincoln Way, there was no restaurant across from the park.  The only business in the vicinity said Chug Pub, but then I saw another sign on the building that said Central Asia Uyghur food, so I thought to myself this was like a pop-up in the bar. However, when I walked in all I saw was a bar with pool tables, full of ordinary looking people  I had walked almost to the end of the bar and was about to exit when an Asian guy asks me if I was looking for the restaurant.  I said yes and he handed me a menu

There are naturally now Uighur restaurants in the Washington DC area, including Dolan’s Uighur which is unrelated to the identically named restaurant in Alhambra.  Apparently Dolan is a common Uighur name.  My greatest regret was never getting to eat at Uyghur Bistro In Houston just based on the incongruity in the name.  And thanks to the Uighur restaurants we now have foot long noodles joining foot long hot dogs and foot long submarine sandwiches.

My First Live Music Shows

For some reason I was recently reminded of one of the earliest live music performances I had ever attended while in high school, which then triggered memories of a show I saw previously in junior high.  Thanks to the internet I was able to track down some information on the performers, much of which I was unaware of at the time.  Armed with this additional information, I figured I should do this write-up while I still remembered some portion of these events.

I attended Mount Vernon Junior High School is Los Angeles from 1959 to 1962.  (The school has since been renamed Johnnie Cochran Middle School.)  I remember one school assembly where there was a special outside performer.  Mind you this was the early 1960s when rock n’roll was changing the face of music.  Nevertheless all of us as this predominantly minority school were thrilled by the appearance of Eugene List, famous classical pianist, and Mount Vernon alumnus.  They probably told us that List gained fame playing for President Truman, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at Potsdam, but I had forgotten that.  Later he also appeared in the movies and on the Ed Sullivan Show.

I moved on to Dorsey High School in 1962, probably the most diverse high school campus of its day with a population almost evenly split between Asians, blacks and whites.  Indeed, Indonesian strongman President Sukarno was taken to Dorsey on his US tour to see its diversity.  This is where on a Saturday evening my pal Gary Fugita came to my house and we walked the three blocks to Dorsey to see my first show with big name entertainers, the Lennon Sisters.  Yes, the rock era was well under way but it was still a big deal that the featured act of Lawrence Welk’s weekly TV show were making an appearance at our school.  Strangely over the years I had forgotten that the Lennon Sisters were at that performance and associated that evening with the appearance of a band fronted by Marshall Cram, whom I had never heard of.  Now you’d think that a band playing at a high school well into the rock era would play rock music.  But actually as I just discovered Marshall Cram was a late swing era session musician, which explained his music which I would describe as big band music with a bit of a rock beat.  And as I also discovered, though Cram was fairly young he died a year or two after he performed at Dorsey High School.  

Back then live music concerts as we know them today were unheard of, so it's interesting to look back at those early shows at school.

Long Distance Chinese Food Delivery

Within the past decade we've seen a few Chinese food delivery services offering to deliver Chinese food far beyond the location of the particular restaurant involved.   At first this sounds like a strange proposition.  Why would there be a critical mass of customers to make it economically viable to deliver food more than two to five miles away from where the food is cooked?  The answer is that we're talking Chinese food, and the fact that good authentic Chinese food tends to be concentrated in certain geographic areas, rather than being randomly spaced throughout a metropolitan area.

As it is, Chinese food and home delivery in the United States are synonymous.  Indeed historians agree that restaurant delivery was invented in 1922 by Kin-Chu Cafe, located on Brand Blvd. in Glendale, CA.  While though restaurant delivery did not become commonplace in America for decades, it was originated and mostly widely used by Chinese restaurants.

 

 

So it's no surprise that the Chinese are pioneering again. Long distance Chinese delivery appears to have surfaced around 2014, and can be tied in part to the surge in enrollment in Mainland Chinese students at American universities and colleges.  Unlike prior generations of Chinese foreign students from Hong Kong and Taiwan, many of whom came to the United States with the intent of staying here after graduation, most of these Mainland Chinese students come with the expectation, if not the requirement, of returning to China after completing school.  In such case these students have a lesser desire to adopt American cultural norms, and hence are more partial to eating the same food they ate back home.  One of the most popular schools in the country for Mainland Chinese students is the University of Southern California.  While USC is close to Los Angeles Chinatown, most of the Mainland students are from the non-Cantonese parts of China, and Los Angeles Chinatown serves mostly Cantonese food and where only one small Mainland (i.e., non-Cantonese) regional style restaurant can be found.  Enter businesses like To Go 626 and their website togo626.com, which offered the food from the best San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants on a sliding delivery fee schedule which worked out to $1 to $1.50 per mile.

To Go 626 made an immediate splash, even receiving a write-up in the Los Angeles Times.  It became popular with the Mainland Chinese students at USC who could have their food delivered for around $15 an order, particularly nominal if a number of students pooled their order.  Surprisingly it also became popular with students from UC Irvine, which given its distance more than 40 miles from the San Gabriel Valley, resulted with a delivery tab around $50.  Who would pay that much to have Chinese food delivered?  Well given that so many Mainland Chinese students drive a Lamborghini, Maserati, Ferrari, or other super-luxury car (or two), what's $50 for restaurant delivery?   However, To Go 626 was a short lived phenomenon.  Food trucks offering Mainland style Chinese cuisine started popping up on the USC campus and USC Mainland students from Northeastern China started gravitating to Koreatown restaurants serving cuisine similar to what they were familiar with.  Meanwhile, Irvine saw an explosion in Chinese restaurants serving Mainland style cuisine, so there was no longer a need to import food from the San Gabriel Valley.

A much greater success story has been that of Yunbanbao in New York.  Established around the same time as To Go 626, its primary impetus was not Mainland college students, but rather a sizable corps of Mainland Chinese workers on Wall Street, and originally only involved lunch.  Once again, there was Chinatown nearby, but it lacked the regional Mainland style restaurants familiar to these workers.  Rather, all these restaurants were located in Flushing Chinatown in Queens.  Yunbunbao was founded as multiple 500 member WeChat organized pods which were connected to Flushing Chinese restaurants that provided rotating menus for bulk orders.  Lunch was ordered a day in advance, prepared in the morning, and delivered to Wall Street in time for lunch.  The sight of crowds of Chinese office workers lined up in the street and grabbing lunch bags from unmarked vans and SUVs garnered such puzzlement and attention that the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Yunbanbao to explain to the rest of the world what was going on. With such success, they expanded their deliveries to other concentrations of Mainland eaters in Manhattan, such as hospitals and universities, as well as back office financial workers in Jersey City.  And with the pandemic they further extended their geographic reach and have begun to deliver groceries, too.

The latest long distance Chinese food delivery platform arises from a completely different direction.  In Los Angeles, Mama's Drive By Kitchen is borne of two of the most current societal concerns, the pandemic and multiculturalism.  Mama's mission is to preserve immigrant cultures by sharing their cuisine to a wider audience. Under the drive by kitchen model, food is ordered from participating San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants, as well as other ethnic restaurants, with designated pickup locations in West Los Angeles, Koreatown and the San Gabriel Valley.  The West LA pickup site is the most noteworthy. While the Chinese restaurant scene has greatly improved in West LA in the past five years, the choices are still limited, and the drive by kitchen gives local residents an alternative to making a 25 mile drive in Los Angeles traffic.  For each order received, Mama's will buy a second order to be donated to needy community members, helping both restaurants and the community in these times of stress.  At this point, the program only operates on special days but hopefully the service will expand.  

While we might not see $50 restaurant deliveries again, it would not be surprising to see long distance restaurant delivery grow in the future.  And like restaurant delivery itself, Chinese food started it all.

Call Me Maybe...What?

As you all probably know I did not enter the food scene the way typical writers, chefs and other industry personalities have done.  Rather I stumbled in by accident, much like the scene in the movie Blazing Saddles, where cowboy brawlers on a sound stage crash into the adjacent sound stage where a dance musical was being filmed.   Not having the traditional credentials has created an interesting dilemma of how I should be described online and in the press and has resulted in a wide variety monikers to describe me and the things I do.

The issue first arose when I retired after 45 years as a CPA and Attorney.  I had always carried a supply of business cards wherever I went and even though I was retired I didn't feel fully dressed without a business card.  But how would I describe myself?  Well this is what I came up with, with the "history" reference encompassing both my writings on Chinese-American historical topics in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the integration of those topics into my articles on Chinese restaurants in America.

A completely different issue is how I would be described by others mentioning my name in food circles.  Of course, there is the ubiquitious term "blogger", and while I have been described on occasion as a Chinese food blogger, that's really not an accurate description.  Yes, you are reading my blog which talks about Chinese food.   But the fact is that this blog was not originally intended to be a food blog, and if you go back to its start a dozen years ago, only an occasional posting had anything to do with Chinese food.  The first move towards weighting this blog to more food content began when I did a Google search for "Cantonese Food Blog" and found my blog listed on the first page of results.  Shortly thereafter the Chinese food content increased further when I had my "Blazing Saddles" moment, stumbling into the food world via Clarissa Wei's article introducing me as the man who had eaten at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants.  It is true at that point I needed to make the lead posting on this blog being about Chinese restaurant food.  But the fact is while that article immediately led to a demand for me to write articles on Chinese food topics, these articles were published by third party websites like Menuism, and not my own blog.  If you look at my own blog, the topics are odds and ends, rather than major works, and I only post to this blog once or twice or month.  So clearly, I am not an active blogger. 

Personally, my favorite description is "Celebrity Diner" because it evokes the incredulous nature of the attention drawn to my dining adventures, while at the same time providing a highly accurate description.  When Clarissa's article was first released I appreciated the fact that my story might be newsworthy in the foodie world, but I was totally unprepared when days later it was briefly the lead story on People.com until replaced by an update on Britney Spears.  Quite telling is the website's categorization of the story as "Celebrity" news.  While a couple of people had gained notoriety for eating at Subway and McDonald's, this was the first time that the words "celebrity" and "diner" had been used in concert.  This was not a reflection of anything I had done differently but rather as an indication of how celebrity status had been extended to new categories of people.  Along the same lines are descriptions such as "Chinese Culinary Celebrity," "Social Media Celebrity" and "Unlikely Food Celebrity."

Otherwise there's been a whole range of descriptors used, which in itself demonstrates the difficulty in finding an apt characterization.  In no particular order they include legendary eater, food historian, Chinese food enthusiast,  roving diner, Chinese food aficionado, prolific Chinese restaurant chronicler, food historian, Chinese food expert, Chinese food hobbyist, iconic eater, Chinese restaurant obsessive, prominent Chinese food writer, Chinese food chronicler, Chinese food maven, and author.  But as the old saying goes, I don't care what you call me as long as you call me. 

Sometimes It's Not Lost In The Translation

At one time or another, everybody has seen an odd or hilarious listing on a Chinese restaurant menu or somewhere else around the restaurant.  Sometimes it's just a typo, like Rock God With Corn Sauce, or Steamed Porn Buns.  

Other times it's due to improper translations from Chinese to English, such as preserved vegetables showing up on a menu as rotten lettuce.  This trend has been accelerated by Google Translate and translation devices which may take a too literal approach to translating the name from Chinese to English.  Incidentally some of these devices are nevertheless amazing.  I remember recently visiting a Chinese restaurant and not being able to communicate to the owner what I wanted to order.  Ultimately he whipped out a hand held device, prompted me to speak into it, whereupon a little voice spit out the Chinese translation.

Despite the miscues, some of these translations are highly accurate and indeed can teach us about English language words we were not aware of.  Back in the old days when there were no translating devices and Chinese names of new foods and dishes were not incorporated without a translated English name, I remember the arrival of ong choy in the United States, leading to various descriptions of the item on menus and causing confusion when looking for the dish.  The most common moniker was water spinach, but it was also described on some Chinese menus as water convovulvus.  Water what?  Yet in fact that was probably the most proper English language name for the vegetable and it amazes me how unsophisticated Chinese restaurants were able to ferret that out back then.  I remember another restaurant calling it something like sweet potato leaf tubers.  That really puzzled me until I read somewhere that ong choy and sweet potatoes were part of the same biological family.  Amazing, again!

This write-up on Chinese restaurant menu food translations was triggered by a recent visit to Dragon Garden Restaurant, the latest in a long line of Chinese restaurants in a second floor space adjacent to what was Hong Kong Supermarket in Monterey Park (now Good Fortune Supermarket), one of the pioneering Chinese grocery store chains in the San Gabriel Valley.   The first occupant of that space back in the mid-1980s, Deli World Cafe, was sort of a mini-food court, where you would place your order at one of the counters and then eat your food at tables by a glass wall that overlooked the entirety of Hong Kong Supermarket below.   Its opening was so noteworthy that it was reported on by the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers.  However as successor restaurants moved in and out, the glass wall was eventually replaced by a regular wall. 

In this visit to Dragon Garden, I spotted a highly conspicuous menu item, Denitrified Pork Leg, for $24.99.  In perusing thousands of Chinese restaurant menus over the years, one word I had never seen was denitrified. In fact I had never seen that word, period.  Looking up the word denitrified, it seems to refer to the removal of nitrites and is more commonly associated with discussions of waste treatment.  Well we do see nitrites in food, so maybe denitrified was properly used.  However, beyond that I was still clueless, so I decided to ask around on social media.   One very plausible guess was that denitrified was used to indicate that the pork leg is not cured, or not cured in the normal manner with sodium nitrite. 

Another interesting response was from someone who found a 2013 reference to the exactly identical Denitrified Pork Leg being served at Formosa Bistro in Houston.  The dish was described as being a deep fried, crunchy, greaseless, fall off the bone pork leg meat, comparable in ways to Peking Duck.  That would explain the relatively hefty tab for this dish.

 

 

Ultimately the mystery was solved by my old friend Howard Lee, who was born in Taiwan but came to the US as a teenager.  He says it's an upscale Taiwanese dish he hasn't had in the US where the pork leg is fried such that the skin is crispy, but the fat melts away.   He says the more accurate translation of the Chinese name is no fat pork leg or walk-away pork left.  But it's stunning that two different Chinese restaurants, miles and years apart, came up with the same English translation for the dish.

Props are in order to Dragon Garden for opening up in a particularly difficult environment.  As noted the restaurant itself is on the second floor, accessible either through an interior stairway at the front entrance, or a very high, exterior, fire escape type metal stairway from the back parking lot.   But with no indoor dining currently allowed, Dragon Garden is managing to operate in the small foyer area at the bottom of the front stairway, with a to go order table and a boba drink set up, with the drinks likely keeping them afloat for the moment.  And hopefully despite the less than descriptive name for the dish, people will be able to discover this excellent dish brought over from Taiwan.

Toishanese Pressed Almond Duck at Kim Restaurant

While much of the old style Toishanese/Cantonese Chinese food of the early and mid-1950s is forgettable, one dish I've always enjoyed is pressed almond duck, a.k.a. War Shu Opp.  In Los Angeles where Chinese food tastes are more sophisticated than anywhere else in the country except the San Francisco Bay area, which is equally progressive, pressed almond duck is probably still available only at a handful of Chinese restaurants.  Undoubtedly the leading purveyor is Paul's Kitchen where I grew up enjoying the dish in the 1950s and 1960s before real Chinese food arrived in the United States in the late 1960s.  And while I never gave up my fondness for this dish, neither was it worth going out of the way to Paul's Kitchen location in the City Market section of downtown Los Angeles, which was the real Chinatown of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s, or places like Canton City and Chinese Garden in Montebello.

However just recently I found this dish at a most surprising location, Kim's Restaurant on Crenshaw Blvd. in Los Angeles.  This was a surprise to me for three reasons.  First of all Kim's hasn't been around nearly as long as Paul's Kitchen, and secondly I lived near Kim's Restaurant for probably 25 to 30 years and was not aware that had that dish on the menu, though that was many years ago.  And over the years there have been a number of discussions on the food message boards about the dwindling number of restaurants serving the dish and Kim's never came up.  Actually, Kim's was probably the closest Chinese restaurant to where we lived, but we seldom ate there.  That's because of their more Americanized Chinese cuisine, so we did most of our Chinese dining in the City Market area at locations such as Paul's Kitchen, On Luck, New Moon, Paul's Cafe, and Li Wah.   Only when Johnny, our favorite waiter from On Luck landed there did we visit Kim's Restaurant more often.

Actually I had pretty much forgotten about Kim's Restaurant until they were involved in an incident at the start of the pandemic in my first Menuism article on the effect of the pandemic on Chinese restaurants. As many of you recall, when COVID-19 arrived in the United States it was often described in terms like "Chinese virus" and "kung flu" which lead to a backlash against things Chinese, and particularly Chinese restaurants.  As a result of unspecified acts of anti-Chinese harassment, the owner of Kim's Restaurant closed down, apparently with the intention to never reopen.   Word of this episode spread throughout the Crenshaw neighborhoods and the restaurant's customers were highly distressed and expressed their feelings in dozens of postings on the local online message board.  Trouble is none of the customers had any idea of how to communicate their outrage as to the event and their affection for Kim's Restaurant and its food.  Fortunately the message board thread ultimately came to the attention of somebody who had contact information for the owner, so they printed out the messages and delivered them to the owner.  Less than a month later Kim's Restaurant was back in business.

After seeing these events unfold with the ultimate reopening of the restaurant I thought it would be a good idea for me to revisit Kim's Restaurant after a 30 year absence.  I actually looked at their menu a couple of times before noticing the almond duck.  Finally getting to stop by the restaurant, this was the old familiar fried duck cubes with a little crunch inside, a few nuts on the outside, that wonderful gloppy brown sauce and lettuce on the side.

Actually the Kim Restaurant version is less greasy that the historic version I remember, which is definitely a good thing.