The resilience of Long Island's Chinese-American restaurants

It’s been a rough spring for all restaurants, but particularly Chinese ones. By the time most local businesses were considering whether to pivot from dine-in to takeout or to close altogether, many Chinese establishments had already shuttered, early victims of concern over the coronavirus spread.

And it was only the latest blow to Long Island’s old-school Chinese-American restaurants, those egg-roll palaces where the meal starts with fried noodles, duck sauce and mustard, and ends with fortune cookies and sliced oranges.

Over the last decade, Long Island’s Chinese culinary landscape has undergone a seismic shift. “Authentic” restaurants, ones that serve regional Chinese dishes, have sprung up in and around Stony Brook, to serve the large population of students from China, and in western Nassau, to serve Chinese families making the familiar eastward migration from Queens.

Meanwhile, the classic suburban Chinese restaurant found itself under siege. The Chinese-born owners of well-established businesses are loath to pass them along to their children: The whole reason for their 14-hour days, seven-day weeks and 365- day years was to provide their children the opportunity to be doctors and lawyers. More recent Chinese immigrants are more likely to open restaurants serving sushi, ramen, Asian fusion or even Cajun-style seafood— the vast majority of these establishments on Long Island are Chinese-owned and are seen to be more profitable and easier to run than Chinese restaurants.

Hunan Taste in Greenvale, which opened in 1984, is one of Long Island’s few sit-down Chinese restaurants that has neither succumbed to the siren song of Asian fusion nor immured itself in the amber of chow mein, with little to recommend it beyond nostalgia. However, “In February, there was a drop-off in business,” said Calvin Hu. “People were nervous about eating Chinese—I get it, I wasn’t going to Flushing, either.” But by mid-March, he said, “we were crazy busy. People wanted a change, they were sick of eating meatloaf.”

“Chinese restaurants are resilient. No question, we will be back.”

Calvin Hu, Co-owner of Hunan Taste

What persuaded Calvin Hu, who owns Hunan Taste with his brother, Michael, to close his doors on March 25 was his kitchen staff. “Most of them come from Queens,” he said. “And they were worried about coming in to work and then going back to their families.”  

Hu hopes to reopen in May. In the meantime, he is tiling the restaurant’s entrance and giving the dining-room walls a coat of fresh paint. “Chinese restaurants are resilient,” he said. “No question, we will be back.”

A few miles down the road in Manhasset, Pearl East was, at press time, still open. Owner Cathy Huang said that, as long as her employees came to work, she would continue to serve her customers. She, too, is determined to be a survivor.

Hunan Taste, Pearl East and, in Huntington, Albert’s Mandarin Gourmet (which temporarily ceased operation on March 17), are all poised to survive because, over the decades, they have become more than just places to eat. They have upgraded their interiors and keep them spotless, hire and retain servers who are attentive and welcoming. And they are presided over by charismatic figures who greet you by name and remember your favorite dishes. Of course, the food needs to be good. But does it need to be Chinese?

To Cathy Huang, it does and it doesn’t. Key ingredients come directly from the Chinese repertoire, whether fresh (ginger, scallions, yellow chives) or packaged (soy sauce, oyster sauce, tofu), and certainly the artillery line of smoking-hot woks in her kitchen has no equivalent in West- ern cooking. But, she noted, “Americans don’t like skin or bones, nothing with a head or tail. Many of the dishes we serve you won’t see in China.”

She recalled a customer who visited Shanghai and, puzzled, told her this story upon his return: “I walked into the hotel’s very good restaurant and ordered General Tso’s chicken. They had no idea what I was talking about.” General Tso’s chicken is emblematic of Chinese-American cooking and even inspired the documentary film “Searching for General Tso,” adapted, in part, from Jennifer 8. Lee’s 2008 book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.”

“Americans,” wrote Lee, “like chicken, sweetness, and deep-frying. These three desires converged in General Tso’s chicken.” She echoes Huang’s observations about American squeamishness: “Chinese restaurants in America tend to shy away from anything that is recognizably animal. Mainstream Americans don’t like to be reminded that the food on their plate once lived, breathed, swam or walked.”

Another of Lee’s observations reverberated strongly with Long Island’s Chinese restaurateurs, that “there should be nothing where you have to chew on something and then spit out an inedible part. This means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shells. Peanuts come shelled, and even watermelon is preferred seedless. In China, however, the aftermath of most restaurant meals is a pile of bones, shells, and other detritus on the table at every place setting: the casualties of a personal battle between the diner and the items on the plate.”

Because it’s so close to the Queens border, Pearl East has a number of Chinese-born customers, and for them, or for adventurous non-Chinese, Huang might offer snow pea leaves with bamboo pith, whole fish steamed with ginger and scallions, abalone or sea cucumber. But she is also the standard bearer for lemon chicken, a famous Chinese-American dish that was invented in New York in the late 1960s at the uber-chic Pearl’s on West 48th Street in Manhattan. (Pearl East, a satellite, was established in 1992; Huang bought it in 1998.)

Lemon chicken, which is exactly as Chinese as chicken Francese is Italian, starts with a boneless chicken breast that is pounded and dredged in a mixture of cornstarch and water chestnut flour, then fried to the barest blonde and served on a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce, garnished with lemon zest and drizzled with a chestnut-brown sauce. It is delicious.

If Chinese-American cuisine is a response to American gustatory preferences, Long Island’s Chinese-American stalwarts have raised it to a high art. On my last visit to Hunan Taste, a foursome at a corner table beckoned me over and, unbidden, began to rhapsodize about their meal. “This is the best Chinese restaurant in the United States,” said Michael Mann of Great Neck. “The spare ribs are amazing. They make a soup that’s a combination of egg drop and wonton. The owners give you a warm greeting. The head waiters know you.” His wife, Meryl, couldn’t say enough about the lobsters. “They are absolutely kicking fresh—and they’ll prepare them anyway you like, Cantonese style or with ginger and scallions.”

The Manns have been regular customers for only five years. Their dinner companions, Howie and Amy Smith of Old Westbury, go back more than 20 years. Amy appreciates that the kitchen will make her anything she wants, even if what she wants is grilled chicken and vegetables. For Howie, the restaurant recalls childhood dinners at elegant midtown-Manhattan Chinese restaurants such as Bill Hong’s (also patronized by fictional detective Colombo and real-life crooner Frank Sinatra). “Places like this barely exist anymore,” he lamented.

“My customers make up their own dishes,” said Calvin Hu. “There’s one customer who gets what we call an inside-out egg roll: We fry an egg roll, take the filling out, put it on a lettuce leaf, and throw out the shell.”

At Albert’s Mandarin Gourmet in Huntington, one of the most sought-after items started with a special request. “My wife and I love Peking duck, but it’s very fatty,” said longtime customer Lew Meltzer. One day we said, ‘Albert, can you make us a Peking chicken?’ He said yes, and now it’s on the menu.” Whether chicken or duck, owner Albert Leung carves the bird tableside with great flourish.

Even in the context of close relationships between Chinese restaurateur and venerable patron, the friendship between Meltzer and Leung is extraordinary. Born in Guangzhou in 1941, Leung started out as a waiter at Mei Ting on Jericho Turnpike in Huntington in 1984; he renamed it Mandarin Gourmet when he bought it in 1986, and Meltzer and his wife were regular, if occasional, customers. But when Leung moved the restaurant to Huntington Village (and, at the urging of his customers, called it Albert’s Mandarin Gourmet), the Meltzers, who lived nearby, became superfans.

“There weren’t that many nice, sit-down Chinese restaurants where you could go in, have a drink, have a leisurely meal,” Lew Meltzer said. In addition to making Peking chicken, he persuaded Leung to substitute ground beef for pork in the stir-fried ginger- scallion lobster and, because “I try to avoid fried food,” to bake his egg rolls.

Left: Albert Leung, owner of Albert's Mandarin Gourmet, carves a Peking duck into thin slices tableside in the dining room of his restaurant in Huntington. Top: Pork BBQ spare ribs are lacquered in sweet and tangy sauce at Albert's Mandarin Gourmet. Bottom: Sweet and sour pork is served on a platter with pineapple and a bright orange sweet and sour sauce with mixed peppers at Albert's Mandarin Gourmet. Photo credit: Daniel Brennan

Meltzer, who founded the Mineola law firm Meltzer Lippe, is also a real estate developer who built River Run, a golf resort on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Once a year he takes a group of clients and referral sources to spend two days playing the Gary Player–designed course and generally being wined and dined. For the past 15 years, that first night’s dinner is provided by none other than Albert Leung, who always makes Peking duck, dumplings and at least one other dish. The rest of the time, he golfs and, along with the 50-odd other guests, enjoys the second-night dinner at Higgins Crab House in nearby Ocean City.

Peking duck is a relative newcomer to the Chinese-American menu. (When Peking Duck House opened on Mott Street in Chinatown in 1976, it was one of the few places in the New York area where you could get the bird without reserving it in advance.) But before Peking duck, there was chicken chop suey and chow mein, and egg foo young, in addition to the eternally popular egg rolls and spare ribs.

Warren Lem, whose father, Arthur Lem, owned Chungking Royal in Hempstead during the 1940s and 1950s, explained that all of these dishes could be made with readily available ingredients. “It’s not like today where chefs have access to all these vegetables and Chinese products,” he said. “Back then my father could depend on having celery, onions and cabbage.” The primacy of bean sprouts as a garnish for so many of these dishes was because they could be grown by the restaurant. “My mother used to grow her own bean sprouts, the food cost was about zero, they were always fresh and they seemed exotic.”

Arthur Lem was an iconic figure on Long Island—godfather to the local Chinese community as well as a Rotarian, Freemason and benefactor of the Hempstead YMCA. He was also a pioneer in another specialty of the American Chinese restaurant—or at least those in the New York area—making Jewish customers feel welcome. “He could speak some Yiddish,” his son recalled, “and he used to make something he called Chinese gefiltefish, which was actually shrimp with pork. He gave it away as a free appetizer, and on weekends Jewish customers would come from Brooklyn.”

Scholars have written extensively on the affinity Jews have for Chinese food—and the love affair has spawned at least one classic joke: If it’s 5780 on the Jewish calendar and 4718 on the Chinese calendar, what did the Jews eat for the first 1062 years? Cathy Huang estimates that about 80 percent of her customers are Jewish. “Without them, Chinese restaurants could not survive,” she says, noting that her busiest day of the year is Christmas, when she serves about 500 dinners.

One of Huang’s best customers is Wayne Hauser of Roslyn, introduced tothe restaurant by his father, who came to live in the same apartment building as Huang. “I can’t eat Chinese anywhere else,” he said. “I bring people here and they always say they’ve never had food like this.” He is particularly enamored of the crispy chicken with three nuts, although he always asks the kitchen to eliminate the peanuts and double down on the cashews and especially the sweet-crunchy walnuts. (He can expound at length about their magical properties.)

His affection and respect for Huang, whose husband died the same year she opened Pearl East, knows no bounds. “She has given her life to this business,” he said. “I see how she operates, the meticulous care, the way she treats everyone like family.”

He recalled the night of superstorm Sandy, when he and his wife showed up for dinner and the back-up generator failed. “We sat there with no lights, a little chilly. We said, ‘We’ll eat whatever you can make for us.’ By that point, Cathy was turning people away, but she gave us sushi, and it was an evening I won’t forget.”

Sushi is a much-debated topic among Chinese-American restaurateurs. Huang, who was born to a political family in Taiwan and came to New York to study piano at the Manhattan School of Music, has always had it on her menu. “Taiwan had been occupied by the Japanese until 1945,” she said, “so I was very familiar with it.”

Albert Leung added sushi to his menu seven years ago. “We are a family restaurant,” he noted. “If three people like Chinese food and the other two want sushi, I don’t want to separate the family.” (The year 2013 was a momentous one for Albert’s Mandarin. Along with sushi, he took on a partner, Raymond Lin, and, for the first time, printed his first menu without Chinese characters.)

Only Hunan Taste has said no to sushi. “Twenty years ago, people were asking,” Calvin Hu said. “But not so much anymore.”

At 51 and 47, respectively, Calvin and his brother, Michael, are a generation younger than Huang and Leong and, having grown up in this country, have had the easiest time bending Chinese tradition to American tastes. Their father, Eddie, came to New York from Taiwan in 1976. The boys and their mother, Audrey, followed in 1983, by which time Eddie already owned Hunan Taste on Doyers Street in Chinatown. The Hus opened the Greenvale restaurant in 1984 but it didn’t catch on until 1993, when Calvin and Michael took over.

“My parents worked hard, but they had lost touch with what was current,” Calvin Hu said. A business major at Adelphi University, he left the import-export business to run the place. The “boys” set about upgrading the ingredients (“we buy the same scallops as Per Se,” Calvin boasted) and the look, which evinces a distinctly sleek chic that barely hints at the Exotic East. The restaurant succeeds, he said, because he and his brother are not merely serving the community, they are a part of it.

“I went to high school with these people,” he said. “I saw them married and divorced and on their second or third marriages. My kid goes to school with their kids, I play tennis with them. I live where my customers live.”

When Albert Leung opened his first restaurant in Huntington, he lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown. His workday began at 8 a.m. when he hit the markets for vegetables and fish. At 10 he would depart for Queens, picking up one load of workers in Elmhurst and another in Flushing before heading east on the Long Island Expressway, north on Route 135 and east on Jericho Turnpike. (He would commence the return trip no earlier than 10 p.m.) In 2002, he moved to Huntington, where he has become a local celebrity.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “One day I took one of my cooks with me to the supermarket. I made a bet with him: Four people will say hello to me. First, I step outside the restaurant. ‘Hi Albert,’ says someone walking by. When we get out of the car at King Kullen, another guy says ‘Hi Albert.’ Inside King Kullen, another person says ‘Hi, Albert. You shop here?’ My cook and I get back in the car. He says, ‘That’s only three people.’ But when we are walking back inside the restaurant, a little four-year- old kid says, ‘Hi Albert.’ The mother says to the kid, ‘How do you know him?’ The kid says, ‘Grandma took me here and Albert gave me ice cream.’ I tell my cook, I have a face the whole town knows.”