It doesn’t get much more meta than this. Here in Shanghai is a restaurant which specializes in American-style “Chinese food”. Beef & broccoli, orange chicken, egg rolls, General Tsao’s chicken, sweet & sour pork. Stuff like that. The place is called Fortune Cookie (which is doubly clever as fortune cookies aren’t a thing in China.)
They even have egg foo young. When I was a small child, my family loved a Chinese restaurant in North Hollywood called Joe Woo’s. (We weren’t alone, apparently. It has its own Facebook nostalgia page.) Anyway, whenever my parents ordered egg foo young they would call it “Egg Foo Young IV” as a parody of my name. I loved that.
Grampa Young would often take the whole Young clan to Joe Woo’s on special occasions. Owning a print shop, he was always whipping up quirky novelties. Like tearoff “scratch pads” of U.S. dollar bills. After Chinese food, we’d eat our fortune cookies and he’d pass around a fortune he’d printed himself which read “Help! I’m stuck in a fortune cookie factory!”
Last night, this was my fortune in the fortune cookie from Fortune Cookie:
I love this story so much. I’ll never look at Egg Foo Young the same:) Keep the entries coming. Hopefully I will catch up on all of them one of these days!
That was a great story.
You brought back many happy memories of my daddy and dinners at Joe Woo’s. We just had a clan gathering at Valley Spring Lane to honor your daddy on his 80th, and we talked about the scratch pads made of fresh dollar bills which my father would take to a cashier, pull off some bills and say, “Fresh off the press.”
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