Golden Soup
Wu and Chien sit down at a large round table in the dining room of Golden Soup, a banquet restaurant on the second floor of the Gold World plaza in San Gabriel.
“This is where we filmed our big dim sum fight,” Wu says.
He waves a hand around the grand room, pointing out the mirrored pillars, the walls lined with lavish glass panels and the large round tables covered in white cloths. This was the setting for one of the most impressive fight scenes in the series. It took a week to shoot and required dozens of stuntpeople, with fighting in the kitchen, the dining room, the parking garage and the hallway just outside the restaurant’s doors.
“It felt like such a big event that we wanted to take over a restaurant,” Wu says. “It just felt like a banquet was such an old Chinese, Taiwanese thing to do.”
Though they say they’re still full from the hot pot, Wu and Chien order eggplant with garlic sauce, fried pork chops with salt and pepper, braised pork belly with preserved cabbage, sautéed spinach, beef chow fun and steamed pork with salty fish. The meal also comes with a pot of rice and a bowl of soup for the table.
The pork chops crunch when you take a bite, then ooze with an intoxicating mixture of juice and grease. The chow fun noodles are just al dente and slick with soy sauce and oil. The fat on the pork belly jiggles perfectly, nestled up against a mound of pickled mustard greens in a sweet and salty red sauce.
A hush falls over the table as everyone passes plates around the table and works on cleaning their pork chop bones.
“I think we have a lot of dinner scenes around a table like this with a lazy Susan, and that’s how I grew up eating,” Chien says. “Food is big in every culture, but I think especially in Asian culture it’s important because it’s one of the rare moments of focused family time.”
“What’s amazing is I think we featured food the best we could on the show, but there’s still so many dishes and restaurants that we didn’t get a chance to use in the SGV,” Wu says. “I really encourage anyone who likes the show and likes to eat to come out and really do a full tour.”
Food is just one facet of a show that managed to accurately capture the Asian American experience in Los Angeles. Others include subtle nods to life in a typical Asian American home. In the middle of an intense fight scene, a character makes sure to remove his shoes, a common Asian practice when entering a home.
“We really wanted to make a show that in some ways reclaimed our childhoods,” Wu says. “We grew up watching so much American content and we didn’t feel like we were comfortable with whatever Asian American we were seeing. We wanted people to feel comfortable watching this, and feel celebrated in a lot of ways.”
As we boxed up our leftovers in what seemed like at least a dozen containers, I thought back to the multiple people who approached Chien throughout the day to ask for a photo and let him know that they loved the show. The series resonated with so many, including me. I’ll keep hoping Netflix reconsiders a second season.