San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
For some Asian American restaurateurs, heritage means diner fare.
A generation of Asian American restaurateurs (and their children) made a life in diners and burger joints.
The popular personal narratives of immigrants and their descendants can get fairly pat at times, especially when it comes to stories about food.
“I have so much angst because my mom packed korma in my lunch box and all of the other kids made fun of me.”
Or: “My old-school immigrant parents could never understand why I loved Raising Cane’s chicken fingers so much.”
(Full disclosure: I have used all of these tricks.)
As someone who reads the genre voraciously, the cadence of these stories has taken on a familiarity, an archetypal feeling that seems on par with Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey: the protagonist grows up eating smelly food, finding escape in burgers and fries. But then she leaves home and her nostalgia for her origins brings her back to those flavors. And then perhaps she writes a cookbook about it.
The romantic notions that we have about the immigrant restaurateur also circle around this tension between authenticity and commercial interests, assimilation and soulfulness. We hold up the chef-artist who crafts tongue-blistering chile fish or aggressively cartiliginous sisig as an exemplar of realness while the restaurateurs who serve up General Tso’s chicken and steam-table curries are met with dismissal, or at least good-humored condescension.
But in California, so many stories go against that grain. Look around the Bay Area, and you’ll see East and Southeast Asian immigrant restaurateurs and their descendants building lives around doughnuts, hash browns and hamburgers, devoting days and nights to food that is far removed from conversations about fusion and authenticity. There can and should be an entire book written about South Asian immigrants and pizza, for instance.
From the creamy grits at Eddie’s Cafe on Divisadero to the thin-patty burgers at Lovely’s in Oakland, it’s clear that Asian Americans have played a big part in the development of American cuisine here in California.
“I think the burger represents for my family a sense of success and a sense of equality,” said Dakota Kim, a writer whose parents also ran such American restaurants. For her parents to perfect this all-American dish in their own way was a kind of victory: proof that they belonged here.
New York chef Angela Dimayuga’s father managed McDonald’s restaurants in the Bay Area when she was growing up, cementing his place in fast food history by inventing the value meal. Ted Ngoy, now known to many as the “doughnut king,” trained fellow Cambodian refugees in the art of doughnutmaking to give them a leg up, planting Christy’s Donuts franchises throughout California. And for some people who grew up within that culinary Americana, that archetypal conflict between third-culture kids and their parents, at least when it comes to food, just isn’t there.
“I grew up eating hash browns, eggs, bacon — it’s comfort food,” Justin Chang said over the phone. His 26-seat Oakland restaurant, Delegates, serves a one-page menu of exactly that, plus burgers.
When he was a child, his parents, immigrants from South Korea, made their living running breakfast and lunch restaurants in the East Bay, serving American diner-style meals with a few outliers like kalbi and teriyaki chicken sprinkled in. Located in downtown Oakland, Delegates is surrounded by construction projects; most of the customers I’ve seen there have been men in orange safety vests and hard hats, gulping down bacon and coffee on their breaks.
Kim, whose parents ran similar establishments in Riverside and Arizona before they recently retired, has a similar story.
“People always assume or ask if it was a Korean restaurant,” she said. But American food was what they were good at, so they stuck with submarine sandwiches, pancakes and Americanized Mexican dishes. “My parents are so American, I can’t even go into how American they are. They can tell you more about hamburger buns than they can tell you about making kimchi at a restaurant.”
Both Kim and Chang grew up in the business, with as much nostalgia for meals at their parents’ restaurants as their home cooking.
In the early mornings before school, Chang recalled, his parents would pile him and his sister into their van and drive them to whichever restaurant they were running at the time. While he and his sister slept, his parents would prep for the day’s breakfast service.
“My dad would wake us up and they’d make us what was easy: eggs and bacon, with hash browns.” As an adult, he keeps circling back to those formative meals, arranging the breakfast plate at Delegates exactly the same way each time. A sandwich board outside of the restaurant says, “‘BEST burgers in town’ — my mom.”
“I do think all of us, people working to understand Asian American culture, we’re figuring it out in the dark,” Kim said, “feeling around to understand where things are.”
One of the most refreshing parts of the recent Netflix film “Always Be My Maybe,” which is set in San Francisco, is one of the leads’ fathers, Harry Kim, an HVAC technician who lives in the Richmond. Played by James Saito, the elder character doesn’t speak with an accent — his family’s clearly been in the U.S. for generations.
That sense of age is present at Marina Submarine in San Francisco, where the decor is wornin, all red walls and framed beer advertisements. A menu of sandwich varieties looks like it was hand-painted decades ago: roast beef, turkey, hot Italian, an “atomic submarine” loaded with the whole barnyard.
When you go there, you have to order directly with Kyu Cho, the (un-ironic) sandwich artist, and linger next to people in suits and construction workers while he whips up the orders, one sandwich at a time. The shop’s aesthetic and “cash only” rule place it firmly in the old school, catering to the same type of crowd that files into Delegates across the bay.
The same feeling of historicity permeates Bob’s Donuts, Eddie’s Cafe and Beep’s Burgers, the latter which was admitted to San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry two years ago. These places are neighborhood stalwarts, oases for longtime Bay Area residents, and they all happen to be run by Asian Americans.
While most Asian communities haven’t been so entrenched in the rest of the country, for Californian Asian Americans, people like Cho or Eddie’s Cafe owners Helen and Min Hwang are commonplace. We run the
risk of perpetuating the idea of Asians being eternal foreigners by ignoring their stories in favor of rehashing the same immigrant narratives.
For Dakota Kim, putting in time at her parents’ diner gave her a better understanding of what “Asian American cuisine” could entail, making the perceived borders between cuisines feel much more permeable. “I do think that Korean food is American food. And our stories don’t have to be separate. We see burgers and kimchi as so separate, but I don’t think we need to see them that way.”