Originally Posted by TWA884 (Post 37749883)

Cecilia Chiang and Sylvia Wu would like to have a word with you. ;)

Originally Posted by YVR Cockroach (Post 37760875)

Have to admit I have no idea who they are, or have ever heard of them.

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Chiang had to flee her home a second time when the Communists took over. She wound up in the U.S., where she was both shocked and amused by the food most Americans considered to be Chinese — like gloppy chop suey. "They think chop suey is the only thing we have in China," she said with a laugh. "What a shame."

So Chiang resolved to open a high-end Chinese restaurant that served authentic fare. "Everybody said, 'You cannot make it. You cannot speak English. You don't know anything,' " she recalled. But starting in 1961, tourists, dignitaries and celebrities — from Mae West to John Lennon — flocked to The Mandarin for then-unfamiliar food like tea-smoked duck and twice-cooked pork.

To this day, Cecelia Chiang's DNA can be found all over American Chinese food.

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At Madame Wu’s Garden, which she opened in 1959 and ran for nearly 40 years, her menus were constantly evolving, but peppered with regional deep cuts and then-hard-to-find dishes. To diners who’d never had Peking duck, the restaurant represented an imagined ideal of tradition and authenticity, but that image obscured her more complex work: Ms. Wu’s approach as a restaurateur was kinetic, profound and always strategic.
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Her regulars included Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Redford and Cary Grant. When Mr. Grant asked her for a “Chinese chicken salad” one night, she made a dish of fried won ton skins, rice noodles and shredded chicken, packed with scallions and dressed in mustard, soy sauce and sesame oil, loosely based on a banquet dish she remembered eating as a child.

It was so popular, she added it to the menu, published the recipe in local newspapers and included it in her first cookbook. Ms. Wu helped write the blueprint for American Chinese chicken salad as we know it, more than a decade before Wolfgang Puck put his own version on the menu at Chinois, his French-Chinese restaurant still open in Santa Monica.
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It was modest at first, with very little décor and no liquor license. But after a few years, she expanded Madame Wu’s Garden into a 11,000-square-foot space on Wilshire Boulevard that could seat 300 people. She made it dazzle with pagoda-style architectural details, stone waterfalls, imported art and a sculpture on the ceiling that rippled with gold. The aesthetic was quickly imitated, and co-opted by white restaurateurs.

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Originally Posted by TWA884 (Post 37760953)

Originally Posted by TWA884 (Post 37760953)

Originally Posted by gaobest (Post 37762805)

Also got to see a mystery event in an adjacent room.

Originally Posted by YVR Cockroach (Post 37763833)

Post dim sum analysis was that there was too much pork (in everything except the taro puffs and the osmanthus jelly, but maybe there was pork byproducts in those too), and every thing seemed the same (doesn't help that I tend to order the same stuff).