Wilson Tang - The Nom Wah Cookbook

W e have generally chosen to provide Chinese words in todays jyutping system for romanizing the pronunciation of gwong dung waa, the Cantonese dialect of Hong Kong and Guangdong province. For simplicity, we have not included the tonal numbers that accompany the romanization of each word. For certain foods, we have opted for the path of least resistance, using the spelling that is more popular and recognizable than its jyutping counterpart, such as char siu bao vs. caa siu baau.

The one exception where we employ pinyin (Mandarin phonetics) would be for soup dumplings, where the Mandarin term (xiao long bao, as opposed to the Cantonese siu lung baau) is far more popularit even has its own acronym: XLB!

Where appropriate, we have included the Traditional Chinese (as opposed to Simplified Chinese) characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. For the sake of consistency for people living in the United States, we have generally followed US usage in writing given name preceding surname.

A t the crook of Doyers Street in New Yorks Chinatowna street so crimped and cramped with history its like times taken a hairpin curveyoull find Nom Wah Tea Parlor. Sewn into the side street like a jewel in a hem, Nom Wah has provided a temporary home for the weary, the lonely, the fatigued, and the famished for the last hundred years. The sign, written in English with Chinese characters below, blinks like a homing beacon. Inside, a cup of scalding tea is always there for the sipping alongside an almond cookie or a steamer full of har gow for anyone who needs nourishment.

Push open the glass doors and the sound of porcelain knocking against porcelain still ricochets around the room. Even as the world outside has changed, the crack and cackle of teacup on table has been a steady score. Any business a century old has had its ups and downs, its crescendos and diminuendos. Nom Wah is no different. It survived; now it flourishes.

In the Nom Wah I remember growing up, this clatter was accompanied by the click-clack of ivory mahjong tiles and the exhale of a thousand cheap cigarettes. Add to that the plaintive creak of dim sum trolleys threading through the dining room, the hiss of steam from the kitchen line, and my uncle Wally, who always had a wordor at least a gruntfor everyone who walked through his door. It was the soundtrack of the Chinese experience in New York for much of the twentieth century. Or at least my Chinese American experience in New York for much of the twentieth century.

Uncle Wally, a hardworking man of strong opinions squeezed into a few words, didnt start the Tea Parlor. Wally arrived in New York in 1950, a sixteen-year-old immigrant fleeing Maos Great Leap Forward. Like the vast majority of early Chinatown arrivals, Wally came from Toishan, in the southern rim of the Guangdong province in Southern China, andagain like the vast many of early Chinatown arrivalshe found employment in the restaurant industry. By then, Nom Wah was already thirty years old, an institution in the constant flux of Chinatown life, started by Ed and May Choy, a family from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. The Choys were driven into the restaurant business by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a shameful blight on the history of America that not only unconstitutionally restricted Chinese immigration but, through visa restrictions, forced those immigrants who did arrive into low-skilled, low-pay labor like restaurant work and hand laundries. Take a look around and youll see how long-tailed those laws are and how hard generations of Chinese immigrants worked to move beyond them.

Under the Choy family, the Tea Parlor was largely a bakery specializing in delicately flavored red beanfilled moon cakes, a specialty eaten in Guangdong in particular during the Chinese New Year, and, of course, tea. Dim sum, which is traditionally a breakfast food, was available in the early morning toward lunch. Before heading to work, folks would stop by for a few moments to grab a fried egg crepe stuffed with vegetables or a pillowy char siu bao, a steamed bun with bits of sweet roast pork inside.

Under the Choys, Wally worked his way up from dishwasher to cook to waiter to manager. Finally, when the couple retired in 1974, he bought the businessand 1113 Doyers Street, the squat building that housed it. Continuing their tradition, he ran the place as a bakery but shifted his focus to include wholesale as well. After taking over the adjoining storefront, Nom Wah became known for its red bean paste and lotus seed paste, two essential components for Chinese bakeries.

Though the focus shifted, dim sum still wobbled on. It was easier to keep the restaurant going than to fold it up, so he still made sure there were snacks coming out of the kitchen. Making their rounds were carts laden with the classics: har gow, the pinkish shrimp visible through nearly translucent wrappers; golden squares of sausage-studded turnip cake; shimmering rice rolls called cheung fun topped with a sweet vinegary sauce and chunks of garlic-marinated spareribs.

I watched Nom Wah from afar. My father was also in the restaurant business until he retired a few years ago. When I was a kid, he had a takeout shop on the Upper West Side, and he also ran a wholesale company selling Chinese products to Chinese restaurants. Later he founded a travel agency. But when I was a kid we moved from the cramped confines of Chinatown into the outer boroughs. Some families ended up in Ridgewood or Flushing. We ended up in Middle Village, Queens. On the weekends, he always brought me back to Nom Wah, back to Chinatown, back to the traditions and a taste of home.

I was born in 1978, so I remember Nom Wah best starting in the 1980s and 1990s. By then the place was in a state of decline. Increasing free trade with China had introduced to the market Chinese-made red bean and lotus seed paste that was better and, though it was shipped from Guangzhou, cheaper than what Wally could make. Whats more, Chinatown itself was emptying out of Toisanese immigrants, many of whom, like my dad, had climbed up the socioeconomic ladder and bought houses outside of Manhattan. They were replaced, increasingly, by Fujianese immigrants, who not only spoke a different dialect but had their own distinct culture, culinary traditions, and family associations. Nom Wah soldiered on as an informal social club for the OG dim sum chefs in the neighborhood. After they got off the line from their 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, theyd gather at my uncles shop to shoot the shit for a few hours before they went home. Uncle Wally always had something to offer them, usually a tea and a cookie and a cigarette, but if they wanted something more than that, hed head over to a nearby restaurant and order it for them. That is, if he liked you. It wasnt, to say the least, a customer-friendly experience, but Wally didnt seem to care. I own the building, hed say, I can do what I want with it.