Saturday night Señora and I went to dinner with two other couples. For our outing the group chose Lu Lu Seafood & Dim Sum, a Chinese restaurant. To call Lu Lu’s a Chinese restaurant — given the American perception of what a Chinese restaurant is – smacks of comparing Mexican high cuisine to Taco Bell. It very definitely is not the Tex-Mex of Chinese food.
St. Louis has an older area that is more or less informally known as Chinatown. There are many Chinese restaurants, supermarkets and other Chinese ran businesses in this area. Much of the Chinese population lives nearby. I looked it up, and the demographers put the St. Louis Chinese population at around 13,000. I thought it was much larger than that. For comparison those same demographers put the Jewish population of St. Louis at around 60,000 souls. We also have the largest population of Bosnians outside of Bosnia. I have seen varying figures, some as high as 90,000, but Google is currently saying somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000. At one time all the ethnic groups in St. Louis followed a Chicago pattern and were to be found mostly in their own neighborhoods, but that pattern is changing with many folks spreading out to the suburbs. However, we still have areas famous for their ethnicity like Little Italy off of Shaw Avenue.
To demonstrate how ethnic Lu Lu’s is, you seldom have a wait person whose English is anything except very obviously a second language they are not comfortable with. When they take your order they are writing it down on their order pads using Chinese Hanzi characters. The restaurant is frequently filled with ethnic Chinese, and it is a fun place to go for the Chinese New Year. Last time we did that, they had a TV set up showing celebrations going on in China, and at one point during the dinner a dragon snaked its way around the diners.
As we were seated at the restaurant, a Chinese woman took our drink orders. A young Chinese man cleared off the extra place setting from our large, round table with a glass lazy Susan in the middle. He then busied himself filling our water glasses. Someone asked him a question to which he responded by singing, in English, the first few bars of Happy Birthday. Okay, that was a bit different.
Later on, I asked him, thinking he was our wait person, what ChowFun was as I was not familiar with the word, nor were anyone else at our table. He kept looking at me blankly, so I pointed it out to him on the menu. Turns out ChowFun is actually Chow Fun which is a Cantonese dish using wide, rice noodles with other ingredients. However, our young man never responded, but returned a few minutes later carrying a fistful of plastic forks which he placed on the table next to me. I am still scratching my head.
Later on in the meal, as he was removing dishes we no longer needed, someone asked him another question. Again he responded by singing Happy Birthday, but then smiling broadly (with his eyes as he had on a mask) at the person who just asked the question. By then I had figured out that when he did not understand the English, which was most of the time, he sang a snatch of Happy Birthday. It was not a very effective communication method, but it was still very charming. He mostly did his job by our wait person barking orders at him in Mandarin. Of course, if it had been Cantonese, I would not have known the difference.
I think the barking of commands is a cultural phenomenon. There is a Chinese carryout place that independently, Señora and I quit using as the ethnic Chinese man running the place tended to bark at the customers and seemed to be even grumpier than me. Again in retrospect it was probably a cultural thing, but there are LOTS of Chinese carryout places around here where they do not bark at you.
I did see an interesting use of chopsticks during our current sojourn to Lu Lu’s. A Caucasian man was using a fork to eat with and one chop stick to push the food onto his fork, much as I would use a table knife to do the same.
Anyway, if you ever get to St. Louis, or have not eaten there, I would recommend a trip to Lu Lu’s for the food and the cultural experience. However, do avoid the calamari which is normally a food that I like, but their treatment of it is definitely different from my expectations that were formed by eating in Italian restaurants.
Sounds like a fun visit. I found myself laughing at the random singing of happy birthday.