The interior looks a little more modern than Wo Hop's, but attaining it requires the same march down a dodgy looking stairway. It's one of the few restaurants in town to still offer this stir fry of bean sprouts, celery, water chestnuts, and cabbage with a choice of chicken, pork, or shrimp. The menu of classics is also similar, though Hop Kee bests Wo Hop in having a section devoted entirely to chop suey - the oldest recipe in the Chinese-American canon.

Hop Kee - Though it looks as old as Wop Hop, and indeed occupies an identical space a couple of storefronts south, Hop Kee is a comparative youngster, founded in 1968. Communicating with each other in Cantonese, the stately waiters wear starched, light blue shopcoats and don't miss a move as they pass around massive platters of chicken chow mein, sweet-and-sour pork, subgum egg foo young (in the section dubbed 'Chinese Omelettes'), and beef chow fun. Sweep down the red stairway into a small square room plastered with snapshots of its enthusiastic patrons. (Only Nom Wah Tea Parlor, originated in 1920 but recently hipsterized, is older.) The secret of Wo Hop's longevity? Both the purity of its Chinese-American fare, which seemingly uses no ginger, garlic, or soy sauce, and the small, subterranean nature of the real estate it occupies. (selling 'Oriental Gifts'), Wo Hop is the city's second oldest Chinese restaurant, founded in 1938. Wo Hop - Isolated in its little corner of Chinatown on lower Mott amidst other fossilized establishments like Wing On Wo & Co. Here are 10 places that keep the old wok-flame alive. Nowadays, Chinese-American fare is an endangered species, even though some of its vegetable-heavy creations are aligned with modern notions of what's good for you.

Health concerns also killed it in the last decades of the 20th century 'low salt' and 'fat-free' became watchwords. What killed it? The incursion of other types of fast food, and the appearance of other forms of Asian food - specifically, recently arrived fare from other Chinese regions, less tailored to meat-and-potato American tastes and hence more interesting to a city with diversifying culinary interests. It also betokened a kind of cultural exoticism in a country that was rapidly becoming less homogenous, and one with returning GIs who had been become familiar with Asian cuisines during World War II and the Korean War.īy the 70s and 80s though, appreciation for salty, bland, and sometimes greasy Chinese-American food, now over a century old, had begun to wane. They saw their heyday in the 40s and 50s, when a legion of housewives found employment outside the home and carryout Chinese became a necessity for feeding a family with two working parents. But it probably wasn't until the 1930s that neighborhood Chinese restaurants started to appear around the five boroughs. Meanwhile, beleaguered sailors started New York's first Chinatown around the time of the Civil War by 1885, according to William Grimes in Appetite City, our city could boast six Chinese restaurants.īy 1924, Chinese restaurants had become synonymous with floor shows and musical entertainment, and there were 14 in the vicinity of Times Square. Such recipes as chow mein, egg rolls, pepper steak, lo mein, egg foo young, shrimp toast, sweet-and-sour pork, and wonton soup gradually followed, making up a roster that came to include dozens of dishes that partly catered to American tastes. This flexible recipe featured meat and vegetables stir-fried into something already partly familiar to Americans as 'hash' - canned ingredients like bean sprouts, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots notwithstanding. By all accounts, their first invention was chop suey.

The new Gold Rush restaurateurs and railroad chefs collaborated in creating Chinese-American cuisine, with help from a few cooks in the gradually growing Chinatowns around the country.

King chop suey menu