Built in 1911 for Loo Gee Wing, a leading Chinatown merchant who made his fortune in the Gold Rush, the building has been owned by a clan society since 1926. First called the Lung Kong Kung Shaw Association, this society was later known as Lung Kong Tien Yee. The building now houses the Sun Ah Rooms, whose top three stories were lodgings for Chinese laborers early in the 20th century. On the ground level was the famous Ho Ho Chop Suey Restaurant. For many years the Ho Ho Chop Suey Restaurant's four-storey high neon sign served as a landmark, but eight years after the restaurant closed, the sign was removed. The building was designed by R. T. Perry and White and Cockrill with no apparent Chinese architectural influence.
Source: The Vancouver Heritage Foundation
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Click here >>>> to listen to Dr. Jan Walls perform a clapper dedication to the late James Sam of Foo's Ho Ho Restaurant.
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Chop Suey
Chop Suey is widely believed to have been invented in America by Chinese immigrants, but in fact comes from Taishan (Toisan) a district of Guangdong Province (Kwangtung Province), which was the home of many of the early Chinese immigrants. The Hong Kong doctor Li Shu Fan reported that he knew it in Taishan in the 1890's,
Chop Suey first appears in an American publication in 1888: "A staple dish for the Chinese gourmand is chow chop svey [sic], a mixture of chickens' livers and gizzards, fungi, bamboo buds, pigs' tripe, ad bean sprouts stewed with spices." In 1898, it is described as "A Hash of Pork, with Celery, Onions, Bean Sprouts, etc."
Despite its Taishan background, there are various colourful stories about its origin, which Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food (1999) characterizes as culinary mythology. Some say it was invented by Chinese immigrant cooks working on the US Transcontinental railway in the 19th century. Another story is that it was invented during Qing Dynasty premier Li Hong Zhang's visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a dish suitable for both Chinese and American palates. When reporters asked what food the premier was eating, his cook found it difficult to explain the dishes, and replied "mixed pieces".
In his book The Gangs of New York (1927), Herbert Asbury attributes the Americanized version of the term to a San Francisco dishwasher, calling it a bastardized version of the Cantonese phrase tsap sui, meaning "odds and ends", "miscellaneous pieces", or more simply "hash".
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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By Jim Wong-Chu
What is a fortune cookie and where did it come from?
The answer is more curious and interesting that one might think. Most food historians believe the first cookies were created as a temple treat in the Kyoto area of Japan. There is a Japanese temple tradition of random fortunes, called omikuji. The Japanese version of the cookie differs in several ways: they are a little bit larger, they are made of darker dough, and their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. Although these cookies do contain a fortune, the small slip of paper is wedged into the bend of the cookie rather than placed inside the hollow portion.
The first North American version of this special treat is credited to Makoto Hagiwara, who introduced the fortune cookie at Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, between 1910 and 1914, before the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Makoto made the senbei (Japanese for cookie) by hand in iron skillets over a charcoal fire, then folded the senbei while it was still warm. Fortunes were written in English and put into the centre. When the fortune cookies became popular, Makoto asked the San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo, to fill the gap.
There are other competing claims. David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle House in Los Angeles, claimed to have invented the cookie in 1918 but Seiichi Kito, founder of Fugestsu-do of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, claimed to have gotten the idea from temple cookies and sold his cookies to Chinese restaurants where they were greeted with enthusiasm in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Today, fortune cookies come in all sizes, colours and flavours. There are fortune cookie factories in many major cities in Canada and the United States. The most well known are San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in Ross Alley, where you can watch women deftly turn cooked, flatten dough into cookies before your eyes, and Mee Mee Bakery on Stockton Street, where you can custom order fortune cookies to your specifications.
The largest manufacturer of fortune cookies is Wonton Food, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, making over 4.5 million fortune cookies per year. Another large manufacturer is Peking Noodle in the Los Angeles area. There are other smaller, local manufacturers including Tsue Chong Company in Seattle and Sunrise Fortune Cookie in Philadelphia. In Vancouver, fortune cookies are produced by Golden Yuan Noodle Company. Headquartered in the heart of Toronto's Chinatown, fortunecookies.ca, will take custom orders and guarantee delivery from factory to your door.
While largely a North American item, these tasty treats are occasionally seen in other countries, most often in Chinese restaurants in India, Brazil, Mexico, Britain, and France.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_cookie
Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee
http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/2438/