Food Notes: 2/17
Baumgart's Cafe, General Tso's Chicken, Spaghetti and Meatball Romance, and more!
Today is a big day, culinarily speaking. As Katie on Bluesky points out, with Ramadan, Lunar New Year, Mardis Gras, and Rosh Chodesh Adar, there’s a lot of fried food happening in the world right now.
The intersection of all these holidays seemed like a great opportunity to celebrate General Tso’s chicken, a fusion of Chinese, Taiwanese, and American cuisine, served up by Baumgart’s Cafe, a fusion of Chinese American and New Jersey diner cuisine.
The first Baumgart’s opened in Englewood, Bergen County, New Jersey in 1944 as a soda fountain and ice cream parlor. The menu featured classics like a New York Egg Cream – chocolate milk mixed with carbonated soda. Egg creams are synonymous with diners in the tri-state area, and while there’s no definitive origin, they emerged from Yiddish-speaking New York City during the Great Depression.
The original Baumgart’s ice cream parlor evolved to include diner dishes like burgers and salads. But the big changes happened in 1988 when Steve Wu, an immigrant from Taiwan, bought the restaurant.
Wu had previously operated a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan and decided to bring those dishes to Baumgart’s. Eighteen months of renovations and a new Taiwanese chef reinvented the restaurant. Wu retained the Art Deco soda fountain bar and many of the diner classics, but introduced a variety of Chinese American dishes.
Wu also expanded the restaurant into a chain, opening a Ridgewood location ten years later, and by 2010 another in Livingston. At its peak, there were five restaurants including Nyack, New York and Edgewater, New Jersey, each serving a mix of east Asian cuisines including sushi and Chinese American favorites, as well as diner classics, and soda-fountain style ice cream.
The pandemic was unkind to the chain with the Englewood location closing in 2022 after the building was sold. The chain is down to two locations today, one in Ridgewood and the newest in Fairview.
During Christmas break, my wife and I headed over to the Fairview location for a quick lunch. Here the Chinese and Japanese dishes dominate the menu, though there remains a few diner classics like burgers and fries, and an emphasis on ice cream. I ordered a General Tso’s chicken lunch box.
The real general Tso (General Zuo) was born in mainland China in Hunan around 1812. Jennifer 8 Lee, in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, compares him favorably to Colonel Sanders in that they are both military men best known for chicken dishes that they are questionably connected to.
According to Lee, General Tso’s chicken only arrived in Hunan province in the 1990s by Chef Peng – years after the dish debuted and conquered the United States. The Chinese version of the Chinese American dish doesn’t exactly resemble what Americans have come to expect in General Tso’s chicken.
Chef Peng was part of a new wave of Chinese chefs who transformed American Chinese cuisine. These chefs were trained in Communist China before fleeing to the Republic of China, the island nation better known as Taiwan. These chefs then opened restaurants in New York city in the 1960s and 1970s, changing the way Americans thought about the cuisine.
Chef Peng opened Peng Yuan on the East Side of Manhattan. T.T. Wang (along with Micheal Tong) opened Hunam Restaurant and Shun Lee Palace. And Wen Dah Tai, aka Uncle Tai, opened Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan. These influential, competitive restaurateurs began creating new dishes for Chinese American cuisine and introduced Hunan flavors to Americans in ways that were familiar to them, producing dishes like orange chicken, and others that are close relatives to General Tso’s, like General Ching’s.
Then after they were introduced in New York, reinvented, did variations of General Tso’s make their way back to mainland China.
And to settle many debates, New York City’s Chinese American restaurants are the undisputed best in the country because of these rivalries.
Jennifer 8 Lee finally met up with Chef Peng who recalled inventing the original dish behind General Tso’s around 1955 while still on the island of Taiwan, but his version of the dish would be mostly unrecognizable in America today.
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