This restaurant offers a taste of nostalgia

This August will mark 34 years since I wrote an ongoing restaurant column that began in Honolulu Star-Bulletin and postponed to Honolulu Star-Announcer. Knowing this story, some readers I met speculated, “Wow, you must have eaten at every restaurant by now.”

I’ve certainly been a lot. If I calculate a minimum of one new restaurant per week over 33 years, the number would be 1,716, well below the estimated 3,600 restaurants open statewide, although I have increased small popup visits and of catering restaurants that have proliferated in recent years.

With the emphasis on “current” being what’s new, I’ve rarely looked back at some of the oldest restaurants among us, but one in particular intrigued me just because of the vintage sign of the 1950s that still adorns its roofline, evoking an era steeped in nostalgia.

Every time I walked past, I was like, “I need to eat here someday. But I had my reservations. For one thing, older restaurants don’t tend to delight customers after their heyday for many reasons such as staff and ownership changes, and the initial desire to please turning into a nonchalant routine.

And the idea of ​​Cantonese cuisine didn’t really thrill me. That’s because, for me, growing up as a Chinese in Hawaii meant eating a lot of Cantonese food from youth to adulthood, which made it pretty monotonous. Young food influencers probably couldn’t understand this but until the 1980s most people stayed home and cooked and if you wanted to go out to eat there were only Cantonese restaurants, drive-thru, pizzas, or the fancy steakhouse or French. restaurant reserved for special occasions. There were no Thai or Vietnamese restaurants, ramen houses, or other popular cuisines of today that didn’t start popping up until the late 1980s. That’s how I ended up doing this job. No one else in the newsroom wanted it because they felt there weren’t enough restaurants in Honolulu to sustain a regular column for even a year. And at that point, I was ready to try anything beyond Cantonese food.

Finally seated inside Tasty Chop Suey, and after all the excitement of the other kitchens, I found it really nice to retreat to this comfort food of my childhood.

The restaurant was opened by Lillian Wong and her chef husband in 1956, and moved to its current space, in what had been a laundromat, in the 1960s. The restaurant was sold in 1985 and changed hands several times since, and while the original family spirit may have waned over time, the food prepared by the restaurant’s Hong Kong-born chef hits the mark and remains as good as any in Chinatown.

Tasty Chop Suey’s place in history was immortalized as one of three Hawaiian restaurants—the others were Wo Fat and Lau Yee Chai—featured in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s 2011 Chinese-American exhibit.” Sweet & Sour”, an examination of Chinese cuisine in America as a window into the immigrant experience.

One of the original Tasty Chop Suey menus featured at the expo showed fried chicken with oyster sauce for $2.25, roast duck for $2, and the most expensive dish, lobster with black bean sauce for $4. And, you could get a small bowl of wonton mein for 60 cents, a large one for 75 cents.

I can’t tell you what the food was like then, but the classics remain, cooked to please contemporary palates.

Although Chinese restaurants are largely focused on family dining, changing demographics and pandemic isolation mean that there are many special lunch plates for solo dinner, such as ginger chicken or chicken crispy over rice ($12.50 each), roast duck and kau yuk over rice ($12.50), plus individual soups like saimin ($10) or wor wonton mein ($12) .

The Hong Kong-style roast duck ($18 half) and pork char siu ($12.50) are staples on the family table. There’s nothing more satisfying to my Chinese heart than biting into that mahogany-colored five-spice, soy and garlic marinated duck skin and savoring the tender sweetness of the familiar char siu. Add to the variety of seafood, vegetable and rice or noodle options ranging from prawns with honey and walnuts ($17.50), steamed fish with ginger and onions ($18) , stuffed eggplant ($11) and char siu chow fun ($12) with lup cheong and chicken chow mein ($14).

For a chop suey dish with a bit of everything, there’s the tofu bat chun ($13.50), a stir-fry of tofu, snow peas, broccoli, baby corn, onions, mushrooms, choy sum, pork and beef.

And, if you really want to go old-fashioned, there’s one of my favorites, a pork hash patty covered in salted egg ($14.50). Not everyone will understand, but when it comes to foods that have shaped my memories and connect me to a simpler past, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Tasty Chop Suey

1606 Gulick Ave, Honolulu
Food: ***½
A service: ***
Atmosphere: ***
Value: ***½
To call: 808-841-3115
Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily
Prices: Dinner for four around $60 to $70

Visits to Nadine Kam’s restaurant are unannounced and paid for by Honolulu featured advertiser. Follow Nadine on Instagram (@nadinekam) or on YouTube (youtube.com/nadinekam).