Brian Wong with Chinese foods _320
As the athletes limber up in Beijing, Emma Pinch looks at how Chinatown has given Liverpudlians’ tastebuds a work-out over the years
GOING out for a Chinese is as unremarkable these days as a trip through the Mersey tunnel.
Ever since exciting taste juxtapositions like hot and sour and sweet chilli appeared on tables used to drab brown stews, we’ve been hooked.
When Chinese food first arrived in Liverpool, it was with a less universally appealing menu. But it was fascinating and strange, and, if you know where to go, you can still try it today.
The earliest known Chinese eating house was Pitt Street, which opened somewhere between 1910 and 1920. It was part of the first Chinatown which grew up following the arrival of Chinese sailors in 1866 on steamships carrying silk and cotton direct from Shanghai.
Chinese sailors would stay at a boarding house owned by shipping line Alfred Holt & Co, and bring preserved Chinese staples with them. The quiet, shy Chinese, often pigtailed and clothed in baggy smocks, kept themselves to themselves and dined on the supplies of food they had brought from home.
Soon, enterprising residents opened shops selling whatever was brought over on the ships, like Mr Kwong’s Kwongsang Lung Grocery Store, on Pitt Street, one of seven by 1906.
Businessman Brian Wong owns a Chinese grocery called Hondos, in Chinatown, which still sells foods which would have been eaten at the time.
“It took three months to get it here, as they had to sail round Cape Horn, so everything was preserved or salted,” he says.
“They would cut a couple of slices from salted fish and eat it with rice and a lot of soy or plum sauce. For vegetables, they would have pickled mustard greens, dried cole – pak choi boiled then dried in long strings – preserved turnip, which was steamed and served with beef, and they’d always bring dried Chinese mushrooms.”
Protein also came via sticks of dried beancurd and thousand-year eggs – duck eggs “cured” for 100 days in a clay-like mixture of strong tea, ashes, lime and salt, and eaten in slices with sweet pickled vegetables.
“They are dishes that are still enjoyed today,” says Brian, who also organises Liverpool’s Chinese New Year celebrations. “Salted fish or fried dace (mud carp) in a container with a bit of ginger and eaten with a bit of rice. Delicious.”
There were 3,200 Chinese men on shore in 1918, mainly from Hong Kong and Guangdong province, and a handful of cheap eating houses provided for them.
They gained a reputation for cheap, flavoursome food. Foo Nam Low’s, in Pitt Street, served ham bows and, for a few pence more, you could have chicken wings or legs, while a jug of chop suey was a bob.
The Chinese, mean- while, went for rice juk – boiled rice with stock, dung choi (Chinese cabbage) and meat, often completed with an egg and spring onions.
The 40s saw Chinatown’s migration away from the docks up to Nelson Street, and the 1950s saw a shift from launderettes to restaurants as the economic mainstay.
Brian Wong remembers washing dishes at his uncle’s restaurant, The Central Restaurant, in Nelson Street, in the early 60s, to earn money for driving lessons: “We were busy at lunchtimes then, because workers would come with their luncheon vouchers. For lunch, we did a cream soup like chicken or tomato, then a main like chop suey (another American dish, ‘everything’ this time with rice), and every chef had to learn to make jam tarts and apple pie. Office girls could buy three courses for half a crown.”
By the 80s, Peking restaurants had emerged, alongside the old-style Cantonese. Most now boast a mix of styles from different regions, each of which is fond of a specific flavour.
“In Sechuan province, the mid-west and the interior, where the weather is hot and humid, they like hot, spicy food,” says Brian. “Whereas, in Peking and Shanghai, they like sour, pickled tastes in dishes. The Cantonese in the South, like Hong Kong, prefer salty and sweet.”
Now, with the pan-Asian offerings and the hotter tastes of south-east Asia becoming popular, many Chinese rest- aurants make a good slice of their money from the after-hours student market, to whom quantity is a big draw.
If it has homogenised some restaur- ants, it is at least keeping up a trad- ition stretching back nearly 100 years – quickly cooked, richly flavoured food that costs little and fills the belly.
THE New Capital Chinese Restaurant is at 5 – 9 Nelson St, Liverpool. Tel 0151 709 1427 for bookings.
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