“I had seen this photograph of Chinatown in the 1940s, and all the restaurants had signs saying ‘Chop Suey,’” he says. So what is chop suey exactly? That’s what Coe himself wanted to know several years ago when he was doing research at the New York Public Library for another book on the city’s history and noticed something curious. In fact, the restaurant offers four varieties of the stuff: beef, chicken, roast pork and shrimp. Luckily for our purposes, there remain a few unfashionably antiquated locations that still serve the dubious-sounding dish, Hop Kee being one.

Those who remember it at all know it only as a preparation of sliced pork or chicken cooked with bean sprouts, onions, celery, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts until everything is mushy and flavorless, then served with a gummy, translucent sauce over white rice.” to mention chop suey in the title - a funny coincidence that nicely demonstrates just how popular and ubiquitous this particular dish used to be.Īs Coe writes in his book, “Today, chop suey is a relic in most parts of the United States, another food fad that has ended up on the trash heap of culinary history. Published in 2009, Coe’s book is one of at least two existing cultural histories of Chinese food in the U.S. Coe, dressed smartly in a polo shirt, jeans and glasses, is the author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. But if you never picked up chopsticks during the middle of the last century, you probably haven’t tried chop suey and don’t know much else about it. We watch steaming piles of Cantonese-style crabs and whole fish fly past us, but we won’t be eating any of that. The décor is simple and outdated, and the florescent lights are a bit much. “They were the first Chinese people who came here.”

“It’s one of the few old-time Taishanese restaurants,” says Andrew Coe, sitting across from me in one of the venue’s burgundy-colored booths. On a nondescript corner in Manhattan’s Chinatown and down a flight of stairs, beneath the pavement packed with busy Asian shoppers and curious tourists alike, is a place where you can travel back in time: Hop Kee on Mott Street, a subterranean restaurant serving what many Americans might describe as old-school Chinese food.

Chop suey books