blake murphy said:Dave Smith said:blake murphy said:
Quoted message said:
and most 'ethnic' restaurants need a local ethnic population (at least
in the beginning) to survive. small towns may lack this.
That probably depends on the ethnic restaurant. Other than college and
university students, there is no real Chinese community around here, but
there have always been lots of Chinese restaurants. While the major
cities
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:around here have significant Italian communities, they tend not to move
to
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:the smaller towns, but Italian restaurants are common.... often run by
Greeks.
chinese is probably the outlier in this. most towns, if there is any
'foreign' cuisine, will have chinese, closely followed (i think) by
italian.
There have been Chinese restos in even the most white bread of little burgs
in downstate Illannoy as long as I can remember, I think the first one I
visited as a kid was in Galesburg IL c. 1963. There is one in in the tiny
county seat (pop. 3500) of my home county...
Quoted message said:new york city (in the seventies, anyway) tickled me because there were
many chinese/cuban restaurants. evidently there was a significant
chinese population in cuba which fled/was kicked out when castro took
over. the menus were a hoot.
Chinese were brought to Cuba in the 19th century to help harvest sugarcane
and do other "grunt" labor. Havana still has a Chinatown, with a number of
"Chinese" restos. Many of the Sino - Cubans left when Kastro came to power,
but there are still a few left:
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y98/dec98/09e7.htm
FEATURE-Cuban Chinatown enjoys revival but lacks Chinese
By Angus MacSwan
"HAVANA, Dec 9 (Reuters) - In a dingy back-street Havana office, two elderly
Chinese men, Abel Fung Lee and Cecilio Lau, sit chatting in the language of
their faraway homeland.
On one wall hangs a photograph of a young Fidel Castro, on another a
red-and-gold lettered calendar with a scene of a Yangtze River gorge. The
office houses the Kwong Wah Po Chinese-language newspaper and people drop by
to pick up the new edition, set by hand in a back room from tray-upon-tray
of lead characters and printed on a 100-year-old press.
Lee, the paper's administrator, and his friend Lau are among the last
survivors of what was once a thriving Chinese immigrant community in Cuba.
They have weathered the hardships of life under communism with stoicism.
``There are not many of our fellow countrymen left here,'' Lee said.
``Almost all left for the United States. The old ones are dying. We are all
old and life here is very hard.''
Yet, even as the Chinese population dwindles, efforts are being made to
revive Chinatown.
Like much of the Cuban capital, its old buildings are decaying. But
restaurants in the small Calle Cuchillo with names like Luna de Oro (Golden
Moon) and El Gran Dragon (the Great Dragon) are filled with tourists and
locals alike, even if the waitresses are as often as not mixed-race Cubans.
A Chinese-style arch was erected at the entrance to the street last year and
another is going up a few blocks away, paid for with government donations
from Havana and Beijing.
'WE MUST RESCUE CHINATOWN'
``We must rescue Chinatown, although it will not be like before,'' said
Alfonso Chao Chiu. president of the Casino Chung Wah, the main social center
for the Chinese community.
The Chinese first came to Cuba in 1847 -- in ``virtual slavery,'' Chao
said -- as indentured labor for the sugar cane plantations. Others came from
the California gold fields with stakes to set up ``bodegas,'' or grocery
stores, and other small businesses. War and revolution in China brought new
waves.
At its peak, the Chinese population numbered about 200,000. Many married
with non-Chinese and Asian features are not uncommon today in Cubans' mostly
European and African mix.
Chao described a bustling Chinatown before Castro's 1959 revolution with
medicine shops, restaurants, laundries and a cinema showing movies from Hong
Kong. El Pacifico restaurant was a favorite with American tourists who
flocked to the decadent Havana of the 1950s and Castro himself has eaten
there, although not for several years now, a waiter said.
Lee emigrated from Canton in 1952. He built up a successful trading business
in Havana but his partner squandered their fortune on gambling and women, he
said. So he started again with a bodega and had four shops by the time
Castro's forces triumphed and set out to build a socialist Cuba.
In 1963, his business was taken over by the state. ``They said I could stay
and work in the bodega but I didn't want to. I became a mechanic,'' he said.
ONLY ABOUT 430 PURE CHINESE LEFT
Most of Cuba's Chinese left or died of old age and now there are only about
430 pure Chinese, with an average age of about 80, according to Chao. But
about 3,200 Cubans with Chinese blood belong to several family and clan
associations, many of which once had links with the nationalist Kuomintang
that was defeated by Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese civil war.
Under a special arrangement with a government wary of private
entrepreneurship, the associations are allowed to run restaurants as
businesses, Roberto Vargas Li, manager of the Tien Tan, said.
Taxes are high, he said, and in Cuba, where many things are in short supply,
spices and other ingredients are sometimes hard to find. But on a recent
Saturday night barman Carlos Leong was serving chilled Tsing Tsao beer as a
group of Chinese Embassy officials attacked their food.
Vargas Li, 33, whose grandfather was Chinese and grandmother Cuban, is a
member of the Grupo Promodor del Barrio Chino (Chinatown Promotion Group),
which is leading efforts to revitalize the district. One plan is to attract
more Chinese immigrants, he said. His own wife came from Shanghai in 1996.
Sipping tea with a visitor to the casino -- actually a social club, not a
gambling parlor -- Chao spoke of his efforts to keep Chinese culture alive
in Cuba.
Mandarin classes are held there every Saturday, with about 15 people
attending, and the club also holds classes in Tai-chi, traditional medicine
and cookery.
In one room is a Buddhist shrine. There is also a large library and some
beautiful objects such as 100-year-old rosewood chairs inlaid with lacquer
amid the pervasive Havana shabbiness. But resources are slim and the
difficulties many.
``We lack everything to make repairs,'' said Chao, who was born in Havana in
1941 to a Chinese father and Cuban mother. Only limited help has come from
the Beijing government over the years, he said. During the Cold War-era
split between Moscow and Beijing, Cuba stayed in the Soviet camp.
Back at the Kwong Wah Po, Lee said he was worried about his own and his
wife's health as the years caught up with them, especially with medicines
hard to obtain. And he doubted Chinatown could return Phoenix-like to its
glory days.
``They would like to make it like before but it can't be -- there are not
enough Chinese,'' he said."
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