Long-awaited Wakiya is now taking reservations starting July 25th!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 6, 2007
Eater informs us that Chinese-Japanese-French Wakiya at the Gramercy Park Hotel is now taking reservations: (212) 995-1330. It has taken more than a year and a half for Ian Schrager to get his upscale Chinese restaurant as Alan Yau of Hakkasan dropped Park Chinois (what is with all the French-Chinese?) earlier this year because of visa issues. Coordinated with the Nobu team, Yuji Wakiya’s restaurant promises to be the buzziest Chinese restaurant opening in decades. Eater informs us that there are no 8 p.m. tables being awarded, though 7 p.m. or 8:30 p.m. or later are okay. Chinese flavor, Japanese delicacy, French presentation.
Topics: Chinese | No Comments »
Australia is (literally) a penniless society and other notes from the Chinese restaurant frontier
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 5, 2007
The Australians eliminated their penny in 1991 — without too much of a fuss, so all cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents. Some Australians feel that Americans shouldn’t give up the penny without a fight (and indeed Americans for Common Cents seems to be holding the torch there). Other thoughts. Southern hemisphere, so seasons are flipped. It’s July but nights are long, days are cold, and there are no holiday festivities in sight. It feels like Narnia: winter without Christmas.
Why journey to Australia? Because it turns out that three of the most notable Chinese restaurants in the world are in Australia:
- Billy Kwong in Sydney, Kylie Kwong’s Chinese restaurant of modest size but large reputation. It’s the only Chinese restaurant to make it R.W. Apple’s posthumously published list of 10 restaurants around the world worth getting on a plane for.
- Flower Drum in Melbourne, which has made it to Restaurant Magazine’s world’s 50 top restaurants four times since the list was first published in 2002 (2002-2005). R. W. Apple did a write-up in The New York Times in 2003.
- Lilis in Melbourne. Lilis, located in a semi-industrial street full of garages, is the least glamorous of the three, but comes has an imperial pedigree. Lili’s great-grandfather was a minister of household affairs for the Empress Dowager. After her death he retired, but he kept the recipes that were later passed down through the generations of his family. Lili’s is one of three restaurants around the world (the other two are in Beijing and Tokyo) which are owned and operated by members of their family.
Topics: China, Chinese, Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
An explosion of Chinese restaurants in Nairobi
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 3, 2007
Ted Fackler has an piece on AllAfrica.com about how the number of Chinese restaurants in Nairobi has gone from 1 to 40 in the last decade due to the rapidly expanding Chinese entrepreneurial presence in Kenya. Official estimates put the number of Chinese in Kenya at between  3,000 and 5,000, though some put the number as high as 10,000. About 14,000 Chinese “tourists” traveled to Kenya in 2006, a jump of some 50 percent from 2005. (China made Kenya an Approved Tourist Destination Country in 2004). Many of the tourists are not there for the sights and culture. They are there to look for business opportunities. And they have pursued them with a vengeance: retail, auto repair, textiles, construction.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Buy a Chinese Restaurant in Texas on Ebay for $63,000!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 1, 2007
 The Green Oaks Chinese Buffet in Arlington, Texas has put itself on sale on Ebay for $63,000 (until July 26, 2007), which is sort of an unusual move. Most Chinese restaurants are sold either by word of mouth or through advertising through the Chinese print media. Ebay is not the most obvious place to do a Chinese restaurant transaction. But why not? Weirder things have been advertised on Ebay. more »
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Nicholas Kulish: Last One In is Finally Out!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 29, 2007
Nick Kulish’s satirical take on the Iraq invasion, Last One In, is out this month from the Ecco imprint of Harper Collins. It trails a Page-Sixish type tabloid gossip reporter for The New York Daily Herald as he gets embedded. (Kulish himself was actually embedded for the 2003 invasion for The Wall Street Journal). I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy, and stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish it in one swoop. There are some great clever absurdities like when a political appointee in Baghdad similarly declares that as Americans, “We’re the pro-Iraqi-forces, and the anti-Iraqi forces are the Iraqis.” Also, the way the Marines eyed the reporter, who refused to carry a gun. To then a man without a gun in a war zone is like a man without a drink in a bar — strange and a little suspicious. And there were a lot of weird details about the front line about the clash of military and media culture. And he was lucky enough to work with Lee Boudreaux, the editor who signed the critically-acclaimed novels “Prep†by Curtis Sittenfeld, “Indecision” by Benjamin Kunkel and “Prague” by Arthur Phillips.
He has two really nicely designed Web sites. I especially like the little red NK splash icon in the menu bar. Very classy.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Hi Daddy! (wave)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 28, 2007
I was very confused by a sudden small spike in traffic this morning as this blog, in its normal course of events (i.e. no external high-volume links), has a few dozen readers a day at best (mostly friends, and a few refers on my Wakiya post from Japan). But there wasn’t a likewise traffic spike from refer links (as of this morning), so these people were typing the site in blind. Not only that the spike was on the Imprint page about Twelve without a spike anywhere else. There was no spike in search engine requests, and I am no where near the top of Google hits for Twelve anyway. My best guess that it went over some mailing list, but I was perplexed what list that would be. And why the Imprint page?
Now I finally found the answer: My dad.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
General Tso’s Kitten? Only if He Misbehaves
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 28, 2007
My friend Jennifer sent me a picture of her cat named General Tso!
I’m sure the Qing Dynasty Chinese warrior would be amused to learn that he has pets named after him overseas more than a century after his death (yes he actually existed, watch this blog for more details. I’ve even met his family, which is still in Hunan). It turns out it was the boyfriend’s idea, who said…
 “we must call him general tso. it will make him behave. he’ll live under the constant threat of being taken to the nearest chinese restaurant.”
Jennifer adds though,
this, when he was skeptical about adopting the cat from friends. now, of course, he loves him.
Topics: Chinese Food, General Tso, Photo | No Comments »
Breathing easier. The manuscript does not suck.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 27, 2007
I got an e-mail from my editor, Jon Karp, which was a great relief. It looks like the book revisions are not going to take too long, and are not going to be too much of a structural overhaul, which means we can get it to the copyeditors by August 1 (which is apparently key because it takes two months to make advanced reader copies (ARCs) and you want to have ARCs out to readers about five months before the book comes out I am also surprised that he and Nate Gray (Karp’s assistant) took the time to line-edit the manuscript. But those 400 pages are floating somewhere between their office and messenger world and me. (they have not yet appeared)
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Suppose General Tso had trademarked General Tso’s Chicken?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 27, 2007
Peter Wells writes about intellectual property skirmishes among chefs today The New York Times, specifically focusing on a lawsuit between Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar and Ed McFarland, her former sous chef and owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in Soho.
But excellent and powerful food ideas, it seems to me, seem to be hard to limit. tend to go from top down (Nobu’s rock shrimp, General Tso’s chicken) or bottom up (burritos, fried rice). Can you really stop a popular idea? Perhaps the name, like Starbucks’ frappuccino, which I learned in Taylor Clark’s Starbucked is trademarked.
Chinese restaurants in America have quite a different attitude (reflecting perhaps a different attitude towards intellectual property in general?). General Tso’s chicken is not a dish that anyone knows in China. The recipe, as we know it today, was actually introduced in New York City during the 1970s (more on that later) but it spread very rapidly because the Chinese American restaurant owners copied each other. Same goes with chop suey and fortune cookies. (All this in my book).
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Is Mitt Romney Sticky Rice? Well, Supposedly the Chinese Voters Might Think he Is
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 26, 2007
Frank Phillips of The Boston Globe has a piece discussing the seemingly awkward translations of candidates names into Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) as required by law. According to the article, Mitt Romney could be read as Sticky or Uncooked Rice, Fred Thompson as Virtue Soup, and Tom Menino as Rainbow farmer — or worse.
The problem, Secretary of State William F. Galvin says, is that there is no actual translation of the names. The Chinese translate English names phonetically, by finding characters that most closely match the sound of each syllable in the name. There are many different characters that could be used to capture that sound and many different meanings for each character, creating the possibility that the Chinese voters could read something quite other than “Romney” or “Thompson” when they read the ballot.
According to the translators whom Galvin consulted, Menino’s name could be read as Imbecile in Chinese. Or Sun Moon Rainbow Farmer. Or, in the worst case scenario for the mayor, Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own.
Topics: Chinese | No Comments »
WSJ: Atheism, the new readers’ market
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 25, 2007
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal writes about the surprising success of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (Twelve, 2007). Twelve originally printed a modest 40,000 copies. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a “dark week.” Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. There seems a booming market in No God books. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has 500,000 and Letters to a Christian nation has almost 200,000. That is of curse but a fraction of a fraction of the number of Bibles, Torahs and Korans sold over time.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Do dogs add “in bed” after their fortunes too?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 25, 2007
Michael Schaffer, who is writing a book on pet culture called One National Under Dog, sent me an e-mail message with the subject line “Our books meet” and a url. I clicked and laughed when I saw it. This company, K9takeout, now sells fortune cookies for dogs. The types of fortunes they offer include “Confucius says Shitzu happens.”
Topics: Fortune Cookies, Quirky | No Comments »
Despite Castro (or because of him?), the Chinese are back in Cuba
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 25, 2007
Nathanial Hoffman of McClatchy discusses the resurgence of Chinese in Cuba, (and with it, a new breath of life for El Barrio Chino, which was once the largest Chinatown in the Western hemisphere (yes, bigger than San Francisco and New York Chinatowns). Massive numbers of Chinese originally arrived in Cuba to work on the sugar cane plantations in the 1840s, and the Cuban Chinese became a critical part of Cuban society, fighting revolutions. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and nationalized their busineses, the ethnic Chinese (like they did in India and Indonesia, when the political winds soured) fled elsewhere. At a certain point there were more Cuban Chinese in New York than Cuba. (the byproduct of which was Cuban Chinese restaurants, like La Caridad in the Upper West Side of Manhattan)
Topics: China | No Comments »
Jamaican Chinese food? Jamaican Chinese reggae?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 21, 2007
Tomorrow I’m heading to Kingston, Jamaica with my friend Eric Lee (who I know from Chinese camp from the time we both still wore braces) to do research on the Chinese Jamaicans, and Jamaican-Chinese food and the importance of Chinese Jamaicans in the reggae music industry.
The Chinese started arriving in Jamaica in the 1850s-1860s to work on the plantations and a few generations later they are completely assimilated and play important roles in Jamaica’s economy — including Jamaica’s biggest cultural export: music. (One of the most prominent producers of early reggae was a Chinese-Jamaican, Leslie Kwong). It is a bit weird seeing people who look like me, but talk like Bob Marley. more »
Topics: Best Chinese Restaurants Around the World, Chinese Food | No Comments »
Wakiya Watch: Yuji’s Google count rising
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 20, 2007
Many of the “Japanese” restaurants in this country have Chinese chefs (those Asian guys behind the sushi counter? Chances are they have never been to Japan). Florence Fabricant profiles the hot new Chinese restaurant with a Japanese chef: Wayika, which will be opening up in Gramercy Park Hotel next month Yuji Wakiya, who is a celebrity chef in Japan, came to Ian Schrager‘s attention via Richie Notar of the group that owns Nobu. Mr. Wakiya will be travelling back and forth between New York City and Japan (where his wife and youn twins live) for the first six months. When he’s not here, Koji Hagihara, will be managing the kitchen. (When I first tried doing research on Yuji Wakiya last year, I found one English language news article on him in a random English-langauge Japanese magazine. But within a matter of weeks, when the restaurant opens, his Google count will skyrocket. This is just the beginning).
Topics: Best Chinese Restaurants Around the World, Chinese, Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
I <3 flickr wordpress widgets
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
I just installed Josh Gerdes’ SimpleFlickr Plugin to display Chinese restaurant photos from Flickr and it was breathtakingly easy. When I saw the line of code I was suppose to drop into the page, I thought, “Is that it? That can’t be it.” It took maybe 10 minutes and it comes back with this beautiful interface (takes a few seconds to load, but it’s worth it).
About 2.5 years ago, I randomly created a group called Chinese Restaurants on Flickr, and didn’t check in on it again. (I don’t think I even uploaded any files). Last week, I checked and found that people had uploaded over 600 photos. But it had become rather random (“My General Tso’s chicken in Iowa” type thing. Another user named “ribarnica” created a more specialized group, Chinese Restaurant Signs, writing, “I just created a new group for Chinese Restaurant Signs. It will be a little more specialized, so that I won’t keep mucking up your group with my photos of signs.” Interestingly, those types of exterior shots is what I had intended from the beginning.
Topics: Blogging Musings, Multimedia, Photo | No Comments »
Facebook: “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.”
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
So people in my age group have only recently gotten into Facebook (we were the Friendster generation, though I am proud to say I have a very low ID on Facebook, but never got into it since no one else I knew was in it back then). My  favorite Facebook group of all time is “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet” (created by Steven Klimczak of Episcopal High School ’07) — now at 700K+ members. I don’t understand groups just yet, but in solidarity with Pluto, I created my own baby Facebook group around The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which my friends have been kind enough to join (generous of them since  I’m not completely sure what’s in it for them just yet). Any one can join!
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
The chopsticks are no worse than a tattoo
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
My friend quickly threw together a temporary header for the blog (displacing boats, tomatoes and puppies that came with WordPress templates), asking “is it obvious that i had to mirror the chopsticks?”
Um, yes. If you look closely, you’ll see the Chinese characters on the chopsticks are backwards. But it doesn’t matter since most of the people who read this blog don’t read Chinese — though this has not stopped others from getting embarrassing tattoos of Chinese characters on assorted their body parts.
Topics: Blogging Musings, Chinese | No Comments »
Are Chinese delivery men invisible?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
The new New York Times Cityroom blog (go Sewell!) has a piece on how delivery bicyclists must wear helmets. Many accidents like getting doored etc. Perhaps because delivery men are invisible in our eyes. The whole missing deliveryman in an elevator from 2004 plays to this theory.
My friend, David Hu, once had a taste of this invisibility. David, an American-born Chinese mathematician, moved to New York City a few years back and bikes around the city. Once he called me when he was in the neighborhood and offered to bring me some snacks. When he showed up at the lobby, the security guards looked at him without acknowledging his presence. “It was little weird,†he said. They would not let him upstairs. At first he was confused by their response since he been to visit me before. Then it slowly dawned on him that he was 1) a Chinese man 2) wearing in a bike helmet 3) carrying a plastic bag of food. The guards thought he was a delivery man — like the other Chinese man who was waiting in the lobby. When he explained (in a perfect American accent) he was here to see me, the security guards’ eyes refocused on him in a new light — like seeing him as a human. When he got upstairs, I noted wryly that David may have attracted international attention for his math research, but he’s just an education away from being a delivery man.
Topics: Deliverymen | No Comments »
If you blog in an empty forest, will anyone hear you?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
(I wrote this post two nights ago and I guess it’s now irrelevant. I feel like this blog is like a baby born prematurely — you have to work a bit harder a bit earlier than expected, but it will all be okay in the end):
 I set up this web site a few days ago just to see what this whole blogging thing would work with a book. Right now, until we get a fortune cookie header up there, I am switching between boats and tomatoes and puppies and whatever other designs amuse me. Essentially no one knows that I am blogging right now. This url has not been submitted to any search engine. No one except my friends and the people at Warner/Hachette Book Group/Grand Central Publishing/Whatever one prefers to call it, know my book is even called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, so no one is going to type it into their address bar. So am I just blogging into oblivion? If no one reads anything you write, are you still a writer? Or am I blogging for an imaginary audience who one day may read this entry? This is getting too meta for me. I must sleep.
Topics: Blogging Musings | Comments Off on If you blog in an empty forest, will anyone hear you?
Newspapers: relying on deep thoughts as much as Deep Throat?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 19, 2007
David Folkenflik has an NPR piece today about media depending on “conceptual scoops” — which is akin to what I call “stories that people talk about” (aka the most-emailed stories, aka, the secret weapon that newspapers will (hopefully) ultimately wield in a hyperconnected, hypermemed, hyperblogged digital media age). He interviews Phil Bennett, managing editor of The Washington, Post, who talks about the fantastic series of stories that Charlie Savage did on George Bush’s expansion of executive power through signing statements as a subtle substitution to line-item vetoing. And he also interviews Michael Miller, page one editor of The Wall Street Journal, about the options backdating series. Both those won Pulitzers this year. (Charlie, incidentally, was in my freshman writing class, so I’m particularly proud of him. Yay!). And tucked in at the end is a transition — “but they don’t all have to be that serious” — to an interview about my man date story (the 2005 Sunday Story story that seems to have eternal life). Some journalists take down CEOs and presidents. Others undermine American men’s sense of masculinity (sigh).
Topics: Journalism Musings | No Comments »
Will America’s best Chinese restaurant be headed by a Japanese chef?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 17, 2007
Today we will being our countdown to a non-specific date…Chinese food aficionados are waiting with baited breath for the mid-July opening of Wakiya in New York City after Alan Yau (of Hakkasan fame) was unable to get a visa for his chef for Park Chinois and thus canceled the project.
Yuji Wakiya, who is Japan-Japanese, is the “bad boy” of Chinese cuisine — he has a huge French influence in his cooking. As the Iron Chef Chinese pointed out to me in an interview, Japan is one of the very few countries in the world where the top Chinese chefs are not themselves, ethnically Chinese. That is because Chinese cuisine is still considered a high art in Japan — whereas in the rest of the world Chinese cuisine is something that is carried on the backs of immigrants. I have been to the Wakiya restaurant in Japan and it is truly fantastic — the delicacy of Japanese presentation mixed with the rich flavors of Chinese cooking. One dish involved steaming a live shrimp right in front of us at the table with tea poured over a hot rock. So its antennae were waving on its gray body one second. Then the bamboo top went down and the tea hit the rock. And 30 seconds later. It was pink and antennae not waving. It is very weird having something go from live to cooked at your dinner table.
Topics: Best Chinese Restaurants Around the World, Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
NYT: Why immigration reform affects your Chinese takeout
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 17, 2007
Tim and Nina Zagat of (yes as in those Zagats) have an interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times about why Chinese cuisine in the United States is stagnant — and they blame it (partially) on the difficulty with getting visas for Chinese chefs. This is something that I have thought long and hard about in my Hunt for the Greatest Restaurant in the World (Outside Greater China). While I agree with their overarching thesis, I disagree with some aspects of how they frame their argument.
Topics: Best Chinese Restaurants Around the World, China, Chinese Restaurants, Chop Suey, Deliverymen | No Comments »
Two for two for Twelve on the NYT bestseller list
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 17, 2007
 
New York Magazine has an item by Lloyd Grove on Twelve’s early success with landing the imprint’s first two books on The New York Times best seller list — Boomsday by Christopher Buckley (peaked at #14 on the fiction hardcover bestseller list) and God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (#1 on non-fiction hardover). Early success is not without its skeptics, the item notes. “Having two best sellers is certainly an achievement, but he started off with two brands,†snipes a rival publishing exec. “Can he work his magic with lesser-known authors?†That is a very good question. Crossing fingers.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Did you change the margins on your term paper too?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | June 14, 2007
I was contracted at 90,000 words, and it looked like I was heading to 110,000. Journalists are obsessed with length/word count (Book editors tell me that their journalist authors will always know exactly how many words they have written so far. Was true for me!) It seemed to me 20% overage was severe, so the 24 hours before my book was due, I spent several hours trying to squeeze the manuscript down to like a decent 100,000. Jon asked me what was taking so long. When I explained, he wrote back: “Hi Jenny: Please DO NOT WORRY about the length! We have designers who can adjust margins, fonts, and lines space to give us the length we desire. Perhaps you did something similar in high school when you had to turn in a term paper. Attach file. Hit send button. Finish chapter. xo, J.”
Of course, this may answer why Amazon knows my book is 320 pages.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »