![]() ![]() Within a few years even the original went into severe decline but by then the Hunan/Szechuan rage in Chicago was well underway.Ĭynthia wrote:While I didn't eat egg foo yung or chow mein growing up, we ate a lot of Cantonese food (especially from Bob Chinn's first venture, House of Chan in Wilmette). The restaurant became very popular and many imitators soon appeared (notably one on N Michigan, whose owners had bought the name). This is the first restaurant I recall that warned diners with red underlining. They served the by-then-common hot and sour soup and sizzling rice dishes but introduced dishes such as willow beef with a serious chili heat. House of Hunan, on the second floor at 3150 N Lincoln, was the first to popularize the spicy fare of Hunan and Szechuan. In 1974 another influential Chinese restaurant opened in Chicago. Many of these restaurants served a roughly similar hodgepodge of a menu characterized by hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, moo shu pork, Peking duck and glazed bananas for dessert (often dumped from a pan into a bowl of ice water). In the early 1970s other "Mandarin" restaurants opened in quick succession: Tien Tsin in Rogers Park, Man Dar Inn in Chinatown (run by some Dragon Inn founders), the upscale Mandarin House and many others. By the early 1970s he was involved in such restaurants as Cathay Mandarin and Peter Lo's (first in Rogers Park, later on N Lincoln). In 1967 Peter Lo left the Dragon Inn to open his own place, the Chinese Tea House on the northwest side. Within ten years they expanded to the north side (Dragon Seed in the Belmont Stratford) and north suburbs (Dragon Inn North). Dragon Inn was perhaps the first area restaurant to serve such then-exotic dishes as hot and sour soup and moo shu pork-a significant departure from Chicago's steady diet of chow mein and egg foo yung. In 1964 an important restaurant opened in a shopping center in the far-south suburb of Glenwood. Dragon Inn in the southern suburbs was the first in the Chicago area in the 1960s although another Mandarin restaurant opened in West Lafayette, IN about the same time and may have been slightly earlier. In the Chicago area Peter Lo's and various restaurants with Dragon in the name were examples. These restaurants typically derived from academically connected people from Taiwan with Kuomintang (Chiang Kai-shek's party) origins on the mainland before the Communists took over. Ekreider wrote:The dishes in OP were common at Mandarin restaurants in the 1970s. ![]()
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