From Yan Chow (Or Do I Mean Yang Chow?) In Streatham To Dim Sum In Soho, Chinese New Year, Probably February 1972

Photo by Jason Jacobs, CC BY 2.0

When I was a small child, growing up in Streatham, there was not exactly a vast choice of restaurant cuisine to choose from. But there was a Chinese restaurant near home. Mum, dad and I all liked the food there.

In my memory it was named Yang Chow – perhaps the proprietors changed the name between 1958 and my childhood visits there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But that was the place. The “theatre” mentioned in the advert above is apparently the Streatham Hill Theatre, subsequently the Mecca Bingo Hall, although the restaurant was no more opposite the Bingo than it was opposite The Locarno, or The Cat’s Whiskers as it was known when I was munching food in the restaurant almost opposite those two landmarks.

My parents were friendly patrons in any restaurant we visited and we became friendly with the proprietor family. I cannot in truth remember the name of the matriarch patron, but for some reason the name Li pops into my head, perhaps falsely, but I’ll refer to her as Li in this article. I do remember the name of the proprietors’ little boy, Christopher, who was a similar age to me (perhaps a year or so younger), who would tend to show his face during our visits to the restaurant. Christopher and I became friends.

On one visit, Li announced that the restaurant would be closed for one weekend only as the family was going to celebrate Chinese New Year with family and friends in Soho that weekend. They wondered whether I would like to join them, to keep Christopher company.

I was keen. My parents were content. The date was arranged.

I’m not 100% sure that it was the 1972 new year, but I’m pretty sure I was around that age and something about “The Year Of The Rat” rings a bell. Again, the vague memory might be flawed.

But I am 100% sure how excited and awe-inspired I was by that event.

We went upstairs in a Soho Chinese Restaurant – sadly I have no recall which one it was. The beautiful sketch below might be the very one; who knows?

We sat at a large table and the upstairs room was packed with Chinese people. I think I might have been the only western face in the room.

Everyone seemed to know everyone – not only the people at our large table – which was presumably Christopher’s family and close friends – but the whole room felt a bit like one big party. It was probably an informal gathering of the suburban Chinese restaurateur community.

Writing 50 years later, it seems extraordinary that local Chinese restaurants might close for Chinese new year – a guaranteed busy time for all Chinese establishments today – but back then I don’t think the annual Chinese event had any traction in the wider community.

I remember lots of people making a fuss of me and I remember several people, especially Christopher’s parents, worrying that I might not like the food and letting me know that they could arrange for some food with which I was more familiar if I didn’t like the “party fare”…

But by gosh they needn’t have worried. The smells, the look of the food, the textures, the flavours. I’d never seen, smelled or tasted the like of it before.

I fell in love with dim sum that day and have never lost the love for it.

It was not all that long after this seminal event in my culinary journey through life that the Yang Chow closed and that family moved on, we knew not/know not where.

Before the end of the Yang Chow era, I do vaguely remember my mum insisting on reciprocating the hospitality I had received by inviting Christopher over to our place for a homely meal. Whether he liked the meal and/or ended up associating matzo balls as a variant of dim sum is a matter seemingly lost to history…

…unless, by some chance, my posting of this article somehow helps re-establish contact with Christopher and/or that kind family, who initiated my love for westernised Chinese food at the Yang Chow and utterly entranced me with dim sum at a more authentic Chinese restaurant in Soho, all those decades ago.