The James Beard Foundation’s America’s Classic designations tend to shine a spotlight on homey, old-fashioned eateries. Maybe more to the point, the nominations reflect a kind of culinary nostalgia for the comfort food of someone’s childhood. Last December, the JBF named Wo Hop (17 Mott St., New York, NY; 212-962-8617; wohop17.com) in Manhattan’s Chinatown to the America’s Classic honor roll. Since we’re spending a month in Manhattan, we made Wo Hop our first lunch-time stop.
The restaurant has been in business continuously since 1938, making it one of Chinatown’s most senior establishments. If you want to taste what New Yorkers used to think Chinese food was, this is where you come. The New York Times notes that Wo Hop offers an “authentic taste of an inauthentic past.” That isn’t so much a criticism as an observation that the place serves Americanized Chinese food. Heck, the restaurant even brags on its website that “we serve old-fashioned chop suey style food. Americans like this style and not very many restaurants in Chinatown sell it anymore.”
The original restaurant occupies a small underground space, and the line to get in backs up all the way up the stairs and onto the sidewalk on Spring Street. The room itself has a récherché charm, with its tiny square tables in a “Broadway Boogie” color dot format (“yellow table,” our server ordered) and its walls covered with dollar bills and photos of people we presume to have once been celebrities.
Putting the menu to the chopstick test
Not finding chop suey on the menu, we opted for two won ton soups, an order of roast pork chow mein, and roast pork chow fun. Honestly, our experience with “chow mein” was mostly limited to the version sold in a can by La Choy many decades ago. (We understand that the recipe has since been changed.) Part of the appeal was the separate can of crunchy noodles.
Wo Hop’s chow mein (above) hits all the hallmarks of Americanized Chinese food: tasty bits of meat, a few pieces of diagonally sliced onion and celery, and a brown gravy heavily seasoned with soy sauce and thickened with a simple starch. The crunchy noodles are much more substantive than the old La Choy variety. They combined with the slight sweetness and pronounced saltiness of the sauce to hit the comfort-food sweet spot. The chow fun was similar, but with wide soft noodles instead of crunchy ones.
The won ton soup was more of a revelation. First of all, the dumplings were perfect. Matchstick pieces of roast pork (red on the ends) floated in the broth. We asked for chips to go with the soup — a very American garnish, we suspect. But since they are essentially deep-fried won ton wrappers, they just added an extra punch.
Prices are low at Wo Hop — good thing, since the restaurant is cash only.