ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Another effort to open an elaborate Chinese restaurant across from the St. Charles Hotel came in 1938 in a venture backed by a group of Chinese businessmen that included none other than a young Lee Bing, the father of longtime Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee. The proposed restaurant never materialized, possibly because of the war (which was already well underway in China by 1938) but Bing managed to open his own restaurant with partner Bennie Wong at 409 Baronne Street in 1940. One can imagine Bing at the bar pouring Old Comiskey whiskey for lunch patrons in a smoke-filled dining room full of men in suits eating noodles. Eventually Bing and wife Yip Shee built the sprawling, pagoda-themed House of Lee in 1959 on prime real estate along a then two-lane Veterans Boulevard (at the approach to the recently completed Pontchartrain Causeway). For many New Orleanians today, the House of Lee brings back fond memories and was often their first experience with Chinese food. This was in part due to the notoriety of Harry Lee as well as the sheer size and longevity — 36 years — of the restaurant that bore his family’s name. Lee Bing’s place on Baronne Street belonged to a second generation of Chinese restaurants that opened in the 1940s and ’50s, particularly on and around Bourbon Street. Towering over them was undoubtedly Gin’s Mee Hong, which opened at 739 Conti Street in 1949. Gin’s served the familiar Cantonese hits that by that time had become very familiar to New Orleans diners, but rendered them, according to contemporary critics, with a degree of skill not equaled elsewhere. By the late 1940s, Chinese food had finally shed many of the negative associations that had burdened it a half century earlier, paving the way for further growth during the city’s prosperous oil boom days. We tend to think of the time we’re living in now as the golden age of New Orleans dining, an understandable claim considering the quantity — and quality — of our currently booming restaurant scene. But more than one critic has suggested that, when it comes to Chinese cuisine, what was available in the 1960s and ’70s remains unmatched today. If the 1890s introduced Chinese food to Americans as exotic and a bit dangerous, and the 1940s heralded its entry into the mainstream, then the relative prosperity of the ’60s witnessed the advent of a mature Chinese gastronomy. The late, ever-acerbic Richard Collin, whose book The New Orleans Underground Gourmet and whose pioneering restaurant review column in the States-Item helped usher in a more critically aware era in the city’s food scene, reveled in the options available in those days. Collin lamented what he termed “tired old Cantonese restaurants” serving “food bland enough for children.” He encouraged the city’s diners to get adventurous. “Eating only chop suey,” noted Collin, “is like

Top: Worker raking shrimp on boards to dry in the sun Bottom: Chinese American Store

A Long- L ost Restaurant... Takee Outee, Bourbon Street, New Orleans "After two or three or more late-night drinks, we’d hit this walk-up window for chicken-on-a-stick, shrimp tempura and egg rolls. I can’t remember if the food was good, but it for sure satisfied our drunken need for food, any food, right this second." - Rob, Marketing

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