11/5/2023 0 Comments Made with lau siu mai![]() And so, in 2010, when Uncle Wally was ready to retire, Tang bought Nom Wah. In 2000, after graduating from college, Tang landed a job as a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley - for his parents, the culmination of the American Dream. But on weekends, his dad would take the family back to the old neighborhood to shop, eat and hang out at Nom Wah. In 1974, the Choys sold it to their longtime employee Wally Tang, the “Uncle Wally” of the book, although he’s not related to Wilson Tang.īy the time Wilson was born in 1978, his father, who was also in the restaurant business, had moved the family out of Chinatown to Queens, where Tang grew up. Nom Wah was founded in 1920 as a bakery and tea parlor by Ed and May Choy, immigrants from Guangdong province, the same region of southern China where Tang’s family came from. “Cookbooks are wonderful ways to have conversations about topics other than food but that intersect with food and pertain to lots of other things.” “When I was writing reviews, I frequently tried to bring in political or contemporary issues outside the scope of restaurants,” Stein said. Tang collaborated on “The Nom Wah Cookbook” with Joshua David Stein, a former restaurant critic, food writer and children’s book author who recently co-wrote Kwame Onwuachi’s well-received memoir, “Notes from a Young Black Chef.” ![]() The book frankly addresses the racism and xenophobia that Asians have faced in America for generations, from 19th century legislation restricting Chinese immigration to recent attempts by the White House to label COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu.” So, dried shrimp, a key ingredient for the aspiring home chef, are called the “Allen Iversons” of dim sum - small but with disproportionate impact. The cookbook is written in a slangy, wisecracking style that works in all kinds of sports, music and other pop-culture markers. It’s also a social history of New York’s Chinatown, with profiles of merchants and artisans who are trying to keep the historic neighborhood alive now.Īlthough COVID-19 restrictions have eased a bit since the city closed restaurants last March, and hungry customers have started to trickle back, Tang saw business drop by as much as 70% at his iconic storefront in Chinatown, which sits in the crook of Doyers Street under a faded red and gold sign. Tang’s pride in his community is reflected in the glossy pages of “The Nom Wah Cookbook,” a collection of mouth-watering dim sum recipes that manages to be much more than that. I come from a head-down-and-work-hard mentality,” the 41-year-old Tang said in an interview shortly before the book's recent virtual launch. Sometimes I’d catch myself thinking, wow, things are going pretty smooth. ![]() “I feel like for my generation, maybe life was too easy.
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