8. LEE'S Not CHINESE RESTAURANT

It was an amusing coincidence to have my father’s name, Sam Lee, on a laundry he had no connection with but it was darn awkward telling teachers (for those were the outside adults whom I was mainly exposed to) that my father had a restaurant but he did not serve Chinese food.

It seemed as if I had disappointed them somehow: I was not real Chinese?

Lily Cho (2010), in Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), proposes that what’s on a menu is about attracting business and at the same time the menu items reflect a self-narrative about Chineseness.

Through the lens of critical theory and post-colonialism, my father’s menu of eggs, bacon, sausages or ham, pan fries and toast; plain or deluxe (meaning with condiments) hamburgers and cheeseburgers; a side of fries, with or without gravy; hot beef sandwiches, pork chops, liver and onions, and even T-bone steaks - all served with mashed potatoes, gravy and tinned peas; “home made” apple, blueberry and coconut cream pies with or without ice cream could have been seen as cultural displacement and homogenization. A grad school education enables me to understand and appreciate these interpretations but my childhood observations contradict.

My parents opened a restaurant at 1286 St. Paul Avenue in 1960. He called it "Lee's Restaurant." Of the three restaurants my father operated over the years, that’s the one I remember. I would have around eight years old when he bought the building and property. Before that my father had a restaurant on Drummond Road (The Clan) and before that one on Victoria Avenue (New World Cafe) but the latter one was before my time.

My mother always worked in the restaurant – not out front but in the kitchen and backrooms: preparing, cooking, and cleaning. Before my brother and I reached school age, she would have had to look after us, too.

She and my father would smile when they told how I’d nap under a kitchen counter amidst the dusty 50-pound burlap sacks of potatoes. I don’t know what she did with my brother but no doubt he was there. We didn’t have baby-sitters or relatives whom we could be left with.

My mother, brother and I spent weekends and summer holidays with my father at the restaurant. There were living quarters in back and upstairs.

Back then, my father opened around 6 am and closed at 1 am so he just stayed over. He came to visit-stay at our Park Street home on Christmas and New Year’s days when the restaurant was closed.

On the slow, lazy afternoons of summer holidays, I’d pop into the front of the restaurant and help myself to a cold Coca-Cola. If there were no customers at all, my father might be leaning on a crooked arm taking a nap. An electric fan on the counter flapped the pages of the Review he had been looking at.

But if a customer were present, he and my father would be talking about sports or politics. The customers were mainly working class men: dump truck drivers, construction workers, city maintenance crews, plumbers, carpenters, utilities, etc.

When business was slow, Father enjoyed it when a customer lingered to chat. Mother would often complain about how Father encouraged these men to stay on and on. They were not spending enough – only buying a single cup of coffee (no free refills back then) – and my father was being kept from doing his work. In essence, she was right but I also think she was envious that he had a social-work life.

My mother had few words of English and her friendships were limited to the small number of Chinese women in Niagara Falls and their mutual availability. The women all worked in their family-run businesses.

While I can agree with Cho that a restaurant menu is about appealing to customers, the take-away messages I have from my father’s menu and how he executed it are:

a) Do simple well.
b) Be prepared to do more - better - at a greater cost all round.
b) Gain is not measured by money alone.

A pre-publication interview by the Star previewed Lily Cho’s book and gives an accessible gist of her research.

1965: Sam Lee & Lee's Restaurant