SOME PHOTOS from the penultimate dinner service at Hop Louie Restaurant in Chinatown. Among my favorite moments was watching multi-generational families slide in for their last meal trying to recreate dinners long past. Too: the young Emo couple slouched over sweet & sour which they paid Dutch for with a pile of crumpled bills and change. One waitress said she was ready for a long vacation after 25 years. One of the owner’s children gave us a crash course on the historic hows and whys of “Chop Suey cuisine.” “If you don’t have bok choy you use broccoli.”
I hadn’t been in that building for dinner since the 80s. Which of course was the echo of the evening. A fact about which the ready-for-vacation waitress quipped: “If we had only been busy like this every night….”
Yes. If only.
The first floor bar is to remain open for now. Upstairs? “Maybe movies.” Another server speculated. Always some scratch in location filming.
Those spareribs and crab Rangoon were just as I remembered from Sunday downtown dinners with the extended family decades ago.
Happy to have the memories but sad to say farewell to all of that.
L. A. leaves us bit by bit by bit.
native to the place 