Restaurant kids, Balkan & Hungarian recipes, green almonds

Good Food

KCRW

Society & Culture

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From takeout boxes to feeling boxed in, growing up as a "restaurant kid" is a unique experience.

Curtis Chin and Rachel Phan share memories of growing up in their parents' Chinese restaurants
Cookbook author Irina Georgescu finds inspiration east of the Danube River in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria
Jeremy Salamon reconnects with his Hungarian Jewish heritage and the charming childhood created by his grandmother
Chef Harry Posner takes advantage of the short window for green almonds

Here are all the SoCal James Beard finalists. And don't forget to sign up for the weekly Good Food newsletter!

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food.
0:08.1	A month or so ago, two books landed with the Good Food team.
0:12.9	Both were memoirs of growing up in families where work and therefore life centered around a family-run Chinese restaurant.
0:21.3	Rachel Fann's book is Restaurant Kid, a memoir of family and belonging.
0:26.8	Curtis Chin's book is Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese restaurant, a memoir.
0:32.9	As I started to read each book, I realized that I wanted to hear both their voices in a joint conversation about growing up in such a particular space, learning to carve out identities amidst their family's expectations.
0:48.0	So thank you so much to Rachel Fan and Curtis Chin for joining us.
0:52.5	I'm so happy to have both of you here. Happy to be here.
0:56.1	Thank you for having me. What part of China are you families from and when and where did
1:04.5	they emigrate to the United States and Canada, respectively? Maybe, Curtis, why don't you start?
1:13.5	Yeah, my family actually came in the late 1800s. As I say in the book, they went from Canton, China to Canton, Ohio, before realizing
1:20.7	there weren't actually Chinese people there, and then moving up to Detroit by the late 1800s.
1:26.5	The auto industry was just kicking off at that time. And
1:29.1	they tried to get a job working in the factories, but there was discrimination. And so they went
1:34.7	into the laundry business. And then from there, they opened a grocery store in the 20s. And then
1:39.3	finally, the first Chinese restaurant in the family, sometime in the 30s. They're from the south, so it's
1:45.4	a southern Cantonese cuisine. And Rachel? Yeah, my family has a bit of an interesting history.
1:52.8	So my family, like Curtis's, is originally from Canton. But during the 1930s, right before World War II, the Japanese invaded and my family
2:04.1	actually fled China to go to Vietnam. So my parents were both born and raised in Haiphong,
2:10.5	Vietnam. And of course, we know that there was also a war in Vietnam. So they grew up during a time
2:16.5	of war.
2:23.2	And once that ended in 1975 and the country was dealing with the aftermath of that,
	...

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