If Raymond Chandler Were Still Alive He Would Be Eating At Bamboo Inn in Los Angeles

Chinese food in Los Angeles and throughout the United States in the 1940s was a far cry from what it's like today.  That's because the only Chinese in America at the time were rooted in the rural villages outside the city formerly known as Canton, as these were the only migrants to arrive in the United States before the Chinese Exclusion Laws were enacted by the United States in 1882.  Those exclusion laws were not practically repealed until after World War II, and not fully repealed until the 1960s.  Consequently what Americans believed to be Chinese food was from an unrepresentative local cuisine, further altered by available local ingredients, as well as the tastes of the American public.  Looking at menus of the day shows they were peppered with dishes such as chop suey, chow mein, won ton soup, egg foo young, stir fried beef, chicken, pork, shrimp and vegetable dishes and egg rolls. 

On top of this, while Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City have fairly comparably sized Chinese communities today, the Los Angeles Chinese community in the 1940s only numbered around 5,000, not enough to support Chinese restaurants geared only to Chinese clientele.  As such, many Chinese restaurants served a combination of Chinese and non-Chinese customers with dishes overlapping the dining groups.   Today that food is classified as "Americanized Chinese food."  

Obviously as times go on, the number of restaurants serving this style of Americanized Chinese food continues to diminish.  There are locales such as New York and Boston where there are a good number of these restaurants still in operation.  But in the Los Angeles area, which has fewer historic Chinese restaurants to begin with, first due to the historically low Chinese population in the early to mid-20th century, and then which has pivoted into the cutting edge leader in the United States for contemporary Chinese food, there are only a handful of oldtime Americanized Chinese restaurants still in operation.  And only one of these, Bamboo Inn on 7th Street near McArthur Park, just west of downtown Los Angeles, would Raymond Chandler, the leading author of 1930s and 1940s private detective tales set in a dark and brooding Los Angeles, feel comfortable eating at.

 

Bamboo Inn, founded in 1951, is the second oldest continually operating Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles area, exceeded in seniority only by the legendary Paul's Kitchen, founded in 1946, and located in the one time secret City Market Chinatown .  While that secret Chinatown has since been absorbed into the Fashion District, Paul's Kitchen is still there.  Formosa Cafe in West Hollywood does claim to be older, having started serving Chinese food in 1939.  However Formosa Cafe closed for several years before being revived, so it does not count in longevity.  The only other local restaurants serving mid-century style Americanized Chinese food are China Cafe in the downtown Los Angeles Grand Central Market, and two restaurants in Montebello, Chinese Garden and Canton City.

Despite being by far the least publicized of these old Americanized Chinese style restaurants Bamboo Inn rises above them all when it comes to capturing the essence of the 1940s Los Angeles Chinese restaurant.  In a city where even 10 or 15 years ago it was a difficult task finding a Chinese restaurant that still served chop suey, Bamboo Inn has two dozen varieties.  I would not have thought it was even possible to have so many chop suey varieties, but they do it by creating two separate categories--chop suey and bean sprout stir fry.

 

And they check all the boxes for the appropriate dishes--chow mein, fried rice, out of the can crisp noodles, egg foo yung, sweet and sour pork, almond chicken, broccoli beef, fried shrimp, egg rolls, bbq pork, wonton soup, they're all there.  Of course you can say that about the other Americanized Chinese restaurants I mentioned, aside from the sheer variety of chop suey dishes.  But there is one major thing that distinguishes the Bamboo Inn menu from the others.  Bamboo Inn DOES NOT HAVE ANY DISHES DATING FROM AFTER WORLD WAR II.   Yes, you can get the traditional dishes at Paul's Kitchen and Formosa Cafe, but you can also get non-Cantonese inventions orange chicken and kung pao chicken there, dishes that did not come along until the 1970s and 1980s.  Bamboo Inn essentially uses the menu from their opening back in 1951.  I mean as a kid my doctor's office was just a block away, which means they're still serving the same food there as when I first walked by there 70 years ago!

This is their chicken chow mein with the old thick Cantonese noodles ("suey mein") which I don't think I've eaten this century.  It was my favorite when I was a kid, before thin Hong Kong style egg noodles came into vogue.

 

And on top of the food, there's the Raymond Chandler factor.  It's dark in there, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, like a Raymond Chandler Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles should be.  (And he would never eat any non-Cantonese dishes either.)

 

Oh, and this likely the same cash register they used when they opened up.

 

Only if you step outside do you realize you're not in a time warp.  Bamboo Inn is located by McArthur Park, on the same block as the iconic Langer's Delicatessen, home to perhaps the best pastrami sandwich in the United States, and which complained to the city that they would have to close down because of the crime, trash, homelessness and illegal street vending in the area.  The city responded by fencing off half of the sidewalk on the block down the middle (Bamboo Inn is in the middle of this picture), leaving no room for street vendors or homeless tents to be set up.

 

And while I have ridiculed Yelp ratings for Chinese restaurants it is interesting to see the Yelp reviews of Bamboo Inn.  An awesome 4.3 stars ratings and countless tales of how reviewers had visited Bamboo Inn in the past with parents and grandparents.  Bamboo Inn is truly one of a kind in Los Angeles.