Chinese restaurants were one of the most popular choices for eating out. They were everywhere but were particularly numerous in Jewish neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. It used to be said jokingly that you could tell you were entering a Jewish neighborhood by the sudden proliferation of Chinese restaurants.
In From My Mother's Kitchen, Mimi Sheraton writes that the Chinese restaurants in Brooklyn were “all done up in standard black, red and gold lacquer with red-fringed pagoda motifs, like rickety souvenirs in Chinatown shops, and the prices were, in retrospect, unbelievable.” Lunch was 75 cents and a children's plate was 40 cents, both of which included egg drop soup or tomato juice, a choice of entrees, crisp fried noodles, rice, tea, and ice cream, Jello or almond cakes, with fortune cookies thrown in for free. Sheraton went to them with her family on a Sunday evening, with her mother after a day shopping or with her friends after a movie. Sometimes her parents joined friends for a trip to Chinatown, returning with tales of spareribs and other delicacies and bearing souvenirs for the kids like backscratchers or porcelain soup spoons.
Ellot Willensky noted in When Brooklyn Was the World that Brooklynites at this politically incorrect time often called Chinese restaurants “the chinks.” As a child of a more politically correct time, I used to cringe when my parents said they were going to "the chinks" to pick up chop suey back in the '60s. These were the one from column A, one from column B joints that served what Sheraton calls a “Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood Cantonese” cuisine featuring egg rolls, roast pork, egg drop and wonton soup, slimy chop suey, chow mein, moo goo gai pan, egg foo young, lobster Cantonese, fried rice, often served with cloying sweet and sour sauces, crisp and greasy fried noodles and small bowls of duck sauce and hot mustard, which Willensky noted was good for clearing your sinuses. For the most part, Schwartz writes in Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food, Chinese food of the era was a bland mix of onions and celery, bok choy, snow pea pods, bean sprouts, and canned water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and mushrooms in many permutations with chicken, beef, duck or red roasted pork. Almonds, pineapple, soy sauce and a touch of garlic were also frequent ingredients. This cuisine had evolved from simple stir fries made by the early Chinese immigrants, who were laborers not experienced chefs, using ingredients available in America. They were adapted further to please American palates after some of these immigrants opened restaurants. This kind of restaurant, with the subsequent addition of a few cliched peppery "Szechuan" dishes and lately and bizarrely sushi and tempura, still can be found in blue collar and lower middle class neighborhoods in the city and suburbs.
What is it about the Jews and Chinese restaurants? Food writers and social historians have speculated much about this phenomenon. It started with the immigrant generation before the beginning of the 20th century when New York's Chinatown was close to the Eastern European Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, but it was not confined to New York. Perhaps former New Yorkers took the habit with them when they migrated elsewhere.
Arthur Schwartz in Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking writes that immigrant Jews might have felt more comfortable in Chinese restaurants where the waiters often knew less English than they and occupied an even lower social level and therefore were unlikely to be patronizing, mocking or hostile, a fear that many a greenhorn carried in his heart. Paradoxically, waiters in Jewish restaurants would come to be known for their gruffness and sarcastic putdowns of customers. Perhaps they believed it was how it was done. It appears that Jews ate out more frequently than other recent immigrant groups and were more likely to investigate cuisines other than their own. Chinese restaurants were cheap, as well as exotic and seemingly cosmopolitan. In some Jewish neighborhoods the only options to Jewish delis were Chinese or Italian restaurants, In the latter you were apt to encounter a crucifix or a Madonna as well be served a meal that mixed meat with dairy which was not only contrary to kosher law but unappetizing to many in the first generation.
Sheraton conjectures that it might have been the family-style eating and the sharing that made a meal a communal experience as well as the very low prices that were attractive. And while the food was different, it was not completely alien to those who had grown up in kosher households. The combination of onions and celery, chicken and rice, the similarity of wantons to kreplach and the absence of the cream, butter or cheese sauces that drowned other restaurant food of the time, made the cuisine more attune to their palates. Schwartz points out that even some Jews who kept kosher at home felt they could experiment with forbidden foods like pork and shellfish, preferably suitably disguised in small pieces or shreds in a stir fry, egg roll or chow mein at a Chinese restaurant, which, after all wasn't kosher to begin with. Eating pork in a Chinese restaurant might temporarily defile the body but it did not permanently defile your kitchen. It was those same little bits of often unidentifiable meats that made some other Americans suspicious of Chinese foodm rumored to contain the remains of neighborhood pets, although by 1946 Chinese restaurants could be found in most gentile neighorhoods as well. American magazines and newspapers of the day ran recipes for "chow mein" and "chop suey" which were even more Americanized than the versions served in the Chinese restaurants
One good piece of news for Chinese restaurant aficionados in 1946, shipments of summer green and oolong teas from China would be resuming. Shipments of these staples had all but stopped in 1940 according to The New York Times. Alas the first shipments proved to be "war weary," which is to say they had been sitting for several years in warehouses growing stale with age.
Jane Nickerson, the Times food editor, wrote on April 8, that dehydrated egg drop soup was available at A&S and Loeser's, two of downtown Brooklyn's leading department stores, as well as Merit Farms stores and B. Altman's in Manhattan. Big downtown department stores had sizable food departments back then when supermarkets were still something of a novelty.