Chinese Restaurant Ephemera

My Lai Garden Restaurant, Edmonton; Wings Café and The Lotus Restaurant, Prince Albert - My Lai Garden: [1970s]; Wings Café and The Lotus: [1940s and 1950s?]

The 1970s dim sum ticket from the My Lai Garden restaurant, in contrast to the Golden City menu, features many clearly Cantonese dishes, including water chestnut cake, egg tarts, green peppers stuffed with shrimp paste, and pig’s liver rice crepes; the latter dish, though trendy in the period, has now died out. Shrimp dumplings, the first item on the list, are a characteristic feature of dim sum: difficult to make, they are the standard by which to measure the dim sum master’s skill. Unusually, this dim sum ticket is for take-out, an unconventional way of enjoying this sociable meal. Perhaps the restaurant found an effective way to deal with long lineups?

Ephemera such as menus, as well as oral histories, are the primary records of Chinese food on the Prairies. Few Chinese cooks published their recipes. Instead, they were passed down from one generation to the next, and generally written only for family use, like the handwritten recipes from Janice Wong, whose parents operated two Chinese restaurants in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan: Wings Café and The Lotus.

The last three images (private collection) are courtesy of Janice Wong, author of the 2005 cookbook/memoir Chow.