In LA

The editor and I drove a few miles West the other night to get some food just outside of Lowell, and ended up stopping at La Te Da’s. From the road was visible a large banner across a truck reading “American Food”. As we approached the door, I noticed an older sign on the restaurant that read Hunan Garden. Perhaps there’d been a recent change in ownership?

Once seated inside, all became clear, or somewhat clear. The waitress/owner handed us two menus each, one a La Te Da’s menu and one Hunan Garden. She’d opened Hunan Garden at that location about 12 years ago. Recently business had slowed so she’d changed the name of the place to La Te Da’s and had made a new menu of all-American food, but she also hands customers the old menu containing American Chinese food standards as well as a section of burgers. At the bottom of the new La Te Da’s menu small print states “A Hunan Garden Restaurant”.

It’s a family-run place, everyone working there was a niece or nephew of the waitress/proprietor. Nobody in the family appeared to be Chinese. I asked her why her original restaurant had been named “Hunan Garden”, why Hunan?¹ She responded that Hunan is a Chinese vegetable².

Faced with two menus and a bewildering array of choices, I went for one of the daily specials, the “fish fry”. The cole-slaw and the breading on the fish were both pretty tasty.

1. I figured maybe she’d met someone from the region, or liked Hunan cuisine. [↩]
2. It might be time to edit that wikipedia entry. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Amusing, Chinese language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.