EMPEROR’S GARDEN SZECHWAN

Does anyone but me remember the Szechwan/Hunan cooking craze of the late ’70’s and early ’80’s?

About the time boomers were emerging from their adolescent shells enough to pay attention to the world, a number cookbooks were published on the subject, inspired, in part by the success of Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan restaurant in New York City. The original Uncle Tai’s closed long ago, but the restaurant ignited the hot Asian food craze in America, and was responsible (at least for a time) for weaning us off of the bland, cornstarch-ridden, gloppy Cantonese food that had been innundating America for fifty years or so.

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