Spending New Year's Eve at Magnolia's Gim Wah
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by Monica Wooton
In the 1980s and 90s, the Gim Wah was among my family's first resolutions and rituals of the New Year! One seldom had to wait long in the entry area of the Gim Wah as smoke drifted by from the barely lit lounge to the left filled with the regulars there for bottomless Manhattans or gin and tonics. Making a reservation was almost never needed but sometimes there were a few tables before you.
On New Year's Eve we dressed up and gathered excitedly in the dimly lit dining room, with its pink-painted walls, intimate 10 or 12 round tables covered with pink table cloths and topped by Lazy Susans, and perused the pink menu. Silverware settings included a paper holder with Chinese writing on it that held smooth wooden chopsticks that joined at the end and that you had to break apart to use. The standing drink order of Shirley Temples for our three daughters and a Roy Rogers for our son were eagerly awaited—grenadine syrup in seven up (Shirley Temple) or in Coke (Roy Roger) and a maraschino cherry with a long stem. At the Gim Wah, we always looked forward to the thick slices of bright red rimmed barbecue pork with hot (for my untried palette, very hot...gasping hot) mustard and untoasted sesame seeds. The combination plates, (B!) were a must for most. "Soup, BBQ Pork, Sweet and Sour Pork, Almond Fried Chicken, Pork Chow Mein, Fried Rice" were the most popular, or some other combination of "Chinese American" foods, which enabled you to get a taste of it all.
Gim Wah pink! Menu from circa 2010 brought home with takeout when we had empty-nested. Brought back lots of memories. Combo B a must for Wootons!
The chop sticks provided some creative entertainment throughout dinner; but, in the end, we always resorted to using forks. For Magnolia, through many eras, this was the extent of the availability of ethnic restaurant fare! Everywhere else, be it Tenney's, the Rexall Drug dining counter (my Grandmother took me there once or twice), or The Limelighter Tavern, burgers and fries were the standard fare. A small dinner salad—all iceberg lettuce with a few cherry tomatoes and just maybe a few shreds of carrot with pink Thousand Island dressing on the side in a small white pleated paper cup—was as healthy, gluten and dairy free as it got!
Today in 2024, in the Magnolia Village you can get Mexican, Asian, Thai, Greek, American, Italian, and Peruvian in a four to five block radius from the nearly 44 year old Gim Wah—run by the same family all these years (1). Now the longest running restaurant here, little changed and more sought out for its lounge, it is a time capsule of a time long ago. The Combination B at $12.95 now is still a relative bargain.
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Dinner always ended with each of us taking the fortune cookie whose end pointed most toward oneself. And, then we had the formal reading of the fortunes. At least one of us would be "lucky in love" or "meet a mysterious stranger" soon enough! My son, always the clown, ended this ritual by eating his paper fortune still in his fortune cookie to the gasps of his sisters. An added attraction for kids was the aquarium built in under the desk where you paid at the enormous cash register. Take-out unheard of until the kids were grown and gone and then an occasional New Year’s nostalgic event which still included the combo plate, fortune cookies and the prediction of the appearance of a stranger someday soon!
I will always remember one of the kid’s third grade school field trips to a fortune cookie factory in the International District as a most amazing sight. I was first introduced to those cookies at the Gim Wah! Since my family of origin was Italian and had 10 kids we had biscotti; and, we seldom went out to dinner! So, in my 20's and 30's, the Gim Wah with four kids in tow, relatively inexpensive as it was back then, was an epicurean education and a splurge—along with my kids, some of the first restaurant experiences of our lives!!
Through the years, Magnolia Village wavers between retail shops and service businesses. It specialized in gas stations, drug stores, or banks through the decades. (And, mostly always a barber shop and a pretty great bakery.) Childcare centers are springing up taking the place of long time retailers like the Porcelain Gallery. And, right now in its newly reimagined state, it is a restaurant scene of sorts. There have been a few high-end food establishments in the Magnolia Village, from the renowned Szmania to its replacement Pink Salt to the homemade pasta at Mondello's.
The only constant without change so far has been the Gim Wah.
There were evenings in the late 1990s, after some community meeting of some sort, PTA or Magnolia Community Club, and without kids in tow, a group of us took the left hand turn into the Gim Wah lounge walking into near pure darkness and joined the bar’s well-reputed regulars. We smoked a cigarette or two, ordered some fried pot stickers, and dipped them in the dark liquid that was smoky, sweet, and sour with cigarette smoke swirling around our heads! That was considered atmosphere back then!
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1. "Gim Wah celebrates 33 years with a free buffet." Magnolia Voice, 16 October 2024. Web​