Lost Tables | Remembering Chinese restaurants in St. Louis
Published July 26, 2021
Have you ever wondered what happened to that restaurant you once loved and have memories of dining at with your family and friends? We did! There is an amazing website called Lost Tables, dedicated to celebrating the restaurants of our past. We are partnering with the site’s creator Harley Hammerman and celebrating these wonderful stories. Hammerman and his wife Marlene are members of Shaare Emeth, and she is past president of the National Council of Jewish Women of St. Louis. Visit Lost Tables on Facebook
Remembering Chinese restaurants in St. Louis
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, St. Louis was a city of rich ethnic diversity. Immigrants from other continents composed one-third of the city’s population. St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the United States at the time.
It is during this period that Chinese started arriving in St. Louis. The first recorded Chinese immigrant was Alla Lee, who arrived in 1857 and opened a small shop on North Tenth Street selling tea and coffee. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese community in St. Louis had grown to about three hundred.
The earliest Chinese settlers in St. Louis congregated in an area between Seventh, Eighth, Market and Walnut Streets, which became the Chinatown of St. Louis, more commonly known as Hop Alley. The name was widely used to represent the district where Chinese hand laundries, merchandise stores, grocery stores, herb shops, and restaurants were located.
Chinese restaurants were initially started to satisfy the needs of Chinese bachelors. They served authentic Chinese dishes that appealed mainly to the Chinese.
In January of 1894, Theodore Dreiser, then a 23 year-old reporter for the St. Louis Republic, visited the Kee Hong Kee restaurant at 19 South Eighth Street while researching a story about the Chinese in St. Louis.
As Chinese restaurateurs expanded their menus, chop suey shops opened in Hop Alley. Chop suey could be easily prepared and was widely accepted by non-Chinese patrons as representative of Chinese food.
The origin of chop suey is widely debated. St Louisan Emily Hahn presented one popular theory in her book on Chinese cooking.
Orient Restaurant
Jo Lin was born in San Francisco in 1883. He arrived in St. Louis in 1906 with no family and little money. By 1916, he owned the Orient Chop Suey Restaurant at 419 North 6th Street, over the Strand Theater.
Joe Lin was forced to move his restaurant when he lost the lease on the space above the Strand Theater. On March 19, 1926, he reopened the Orient at 414 North 7th Street.
