Thirty-Ninth Week

hirty-Ninth Week

Monday, September 27, 2010
&
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
For the second murky, rainy day, with a head cold, I went out at lunchtime for a bowl of soup. For the sake of symmetry, I went to Wo Hop upstairs on Monday, forgiven for the salt-laden plate of cold sesame noodles on July 6, 2010, and Wo Hop downstairs today. In each case, the presence of wide, fried crispy noodles was as much a lure as the soup itself. After careful comparison, upstairs is the better choice. It was relatively empty, with large booths available, while downstairs required a wait before I squeezed onto the end of a table occupied by three young lawyers. They were eating up a storm, even though two of them were girls, and that was somewhat punishing for me to observe. Upstairs the soup bowl was larger, I think, and the soup was definitely hotter; downstairs it was barely warm. Downstairs was cheaper, though, because they did not charge me extra for the wide, fried crispy noodles.

Wednesday, September 2, 2010
My head cold has advanced and kept me home. Nothing to report.

Thursday, September 30, 2010
Feeling a little better, but left work at midday. No lunch.

Friday, September 24, 2010
Since Wo Hop upstairs won this early round of the soup bowl, and my cold was not all gone, I returned for more soup. But, I changed the menu somewhat. This time I had a large bowl of egg drop soup and two egg rolls. The soup was served hot and I stirred in some mustard to jazz it up. The egg rolls were classic, those fat beauties you remember from early restaurant meals with your parents. Hot from the deep fryer and stuffed with little bits of wonderful things. I skipped the fried, wide crispy noodles, because the egg rolls satisfied my daily fried food requirement.

Just across the street from Wo Hop is the Chinatown Fair, 8 Mott Street, once the home of the tic-tac-toe chicken, immortalized by Calvin Trillin. Someone asked me about the chicken a few days ago and I looked in on its former home, still an arcade full of video games manned (entirely) by anomic Asian teenagers. There was an empty spot where the chicken once stood/perched/played/resided and the somewhat-battered sign outside still advertised the tic-tac-toe chicken. Remember, the chicken always goes first.