Butte's Pekin restaurant featured in NYC exhibit

ANNIE PENTILLA

Montana Standard

BUTTE (AP) — With their fingers seemingly always on the pulse of history, most Butte residents won’t be surprised to learn their city once boasted a Chinatown that rivaled those of New York and San Francisco.

But soon people all over the world will get a chance to peek behind the curtain of Mining City history.

The Pekin Noodle Parlor, a 105-year-old Chinese restaurant at 117 S. Main St. in Uptown Butte, is being featured in an exhibit at the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City, reported the Montana Standard.

The exhibit is called “Chow: Making the Chinese American Restaurant,” and according to the museum’s executive director Peter Kim, it will be the museum’s first cultural exhibit.

“We knew we wanted to tell a cultural story simply because food is such a key part of how we identify ourselves culturally,” said Kim. “So we started looking at a lot of possibilities for that, and we realized that there was something really extraordinary about Chinese-American restaurants.”

Kim said the exhibit is intended to be a sensory experience where patrons can not only read and view history — they can also taste it. It includes a cooking studio where visitors can learn culinary techniques and sample chef-designed dishes in addition to an art installation called “Curtain of Many,” made up of 7,250 takeout boxes. There’s also a working 1,500-pound machine that dispenses freshly made fortune cookies containing messages submitted by people all over the world.

So how did the Pekin become an exhibit among Brooklynites?

Kim said museum staff wanted to find restaurants whose history intersected with the history of Chinese Americans. They came across the Pekin, he said, which is often touted as the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant run by the same family in the United States.

The family who has kept the Pekin running since 1911 is the Tams.

Today Jerry Tam operates the Pekin, but the restaurant is still owned by his father Ding Kuen Tam — commonly known as “Danny Wong” — who took over operations in the 1950s from his great uncle Hum Yow.

FAMILY’S HISTORY

But the family’s history doesn’t end there.

According to a 2011 addition to the Congressional Record, the first Tam family member to set foot in America came in the 1860s.

In the Pekin’s kitchen, Tam sliced onions as he explained that the restaurant’s sweet-and-sour is brown and not red like it is in most Chinese-American establishments because his forerunners didn’t have access to red food coloring or ketchup.

An entrepreneur in his own right, Tam lived as a fashion designer in New York City for several years. There he attended Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology and even had a brief stint on Lifetime’s “Project Runway” in 2008.

A native of Butte, Tam moved back to the Mining City in 2009 because, he said, his mother, Sharon Chu Tam, was getting sick. He started helping out at the restaurant and sifting through the basement and archiving old odds and ends he found in the building’s underbelly.

With the help of archivist Ellen Crain, in 2011 the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives collaborated with Tam to put on an exhibit. The archives sent a few artifacts from the 2011 exhibit to New York for “Chow” along with an oral history featuring Tam’s father. Items sent to NYC include photographs, woks, utensils, menus, advertisements, Chinese wicker baskets, and vintage soy and vinegar bottles imported from China, among others.

Ultimately, Tam said, he’d like to set up a walking museum in the Pekin’s lower levels.

“The basement here is literally where keno might have been invented,” he continued. “We have keno tickets that are in Chinese characters.”

The building itself was constructed in 1909 and went through many incarnations — including serving as a gaming parlor, Tam said.

It resided in the heart of Butte’s Chinatown and was also, among many uses, an herbal medicine shop, tea- and coffee-distribution site, a mercantile, and noncommercial bathhouse, boasting two old-school claw-foot bathtubs.

LOOKING BACK

Butte historian Dick Gibson, meanwhile, said outsiders are often surprised to learn Butte once had a Chinatown.

“Generally speaking, they’re blown away,” said Gibson.

Like many of the immigrants who arrived in Butte, the Chinese came to stake their claim on The Richest Hill on Earth. Many arrived during the Gold Rush, but by the time it was over in the late 1800s, a healthy population remained. They opened businesses, started families and established a burgeoning population that reached a height of 2,500 during the 1910s, Gibson said.

But life wasn’t always easy for those who left their homes in China.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put limits on immigration from China and was concurrent with organized boycotts of Chinese businesses.

An anti-immigrant sentiment was palpable in the air in the late 1800s, Gibson said, which was partly due to economic anxieties: fear of an immigrant population traveling to the United States to take American jobs.

“They wanted to protect their wages,” said Gibson, explaining that the unions were often the driving force behind the boycotts in Butte.

This history did not go unnoticed by Kim and museum staff.

“When you dig into it, you realize there’s this extraordinary story of hardship, adaptation, entrepreneurship behind all of these restaurants,” said Kim. “It was really a difficult period for them living under exclusion, but they managed to hold on by opening these restaurants and by creating a venue that appealed to non-Chinese diners.”

Gibson said the same.

“That’s one reason why the Chinese population in Butte thrived,” said Gibson. “They were not just catering to the Chinese community. They were catering to Butte.”

AMERICANIZED FOOD

Today there are 50,000 American Chinese restaurants in the United States that boast a uniquely American cuisine that you would be hard pressed to find in China, Kim said.

“You can go into nearly any town in the country and you’ll find one,” said Kim.

“In general we want people to appreciate the importance of food and how it connects to the world around us,” said Kim when asked why it’s important to preserve the past through the vehicle of food.

“In a broad sense, I think this exhibition will help people think about what food means to them personally and how it reflects their own cultural identity. And secondly, looking back at history is always valuable because it informs the present, and there’s a lot of debate right now about what it means to be an American.”

But preserving the past doesn’t just happen on a global level — it happens on the individual level in the form of family memories.

“My dad’s 83, and the restaurant is still doing very well, so I’m going to just see it through with him,” said Tam when asked if he’s ever thought of going back to New York.

Tam described his father as a hardworking man who has kept the restaurant going for more than 50 years.

He added that he’s excited the restaurant is part of the New York exhibit and that he’s heard countless Montanans share their memories of coming to the Pekin, which adds to the tapestry of Mining City history.

“It kind of gives people a remembrance that my dad has worked his whole entire life to provide Chinese food to this community, and I want him to feel very proud,” said Tam.