Chinese Restaurants of my Childhood

I remember the Lotus Inn in Baltimore on Reisterstown Road near Pikesville. It was the Chinese restaurant of choice for tons of teens in my era, and was a nice, average restaurant a bit out of the way for me. I spent more time at Nan King restaurant, just nearby my house in a slightly less upscale neighbourhood, I guess. In September, 2009,
I wrote about the restaurant and I said:  

 “When I was a kid I used to go to the neighborhood Chinese Restaurant, Nan King. It was across the street from the bowling alley in our Forest Park neighborhood, and was always a wondrous place, full of great and exotic food.

 Now, granted, this was in the days before we ever heard of Szechwan cooking or Sushi or Vietnamese cuisine.

 They had dishes with pork and shrimp and lobster, these were things that little Jewish boys only heard about, because they wouldn’t have been seen in our house. It’s not like we were kosher, it’s really just that these foods were foreign to us at the time.

 My father would not eat Chinese food, so this became a special place for my mother and I to eat lunch on special Saturdays. We would get Chow Mein and Fried Rice and all those exotic Cantonese dishes.

 As a teenager, I returned there with friends. My friend Ted Fisher and I would go there often and get combination platters, a great bargain. The pork chow mien and fried rice with an egg roll and soup was about $1.10 and the shrimp egg foo young and fried rice and an egg roll with soup was about $1.25. These came with dessert of course, peppermint ice cream!

 I know this place closed many years ago, as well we moved on to the Lotus Inn when we were mobile, a more upscale (slightly) place a mile or so uptown. When I was older, we were turned away from the Cantonese places by the more exotic ones, but my memories of sitting there with warm china containers with lids full of wonderful food and pots of tea still remains.

 Much like my story about the Pimlico Hotel, I have a Nan Kin story. No, I didn’t steal from these lovely people, but an opportunity came up a few years ago on eBay to acquire four tea cups from the restaurant. I hold the cups in my hand and it takes me back to a kinder, more gentler time……”

 However, today I found this postcard from the Lotus Inn and it brought to mind a story.

 When I was a kid, a teen ager, my fraternity (pledge class maybe) had a Father and Son Dinner. It was a lunch really, because it must have been a cheap way to do it, at the Lotus Inn.

 My father, a lovely guy, was a bad eater, or I guess just a picky one. He had a few things he liked, and many he didn’t. Chinese Food was one of his least favorites, in fact I never saw him eat any. However, because of this event, he was willing to go to the Lotus Inn with me. I believe he had fried chicken, which he did eat, but he enjoyed himself in the camaraderie of his son and another one of my friends and their father (who it was is lost in time) who shared our booth.

 As I remember it was a good crowd, and this was before political correctness so it was a Father and Son Event, not a child with any given caregiver.

 The restaurant is gone as are most of the attendees, but I remember the time so well….