Spending New Year’s Eve at Magnolia’s Gim Wah
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 from the barely lit lounge to the left filled with 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 ten or twelve round tables covered with pink tablecloths and topped by lazy Susans, and perused the pink menu. Silverware settings included a paper holder with Chinese writing for 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 Rogers) 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 palate, very hot...gasping hot) mustard and un-toasted 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“ was the most popular along with some other combinations of “Chinese American“ foods, which enabled you to get a taste of it all.
Gim Wah pink! A menu circa 2010 brought home with takeout when we had empty-nested brought back lots of memories. Combo B a must for Wootons!
The chopsticks 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 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 long ago. The Combination B at $12.95 now is still a relative bargain.
Dinner always ended with each of us taking the fortune cookie with its end pointed closest to 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 was unheard of until the kids were grown and gone, and then an occasional New Year’s nostalgic event 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 ten kids we had biscotti, and we seldom went out to dinner! So, in my twenties and thirties, 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, it entailed 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, drugstores, or banks through the decades. (And almost 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, there is a restaurant scene of sorts. There have been a few high-end food establishments in Magnolia Village, from the renowned Szmania to its replacement Pink Salt to the homemade pasta at Mondello.
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 potstickers, 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!
Note
-
Steven Smalley. “Gim Wah celebrates 33 years with a free buffet,“ Magnolia Voice, 26 Aug. 2013.