Holiday Treats

Nagrant Recommends Traditional Christmas Meal Of Szechuan Hotpot

Decking the halls with duck at the old Sun Wah.
Decking the halls with duck at the old Sun Wah.

Sometimes you know exactly where a food meme comes from. No one associated cops and dougnuts until Raising Arizona’s memorable line “You want to find an outlaw, hire an outlaw. You want to find a Dunkin’ Donuts, call a cop,” and then suddenly everyone did. Likewise, A Christmas Story imprinted the idea of Chinese food as an emergency Christmas dinner, and Michael Nagrant in the Sun-Times today, besides pointing out what the actual restaurant in Hammond that inspired the meal in Jean Shepherd’s take was, calls out some of his favorites for a warm family gathering over hot and sour soup and eggroll. After all, “Why suffer through a dried-out goose when there was a crispy lacquered duck cooked by someone else right around the corner?” His Chinatown choices include stir-fried black pepper garlic beef tenderloin (“the brainchild of Gene & Georgetti and Martin Yan”) at Double Li, a fiery Szechuan hotpot at Mandarin Kitchen, and Kung Pao chicken at Spring World. As the traditional carol sung in A Christmas Story goes, “Fa ra ra ra ra.”

Nagrant Recommends Traditional Christmas Meal Of Szechuan Hotpot