“For many people, my family is a major part of their holiday tradition” — Angela Wong, whose family owns Princess Garden Chinese restaurant
Under disco lights and near the seated queue of karaoke singers waiting for their turn, I clear Heineken bottles from the bridal party table, flexing my fingers around their sticky green glass necks to drop them into a bin out in the service hallway. “It’s hard work but good pay,” my sister’s friend, Annie Wong, texted earlier in the day.
Robert is still head chef, and plates every single entree that’s ordered during his shifts. In the kitchen, his wok is burnished in oil and surrounded by constant high flames until service ends. The food, mostly Northern Chinese, Szechuan, and the American style of those cuisines, is prepared and cooked under the tenets that nothing is made in advance or in bulk . Nearly everything is cooked to order, making the restaurant an outlier against the other Chinese restaurants in the city.
Suewan and Sueka work as the restaurant’s main servers. Whatever distraction or impediment that may be happening in the kitchen is rarely seen on their faces when they hit the floor, where their attentiveness makes most diners forget they’re often the only two servers working. Suewan’s husband, David, does everything from bartending to dishwashing to fixing plumbing and electricity issues.
“I do a lot more yelling,” Robert says when I ask how he gets through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. “That’s usual.” Robert cooks with no break, and sees both days as an opportunity to see how much he can do. “It’s a good challenge for me. I want to cook perfectly, and I want to know how the dishes come out and how people like it,” he says. “Every time I cook, I’m fighting for time. It’s a kind of fun.
Despite these adjustments and working around the kitchen’s higher traffic, a familiar routine takes over me: keep an eye on incoming diners, serve water as quickly as possible, refill waters as needed, refill ice from the ice machine, buss the tables, hand off the final receipt and tips directly to the waiter or to the front register if a waiter hasn’t managed it yet, discard the white paper on top of each tablecloth and then replace it with another, and finally, reset the table for everything...
I feel like I am being processed through a system of water slides with increasing speed and with all relief points zeroing out into a cascade. One of Suewan’s tables flags me down to double their egg roll order. In my rush to the kitchen, I slip and then slide the full length of the service counter, feeling the entire drag on my back heel. Suewan steadies me to a stop. “Your table wants another order of egg rolls,” I say, stunned and relieved that I didn’t fall.
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