Think back to your childhood. I’m working my way through my seventh decade on this Earth, and like many of you from that generation, home-cooked meals were the norm almost every day of the week. Takeout wasn’t our normal, although I have fond memories of a certain red and white bucket of chicken with biscuits and sides as a regular treat. But sometimes, we piled into the car to go out to eat. I think every family had their “regular place” and their “special place”, or at least everyone I knew did. Tonight I want to tell you about mine, and invite you to share yours in the comments.
I grew up in Ulster County, in New York State’s Lower Hudson Valley (do NOT call it Upstate, it isn’t. I’ll die on this hill). The closest major city, Kingston (population ~25K), was only twenty minutes away and it’s there we headed often for Chinese food, at Engs Restaurant. Oh there were other Chinese restaurants but Engs was THE one and only for us. According to their history page (they’re STILL open!), it was Kingston’s first Chinese restaurant, opened in 1927 and moved to its current location in 1966.
I had my first wonton soup there as a little child, and added rice to it to call it a meal. A little older and I graduated to Lemon Chicken, essentially chicken fingers served on a bed of lettuce that I ate with, yes, rice. Always accompanied by tea that I was allowed to put sugar packets in, and every meal finished with fortune cookies. I still remember when I became brave enough to get a “real Chinese food dish”… Pepper Steak, essentially tender beef in a cornstarch-thickened gravy with green peppers in it. I’m sure I quietly left the green peppers on my plate LOL.
I don’t remember when I first tried their egg rolls. I suspect early on I scooped out the filling and ate the wrapper, but eventually I learned to love them whole, dipped in hot mustard. The filling is the best I have EVER had, and that counts my decade in Boston’s Chinatown for grad school. Green, celery and cabbage and pork and something magical that made then addictively good. From an article on their website:
“There’s a lot of preparation. We use only freshly cut vegetables to stuff into the noodle wraps. We make thousands of them at once" said Sit, who along with his wife, Faye, has been running the popular restaurant at 726 Broadway since 1978.
“We’re the only restaurant in town that makes its own egg rolls, and everybody loves them. Nobody can beat them.”
[...] “We won’t share the recipe, though. It’s an ancient Chinese secret,” Sit said.
When Mr. Brillig joined the family, we went there. When he and I traveled from Boston to Kingston to prepare for our wedding, that’s the first place we stopped. I haven’t been there in over 20 years, but I can still taste the food.
I’d assumed it was no longer a landmark given how long it had been in business, and then while watching Season 2 of Severance, I thought one scene location looked familiar. Sure enough, it was in fact where the Zufu scenes were filmed. And it was just named a 2026 James Beard America’s Classics Award winner.
Sometimes, however, we wanted to do something fancier. A “special outing”, often to celebrate something. It was then that we crossed the Hudson via the Rhinecliff Bridge and headed to Rhinebeck and Foster's Coach House. Inside it was dark and we always sat in booths with high-backed wooden benches and heavy wood tables meant to resemble stalls. I couldn’t find a picture online but I vividly remember a thoroughbred statue that I would ‘visit’ every time. Unlike Engs I have no real recollection of what I ate there except for a roast turkey and stuffing plate.
I haven’t been there since the early 1990s, and was saddened while writing this piece tonight to come across a 2020 article detailing how Foster’s removed racist caricatures that had been on the walls since the early 20th century after it was publicized on social media. I have NO memory of those images although I am sure they were there and like many of us in that era, I simply did not notice them for the offensive images they are.
Now it’s your turn. What were YOUR family’s go-to places? Share your family favorites in the comments, after tonight’s Tops!!
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