The New China Club

Walter Hamilton walked up Lake Street on the morning of May twentieth, 1952, in a clean white cook’s coat folded over his arm and a pair of black leather shoes wrapped in a brown paper sack under his elbow, on his way to the kitchen door of the New China Club for the third day of its opening week.

He was thirty-two. He had grown up in his mother Eliza’s house on Bell Street in the Powning Addition, had enlisted in the Army in 1942 the week after he turned twenty-two, had served three years in a quartermaster unit in the European theater cooking for two hundred men a meal, and had been discharged at Camp Beale in California in November of 1945. He had come back to Reno with the expectation that the casino kitchens that had hired Black porters and bus boys before the war would, after the war and the long honorable service of the men who had fought it, hire Black cooks. He had been wrong. He had cooked, in the seven years since his discharge, in the kitchen of a ranch house in Washoe Valley, in the kitchen of the Bethel AME church basement for the church suppers, and in the kitchen of a private home on the Bluff where he had been the only employee and where the family had been kind. He had not cooked in a casino.

The New China Club stood at the corner of Lake and Commercial Row. It was a long single-story brick building with a low pitched roof and a marquee that read NEW CHINA CLUB in red electric letters over the front entrance, and the building had been a Chinese restaurant before it had been a casino, and before that it had been a laundry, and before that it had been a feed store. Bill Fong had bought the building the previous summer. He had spent eight months remodeling. He had opened on Saturday the seventeenth, and the opening had drawn a crowd that was, as far as Walter knew, the first casino crowd in Reno that had walked through the front door of a casino without anyone counting whose skin was what color.

Walter went around to the kitchen door on the alley.

The door was propped open with a brick. The smell of garlic and pork stock and steaming rice came out of the door and met him in the alley before he had crossed the threshold. He stepped inside. The kitchen was already moving. Two Chinese cooks were at the stoves, one stirring a deep pot, the other working a wok over a high blue flame. A woman at the long sink was washing greens. The kitchen manager, a man in his forties named Henry Wong, looked up from the order board.

“Walter.”

“Henry.”

“Get changed. Mr. Fong is in his office. He would like to see you before service.”

“Yes sir.”

Walter changed in the small back room, hung his street clothes on the hook, put on the white coat and the black leather shoes, and tied a clean apron over the coat. He went up the short corridor to the office.

The office door was open. Bill Fong was at his desk, a small neat desk with a green-shaded lamp on it and a calendar on the wall behind, signing a stack of supplier checks. He was a slight man in his forties, in a dark suit with a white shirt and no tie, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow because the room was warm. He looked up, and looked at Walter for a moment the way he had looked at him the first day, at the hands and not the face, and nodded once toward the chair, and went back to the check he was signing.

Walter sat. Henry had come up the corridor behind him and stood in the doorway.

Mr. Fong finished the check. He blotted it. He set the pen down and slid a sheet of paper across the desk, and Henry, who did the talking in that kitchen because Mr. Fong did not, came in and picked it up and read it to Walter as if Walter could not read, which was Henry’s way.

“The first two nights. Reports from the floor are the kitchen ran clean.” Henry looked at him over the paper. “I told him you run a clean station.”

“Yes sir.”

“The braised short ribs. Three orders Sunday night. Seventeen Monday. He figures forty by Friday. It is not going on as a special. It is going on the menu.” Henry set the paper down. “You all right with the volume.”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Fong had gone back to the checks. He did not look up again. Henry lowered his voice, though there was no one to lower it from.

“One more thing, and he does not want it said twice, so I am saying it. You were hired for the kitchen. You were not hired for the floor. The floor is taking care of itself and the floor is not your concern. On shift you are a cook in his kitchen and you answer to me, and what happens at the tables and the dice pit is the customers’ business and nobody else’s. Follow me.”

“I follow you.”

“He has a notion the next few months will be talked about in this town for a long time. He does not want anybody in the kitchen distracted by the talk. Cook the food. I do the rest.”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Fong signed the last check and squared the stack and looked up, and that was the dismissal.

Walter went back to the kitchen. He took his station at the second stove. Henry set a stack of order tickets at his elbow without a word. He read the first ticket. He pulled a sauté pan off the shelf. He lit the burner.

The lunch service began at eleven.

By twelve thirty he had cooked sixty-three plates. He cooked steadily, in the way he had cooked at the quartermaster mess, with the small economical movements of a man who had been doing this for a long time and who did not, while he was doing it, think about anything other than the next plate. He plated a short rib and slid it under the heat lamp. He turned and started the next. He heard, behind him, a man’s voice in the dining room, raised in laughter, and another man’s voice answering it, and the laughter came back. He did not turn to look. He plated a second short rib.

At two o’clock the lunch service ended. Henry came past his station with a tray of bowls. He set one of the bowls on Walter’s station counter.

“Eat,” Henry said. “Family meal in ten minutes. Mr. Fong eats with us today.”

Walter wiped his hands on the apron. He picked up the bowl. He stood at his station and ate the noodles and the broth and the small pieces of pork the kitchen had cooked for itself. The two Chinese cooks were eating at the prep counter. The woman who had been washing the greens was eating at the sink. Henry was eating at the order board.

Bill Fong came into the kitchen with a bowl of his own. He took a stool by the back door. He ate without ceremony. He nodded to each of them as they finished and put their bowls in the wash sink. He did not speak.

At two-forty-five the dinner prep began. Walter put down his bowl. He washed his hands. He took up the knife. He began to break down the next case of short ribs.

He thought, for one moment, about his mother Eliza in the house on Bell Street and about what she had said at the kitchen table the night after he had taken the job.

She had said: “You are the first.”

He had not known how to answer her then. He did not know how to answer her now. He cut into the short rib.

He worked the knife.

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