The Releases: Strut of Kings (LP—GBVi, 2024) / Tractor Rape Chain/I Am a Scientist (3oth Anniversary) (Single—GBVi, 2024)
The text from George came on Monday evening. It was brief, and delivered in the spartan tone of someone who knows that they are powerless to address the crisis at hand. My reply was similarly terse: “Don’t fuck with me, George.” But this was no ruse between a pair of friends of nearly thirty years. A day that we had long feared—though had never spoken of—had come. Hunan West was gone.
For those unversed in the dining options of Flagstaff, Arizona, Hunan West was one of the real ones. It was unassuming, consistent, always there (except on Mondays), and was the kind of place where the owners and staff got to know you by name (and order). If you were a regular, Hunan was an oasis of affordable, reasonably authentic (American) Chinese food, served hot and with a smile. And until its doors closed last week, it was a Flagstaff institution.
My family first began frequenting Hunan in the fall of 1994. It was around that time that my parents started dabbling in going to church for the first—and only—time in my life, and I was willing to go along with it, as long as it meant a free lunch afterwards. The portions were generous, and the $3.95 lunch special (entree, rice, and soup) meant that a family of five could eat for less than $25. With two teenagers and an eleven-year-old (one that ate like an additional two teenagers), Hunan was both a good value and an easy crowd pleaser.
From the first visit on, my go-to meal was the Mongolian beef with fried rice and wonton soup. I’d mix it up occasionally—and there was a brief period during my junior year of high school where the barbecue pork chow mein battled for a spot as my favorite—but I’d always find myself going back to the Mongolian beef. It was a staple, and—especially when paired with the soup—was my absolute definition of ‘comfort food.’ And while I’ve ultimately had better Chinese food—San Tung, near Golden Gate Park, takes the top spot—Hunan West remains the standard by which all others are judged.
There was no pretense with Hunan. The decor fit its placement at the center of a strip mall, adjacent to a plasma donation center, and a movie theater that turned into a dollar store once the megaplex came to town in the summer of 1997. The fanciest thing in the restaurant was a mural-sized woodcarving of a seaport town. Otherwise, it was all crepe paper dragons, Tsingtao beer signs, and Chinese zodiac guides placed under the plexiglass table tops. In all of the years that I ate there, I believe that all of the audio ambience was provided by a single cassette tape of nondescript instrumental music.
But despite its humble facade, a certain ‘Hunan Lore’ became part of the vernacular of my family. There was a Sunday afternoon regular who always seemed to arrive just after us, and came to be known as ‘One Dollar Extra Beef,’ based on his peculiar order modification. We wondered why the restaurant’s owner, Rita, could never remember my dad’s name, and instead referred to him as “Teri’s husband.” My younger brother loved the hot and sour soup. I tried it exactly one time, hated it, and suggested that the unique flavor was a result of the co-owner, Oscar, soaking his feet in the soup pot. My older brother and I teased him until he finally got in on the joke with us. We made guesses as to how long it had been since the shakers of white pepper on each table were changed out—it was years before we learned how well it paired with the wonton soup. We pondered the legality of the oddly-named ‘Fast Park Takeout’ space out front. And we speculated about a possible schism with the crosstown Hunan East, as well as the source of the animosity between Hunan and their west-side rival, August Moon—rumor had it that the proprietor of August Moon had stolen recipes from Hunan.
As I got into my late-teens and early-twenties, Hunan became the go-to spot for me and my friends. In the summer of 1999, George, myself, and our friend John would meet there for lunch at least once a week. During one of those lunches, John and I hatched a plan to record a new tape of instrumental music and present it as a gift to Rita and Oscar. But like most of our awesome-but-ridiculous ideas, it never got beyond the planning stages.
The single most memorable lunch that I ever had at Hunan came on December 8, 2000. It was a Friday. I had only one morning class on Fridays that semester, after which I would put in a six-hour shift at the small engine shop that I worked at through most of my undergrad years. The shop had recently hired a new bookkeeper—also twenty-one years old—and she and I had become friendly work acquaintances. On the days that I worked, we’d occasionally take turns running out to grab lunch for each other. That Friday, I casually suggested that we take our lunch break together. Truth is, I had a massive crush on this girl. But I was terrified of actually asking her out, and this ‘spontaneous’ run to Hunan was me finding a clever loophole to doing so. We sat at the booth on the left side of the woodcarving. She ordered the lemon chicken and I ordered the chow mein.
The last time that I ate at Hunan was this past summer, when I went on a two-week solo road trip to see friends and family in Arizona. I met my nephew for lunch, and as I had done hundreds of times before, I ordered the Mongolian beef. Oscar was noticeably grayer than he had been the last time that I saw him, but then again, so was I. We talked about our kids for a while, in that way that exceedingly-proud parents do. And he refused to let me pay for my lunch, as he had done every time since I moved to Oregon in 2012.
On Monday evening, about an hour or so before George texted me, I stopped to grab takeout at Wan Lung, a Chinese restaurant a couple of miles away from my house. My wife had a work event, and my youngest daughter—who is home from Oxford for winter break—had plans, so I was on my own for dinner. I was on the way to get tacos, but after passing the turn off for Wan Lung, I decided that it was wonton soup weather. It turns out that George had a similar premonition, because before his mom had shared the news about Hunan, he had also decided to get Chinese food for dinner that night. We both texted pictures of our leftover Mongolian beef to each other to verify this oddest of coincidences: one involving a restaurant in a town that neither of us have lived in for well over a decade, but that we both have treasured memories of.
In another odd coincidence, it turns out that Hunan officially closed on December 7th. Had they held out for just one more day, it would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ‘not-a-date’ date that I went on with my coworker. She and I would return there after that day. Sometimes, after one (or both) of us had a bad day at work, we’d decide to meet there for dinner. When she was pregnant, and I was student teaching (and living off of student loans), I’d swing by Hunan and grab four cups of wonton soup to-go, and leave the change from the five-dollar bill as a tip. And when I was sick, she would bring me the most comforting comfort food that I’ve ever known.
And that little unassuming hole in the wall with the paper dragons, in the middle of an unremarkable strip mall, was the first restaurant that we took both of our girls out to after they were born. After all, sometimes you just want to go where everybody knows your name.
Rating: Strut of Kings (7.3) / Tractor Rape Chain/I Am a Scientist (30th Anniversary) (★★★★1/2)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “Immortality knows time and boredom / Better than a vanishing man” (“Bit of a Crunch”)
Next Week: The penultimate installment of The GBV Project covers an album that hadn’t even been released when the project began.
