A pickup truck pulled up to the curb outside 1541 N. Wells–or as close to the curb as it could get. It was January 1967, and 29 hours of blizzard had buried the city under 23 inches of snow. A tall, lean man two decades removed from the Guangzhou region of China unfolded himself from the cab of the truck and surveyed the condition of his new restaurant, a pizza joint called the Firehouse, which he’d soon rechristen the Golden Dragon. The snowfall had not caved in the roof. It had, however, entombed the doorway, a situation that Papa Yum, as he would come to be known up and down Wells Street, viewed with the detachment of an auditor. Luckily, he’d brought a few of his seven children with him.
Late last year, when Terry paid a visit to 1617 N. Wells, the most recent of the Golden Dragon’s three locations, he felt a little out of place. He no longer had anything to do with the business. After owning and running it since the mid-70s, he had a few months earlier ceded control to his son, Chris, who’d made a few changes: gone were the photographs of friends and patrons, a hall of fame of regulars that had cluttered the walls under Terry’s management. Only four decorative items remained from the old days: two Buddha figurines and two circular signs depicting a dragon in relief. They looked to have been cast in bronze, but in fact they were made of fiberglass. The Yums had acquired the signs cheap in the 80s, from an entrepreneur who’d ordered 30 of them to embellish a chain of Chinese restaurants that never got built.
At about the time Chiang Kai-shek was consolidating his forces against those of both the Japanese and the Communists, Papa Yum, for reasons that have died with him, made a hasty exit; perhaps he had lost his shirt to the general in a vicious round of mah-jongg. He had not yet acquired the identity of Yum; his real name was Kong Nam Dye. (To this day, “Dye” persists in the Yum family, assigned as a middle name to all of Tom Yum’s descendants.) Then 19, he had saved enough money to buy the identification papers of an heir to a wealthy local family, surname Yum, who had official clearance to leave the country. False papers in hand, Yum left for the United States, where his aliases multiplied, for reasons easy enough to guess given his penchant for games of chance. “He had four different names,” Terry says. “And when he died we found six different safety deposit boxes.” Much of the time he went by Tom Yum, but you wouldn’t have been insulting had you instead addressed him as Charlie Yum or Chuck Ho Yum or Tony Yum or Papa Dragon–“or,” Terry says, “just Papa for short.”
On nights when the restaurant’s tables remained lonesome for diners, Papa would announce to the family, “I’ll get some business in here.” Barhopping his way down Wells, he would buy the fellows at each stop a round of drinks. “I’ll get these,” he’d say, “and you get the next.” He would then initiate conversation that culminated inevitably in queries as to the state of the party’s appetite. “Hearty” was almost always the answer. Yum would nod knowingly, like a hotel concierge, and tell everyone that he knew of a good restaurant nearby. When he made his reentry at the Dragon some time later, Terry says, “he’d have 20, 25 people with him. They used to call him the Pied Piper of Wells.” With no other Chinese restaurants in the immediate area, “the place took off like a bat out of hell. We had people waiting for hours to get a table.”
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The Golden Dragon occupied three floors at 1541 N.Wells–there was a bar in the basement, a dining room on the ground floor, and another bar upstairs. The dining room was dimly lit, with dropped ceilings and red vinyl booths that stretched aft along both sides of the room. A small bar lined the rear wall, on which hung a Tsingtao beer sign. Behind a thin coat of lipstick-red paint, the outlines of flames were visible, a vestige of the Dragon’s days as the Firehouse.
Kin Sun Yuen, better known to his friends as Cookie, retired from the kitchen in 1999, after a stroke that year numbed his entire left side. Cookie, 64, speaks an English not so much broken as suffering from a misunderstanding of the instructions for assembly. He is small and slim as a spatula, and under his chef’s smocks he often wore T-shirts sized for women, the only ones that fit him.
