Stephanie, Penny’s Noodle Shop, Wicker Park, Chicago
Stephanie, Penny’s Noodle Shop, Wicker Park, Chicago
Stephanie, Penny’s Noodle Shop, Wicker Park, Chicago
Jessica, Penny’s Noodle Shop, Wicker Park, Chicago
A few weeks ago I took my family out to Penny’s Noodle Shop by the Damen Blue Line stop. My niece Stephanie is 8 and we were showing her how to use chopsticks. We positioned her hand and had her practice picking things up. I remember saying “you might not be able to eat anything yet, but if you practice with the chopsticks every time you’re at a restaurant that has them, then someday you’ll learn to use them.” Then my niece proceeded to eat her entire meal with chopsticks. And ramen noodles aren’t exactly the easiest thing to eat.
I think that Stephanie using chopsticks especially impressed me because I didn’t learn to eat with them until I moved to California when I was 24. I remember sitting at Tokyo House (also my first sushi) with Mark and Ryan while they made me practice picking things up with chopsticks. The town that I grew up in didn’t have a Chinese restaurant until after I moved away from it when I was 19. I remember working in Appleton and my entire department loved this place called Chef Chu’s. It was my first experience with Chinese food and I remember not liking it.. but threatening to throw me out of the Marketing department if I didn’t conform, I found a dish I liked - Moo Goo Gai Pan. .. and it’s something that to this day I still order often when going out for Chinese. Getting back to Steph, it’s interesting to watch her and Jessica grow up and see how things are different than how I grew up.
6 responses so far ↓
1 matt // Nov 8, 2004 at 3:45 pm
Wow, Jessica is only using ONE chopstick! What a pro! I can’t even manage two.
2 SK // Nov 8, 2004 at 8:31 pm
Your niece is a carbon-copy of you!!
3 marcus // Nov 8, 2004 at 9:36 pm
Impressive! I’m in my 30s, and I still haven’t learned how to use chopsticks. I’ll try impatiently, and then go for the fork everytime.
Seeing these pictures, Stephanie is now my chopstick role model!
4 mmeiser // Nov 9, 2004 at 12:28 am
I haven’t visited your site in too long. Pennys! Oh how I miss pennys noodles.
BTW, Nice tour of the cemetary. I snuck in there at 2am once with a friend. It’s the best time to tour it. Excellent.
5 Richard // Nov 9, 2004 at 6:36 am
I was amazed at how well Stephanie could use them. I can use chopsticks myself, but I think that was the first time I’ve ever resisted my temptation to grab my fork, and ate my whole meal with them.
Penny’s was also the first time I’d ever seen Jessica drink from a straw. Although, when I told Amanda I think she said that Jessica had done it a coulple of times before then.
6 Plurp // Nov 14, 2004 at 5:31 pm
I was probably in my late teens when I learned to use chopsticks. There weren’t any Asian restaurants in the little California cow-town where I grew up. The nearest Chinese restaurants (all two of them) were in the next town, thirty miles away. My mother insisted that we make that long trek once a month, but it didn’t do me any good.
The epitome of picky eaters, I wouldn’t eat anything other than hot dogs, hamburgers and fried shrimp, all of which were conspicuously absent in Cantonese cuisine. I forced my father to buy me a hot dog and french fries at the nearby A&W beforehand, and we would troop into the Chinese restaurant with an A&W bag in hand, to the everlasting embarassment of my poor father.
Later in life, I finally learned to love food - all kinds of food - and to eat in a variety of local styles, including using chopsticks. Today, my favorite food - by a lot - is sushi, eaten with naked hands.
Helen, on the other hand, used chopsticks as a small child in Taiwan. Her nickname was “Han-babe”, “han” being Chinese for “rice”.
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