Inside Kwong Ming in Wantagh: One of Long Island's oldest Chinese restaurants

As gerontologists will tell you, and chain-smoking centenarians will quickly attest, risk factors do not necessarily correlate with human longevity, and the same is true of restaurant longevity. For proof, you have only to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem Avenue and what is likely the oldest Chinese eatery on Long Island. The place goes back 60 years, with rumors of its demise going back almost as far.

“Kwong Ming in Wantagh is for nostalgia buffs,” wrote The New York Times in a kiss-of-death review published in 1982, dismissing the restaurant as a relic of the “pre-Sichuan-Hunan era of Chinese dining, when Levittown was young and no one owned a wok.” The popularity of Kwong Ming’s Cantonese American fare had made a certain kind of sense in the past, the Times critic argued, but this was 1982, for heaven’s sake. “Chinese food has become more sophisticated and authentic.”

Ah, the ’80s, Kwong Ming’s heyday. The kitchen employed upwards of 40 cooks, hourlong waits for its tables were commonplace and on Saturday nights the dining room stayed open till 2 a.m. to accommodate post-show crowds from the 700-seat Wantagh Theatre across the street. Howard Lee, who ran and co-owned Kwong Ming, had to fight daily to keep the proceedings from descending into chaos even as his son Barry, then a teenager, worked as a takeout runner. The younger Lee went on to become a busser, waiter, cashier and, since 2000, manager of the restaurant, taking over from his father. Leading a visitor on a tour of Kwong Ming’s party room, even now his eyes lit up when recalling all the bridal showers and family reunions held there, the constant parade of company parties, first communions, Sweet 16s. “We didn’t worry about anything in those days,” he said wistfully.  

It was the kind of success restaurateurs dream about, most of it stemming from the deep and abiding love Long Islanders had for Kwong Ming’s menu. That menu, in turn, owed much to laborers who left China for California in the 19th century. Many found jobs cooking for white employers, serving up dishes they either created themselves or heavily altered to appeal to stateside palates—chop suey, lobster Cantonese, beef with broccoli, kung pao chicken.

And there lay the rub for The Times, whose reservations about Kwong Ming seemed to extend beyond its fare and its kitchen to the question of whether it had a right to call itself a Chinese restaurant at all. Sure, it had Chinese owners—Lee’s father emigrated from there—and its recipes could be traced to immigrants from China. But the assumption was that Kwong Ming was serving up inauthenticity of a sort that could only appeal to those who didn’t know any better. As such, Long Island’s love affair with Kwong Ming seemed to speak to the backwardness of an entire Island, a verdict that doubtless enraged local readers.

“To infer that Cantonese-American cuisine is popular only among those who just don’t know any better gives ‘chutzpah’ new meaning,” wrote one of them, North Bellmore resident Joanne Kaminowitz, in a Times letter to the editor published on February 14, 1982. “I am fully aware that it is not authentically Chinese, but I still like it.” Kaminowitz added that if ever she found herself in the reviewer’s position, she would be “a great deal more tactful when I try to save others from their own bad taste.”

Forty years on, the exchange feels like a contretemps from a world that’s disappeared. The crowds have gone, taking with them most of the cooks, only eight of whom remain. The Wantagh Theatre has been gone since 1989 and Lee’s father since 2020. On the other hand, Kwong Ming is still mercifully hanging on, and so is staunch defender Joanne Kaminowitz, even as she decamped to Forest Hills in 2004 and is now retired.

“When you went on Sunday there was always a very long wait, 15 or 20 minutes to get a table,” she recalled. “You would go in there and see all your neighbors and their kids.” Kaminowitz first visited the restaurant decades ago, a young mother of two daughters who were “endlessly fascinated by the display of Buddha dolls in the lobby”—still there—and a dish called wonton lop chop choy, “a heaping plate of everything they had in the kitchen” that Kaminowitz has never seen on any other menu. And Kwong Ming is an outlier in other ways. While these days Kaminowitz enjoys “the more authentic places” in Queens, home to one of our country's most vibrant, diverse assemblages of Chinese restaurants, she still hankers for a Kwong Ming–style Cantonese American palace from time to time. “It’s almost impossible to find here,” she said. “The other food is delicious but it’s different!”

Determined to discover the secret to Kwong Ming’s stamina, I wandered in on a Monday afternoon in February, finding the dining room to be as it was, is and ever shall be: candle-folded white napkins nested in teacups, standing like slightly crooked tapers on top of dozens of vermillion-sheathed tables. Just five or six diners sat eating in a room that holds a hundred, making me almost grateful for the noise coming from three employees rolling flatware at a back table, that and the TV hovering overhead, even if the news report playing on an endless loop—about the Miller Place funeral home that received the body of a woman still breathing—seemed a little too on-the-nose.

Taking a seat, I noticed carpets that were worn and flooring in need of replacement, although appraisal turned to attention with the server’s arrival. A figure rushed over with a bowl of fat fried wontons and big saucers of duck sauce and hot mustard, displaying that charming rudeness favored by ancient Chinese restaurant servers, and which they alone can get away with. (Intrigued by a Kwong Ming special that the cocktail menu described as “our own luscious potion,” I asked what was in it. “I don’t know,” the man replied, turning and walking away.) 

Plenty of Island restaurants seem frozen in time, but Kwong Ming wears its frozenness as a badge of honor, making you wonder if there’s some connection between stubbornly resisting change and restaurant longevity. Consider the sloe gin fizzes and Singapore slings on its cocktail list, or the little-from-column-A-little-from-column-B family-style menu, or the many dishes of perpetual mystery—chow sam wong? zee chew calamari? wor cha?—that apparently wandered onto the menu during the Pleistocene Era and never left. “We still make everything on the premises, all our dumplings, egg rolls, noodles, duck sauce, mustard, everything,” Lee told me. “The recipes we created in ’62—the cooks follow those same recipes today.” MSG is an ingredient in many of them. “It’s a food seasoning. If you didn’t put MSG in, there wouldn’t be any flavor,” he protested, adding that Kwong Ming’s cooks will leave it out on request.

The server hurled a plate in my direction. “That looks beautiful,” I found myself saying, staring at the largest egg roll I’d ever seen, bigger than many burritos. “You mean the egg roll or me?” replied the man, again walking away without another word. Soon, a plate of beef chop suey arrived, sweet and gloppy, its crunchy baby corn and freshly sliced mushrooms smothered by a sauce that challenged my dexterity with chopsticks—or would have if I’d been given any. (Most of Kwong Ming’s patrons are non-Asian, Lee explained, so he supplies them only when asked.)

What else is associated with long life? A sense of purpose, and Kwong Ming has that too, as I discovered on another day over a plate of spareribs—sticky, sweet, irresistible. At an adjacent table, adult children asked elderly parents pointed questions about family history. “I never understood why they didn’t have kids,” said one. “Wait a minute, he met her before Lucia?” asked another. One suspects that not a few patrons come to Kwong Ming, a place that’s lost in time, in hopes of recovering what’s been lost to time. Think ancestry.com but with fortune cookies.

Given that the personal histories of so many Islanders played out over late-night pupu platters and Sunday suppers at Kwong Ming, scrutinizing the origin stories of General Tso’s chicken or shrimp toast, much less debating their inclusion on the menu, seems beside the point. Kwong Ming is too big for little questions. And it has lasted long enough to see Cantonese American food finally gain a measure of respect among food lovers, Chinese Americans included. “We shouldn’t shun or ignore the evolution of our food in diaspora,” wrote Su-Jit Lin, who was raised on the Island, in a recent essay on thespruceeats.com. “Just because this cuisine was created in exile doesn’t make it any less authentic.”

Still, Kwong Ming is clearly showing its age. Indeed, it seems to grow frailer with each passing year. When some of Lee’s customers who have retired to Florida return after an absence of a few seasons, they often express surprise that Kwong Ming is still around. Sometimes Lee is surprised, too. “Business is not like it used to be,” he admitted. “There are a lot more headaches. Food costs have doubled. We’ve had to raise prices two, three times.”

Death being the inevitable, inescapable fact of life, Kwong Ming too will die someday, but perhaps not soon. The walls of the entrance way are covered with commendations from the town of Hempstead, photos of the many baseball and football teams it has sponsored over the years, all the framed honors received, the testimonials by a Wantagh it helped create. And Wantagh would seem to have a vested interest in keeping it alive, if only because in dying, it would take some of Wantagh with it.

With time, furthermore, has come not just new attitudes toward restaurants like Kwong Ming but a new generation willing to love the place without apology. Among these is Lee’s daughter Tiffany, who, despite being just 16, has already had a number of “memorable moments” in the party room, she told me, most of them involving deejays and her Wantagh High School classmates. “I would maybe like to work in this restaurant,” said Tiffany, speaking in measured tones in front of her father, adding that she would need to change up the carpeting, fix the floors and add some modern touches. As I left, she presented me with a one-page, handwritten essay spelling out newer initiatives like “accommodating health-conscious consumers by using vegetable oil and less salt” and “incorporating a variety of healthy ingredients.”

“Third generation!” beamed Lee.

Tiffany’s reaction resisted easy reading. All I can say is that it left me feeling both excited and worried, as did the message in my fortune cookie that day—Enjoy yourself while you can. On the reverse, it noted that the disaffected could seek out an alternate reading at secondfortune.com, and I felt an impulse to do just that, on the off chance I might score a fortune unambiguously positive, something about the good times going on forever.

By Scott Vogel

scott.vogel@newsday.com

Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.