Readers Remember

When I opened my first restaurant in Santa Monica in 1959, I had the only Chinese restaurant in town. Until then there were just a few chop suey houses, most of them in downtown Chinatown. I featured gourmet dishes because that is what I had grown up with in my native China.

However, one of my first celebrity guests was Frank Sinatra, who asked for chop suey. Since I didn’t have it on my menu, I served him Wu’s Beef and told him he didn’t have to pay for it if he didn’t like it. I had made up the recipe as a substitute for chop suey; he loved it and Wu’s Beef became one of my most popular gourmet dishes.

Another celebrity and frequent customer was Cary Grant, who asked for chicken salad, another item not on my menu and one that did not exist as a Chinese dish. From that request came my Madame Wu’s Chicken Salad, a unique and different kind of dish that became the most frequently requested item on my menu.

As time went on I continued to invent other recipes to satisfy the gourmet tastes of my international clientele. Some of them included crab puffs and sirloin beef cubes that customers could cook to their own tastes on miniature hibachis at their table. For an exotic dessert, I put together an avocado and green tea parfait.

In 1998 I closed my Madame Wu’s Garden, but I think I can safely say that I introduced gourmet Chinese cooking to the local scene.

MADAME SYLVIA WU

Pacific Palisades

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