wheel of fortune house chinese restaurant

Mothers being taken out to dinner by their middle-aged sons and daughters. Elderly couples who linger over a glass of red wine at the end of their meal like they're at Le Bernardin. Though all the patrons seem to be from the extreme immediate area, there are two customer worlds at Fortune House. She was always dropping off some dish or picking up a check, cleaning, clearing, inquiring and sometimes chatting with the more regular of the regulars. Overseeing all was a fierce female manager in glasses and black pant suit. The ever-whirling help must have read some of the reviews on the Internet that characterize the service at Fortune House as 'indifferent.' Though distracted by sheer business, the waitresses rarely left a table unattended and even occasionally smiled. The result wasn't good, and it wasn't bad. The girl then mixed the concoction with a shake that wouldn't wake a baby. I started to feel pretty good about my drink. I saw five ingredients go in, two of which were rum, one recognizable as Myers. Worrying about being passed some rotgut, I watched the 'bartender' (really, a young Asian women of about 17) make my Mai Tai. 'And they're so cheap!' I didn't need much pushing. 'The cocktails are great,' encouraged a regular. They're the genuine, time-warp items, the drinks your Mom and Dad used to throw back, complete with tiny umbrella and little plastic sword skewering a cherry and orange slice. Well, maybe it's the $4.25 tiki drinks! Fortune House serves Mai Tais, Zombies and Navy Grogs. What can it be about the pink tablecloths, green walls and Cantonese-American-style duck-sauce-to-pineapple-and-fortune-cookie cooking that keeps them coming back?

Plus, for 26 years it has held on to a prime piece of Henry Street real estate in Brooklyn Heights that assumedly should have been converted into a Duane Reade or Starbucks long ago. What makes Fortune House a noteworthy case is, while is does a steady take-away business, it also fills a great many of its tables every night.

You'll find plenty in Chinatown, and every neighborhood has its stubbornly tenacious take-out joint. This is the latest edition of Who Goes There? a regular feature in which Lost City's Brooks of Sheffield cracks the doors on mysteriously enduring Gotham restaurants-unsung, curious neighborhood mainstays with the dusty, forgotten, determined look-to learn secrets of longevity and find out, who goes there.Ĭhinese restaurants that hold their ground while garnering little notice outside the immediate area are hardly unusual.

Wheel of fortune house chinese restaurant