Courtesy Leong family
The menu at Rob Connoley’s Bulrush is inspired by the traditional folk cuisine of the Ozarks. It’s extraordinary, with dishes confected from pork belly, mulberries, and acorns, foods of southwest Missouri's ancient hills. For some, however, there may be a bit of a disappointment knowing that at least one dish that's just as iconically Ozarkian as fried sucker or poke sallet is missing from the acclaimed restaurant's oeuvre: cashew chicken.
We'd wager that at least a third of all first dates in Springfield, Missouri, involve cashew chicken, which means it's not a stretch to say Wing Yin Leong is at least partially responsible for a great many marriages in that town and should probably have a few thousand children named in his honor.
It's difficult for the non-Springfieldian to capture the place of cashew chicken in the life of the Ozarks. It's far more than a typical takeout choice. It's hardly just another clumsily Americanized specialty. Cashew chicken in Springfield and its immediate environs is an element of the communion that binds communities. Post yourself on a Sunday morning in any joint that features the dish and watch as church-goers, multi-generational families, and couples stream in when the day’s services are concluded. Getting a table at around noon on a Sunday afternoon is harder than finding a parking spot on Bass Pro Shop’s lot on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Cashew chicken in Springfield is the salty, fried chicken-crunchy crispy and oyster sauce-bedunked reviving sustenance, the late-hour apres-drinking supper, the final skip of a Saturday night bar-hop, and the preferred stop for thousands of workers heading out for lunch on Monday through Friday. When parents are working late, kids can expect it on the plate for dinner. Head for a weekend on Table Rock Lake, where lots of residents have weekend homes, and it’s what you'll likely eat along I-65 toward Taney County.
How many St. Louis eateries serve toasted ravioli? Add several dozen to that, and you have some reasonably accurate count of the restaurants peddling cashew chicken in the Queen City. Nobody there calls it “Springfield-style” any more than locals here feel the need to say “St. Louis-style gooey butter cake” and for the same reason: There isn’t any other style worth mentioning. (There are some Chinese restaurants in Springfield that have the chopped vegetables and chicken Chinese-American version of “cashew chicken,” though their menus carefully note the distinction.)
It’s probably impossible to travel more than a mile in any commercial district in Springfield without coming across a restaurant that has cashew chicken on the menu or, more likely, a small place with booths, tables, and a take-out option. The visitor is to be forgiven for thinking there might be an enclave of Chinese residents in the region who are responsible for the food's popularity. Cashew chicken is one of the few foods whose history is relatively straightforward and can be traced back to one man, Wing Yin "David" Leong.
In 1963, Springfield surgeon Dr. John Tsang wandered into a Chinese restaurant in Florida while vacationing there and liked what he tasted. Because any sort of regional Chinese cooking was virtually unknown in the Ozarks then, he asked the restaurant’s cook to come to Springfield, where the doctor promised he would set the cook up with a restaurant. That cook was Leong, who received the Western first name, David, courtesy of an Army sergeant who couldn’t pronounce his name.
Courtesy Leong family
Leong was born in Guangzhou, in southern China, back when most Westerners knew the city as Canton; he and his wife married in the 1930s, and he left to find work in the United States when she was pregnant with their first child, just as Japan invaded China. Leong arrived in the U.S. hopeful his wife would soon follow. It took a decade for that to happen. Leong worked in a laundry in New Orleans and was drafted for WWII. He survived the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach after diving overboard from the landing craft and swimming as bullets flew around him. After the war, Leong cooked in a variety of restaurants across the eastern U.S. He was in a place in Pensacola when the surgeon from Springfield visited. Leong and his brother Gee Yuen Leong came to the Midwest, working in Springfield until they’d saved enough money to open their own restaurant, Leong’s Tea House. The night before the opening, someone put several sticks of dynamite outside the restaurant; the explosion woke the whole side of the city but did little damage.
Within a few years, Leong’s Tea House was the place for international cuisine in Springfield; its bar was the headquarters for golfers from nearby courses, who’d stop by for a beer after playing 18. The walls were made to look like Japanese shoji screens. The sign, a fixture for years in Springfield, was a massive telephone pole structure that copied a Japanese Shinto shrine gate with a tiled Manchu roof.
Leong’s Tea House was also where cashew chicken got its start. Leong began experimenting with a recipe that replaced stir-fried chicken chunks with a deep-fried version. He added a sauce, a thick gravy of oyster and soy sauces, and a legend emerged from the hot oil.
Photo by Dave Lowry
Cashew chicken is not a complex dish. The recipe is easy to find online; you can make it at home. Expatriates do it, homesick for the taste, and it’s fine if you’re careful and follow the directions. But it isn’t the same. The experience of cashew chicken is not one of just taste. For Springfieldians, it is a meal eaten sometimes directly from the cardboard tubs in which it’s packed for take-out or from plastic plates sitting in a booth with family or friends.
It’s a dish that one insists on having at that one particular joint where it's served "the best." Opinions on the preferred cashew chicken in Springfield are not exactly difficult to find. “This is the place where it tastes most like the old version at Leong’s” is a common bit of advice you’ll get if you ask for recommendations. “That’s the place where it tastes most like what I remember when I was a kid.” There are its aficionados who can detect the faintest aroma of garlic when they enter a cashew chicken restaurant and will promptly leave. Cashew chicken, they insist, needs no such aromatics. A scatter of freshly chopped scallions on top, yes. Adding anything else is to despoil the dish.
Other matters matter: You’ll be asked if you want all white meat. You do not. Thigh meat adds richness and flavor. You will be surprised to hear that customers ordering with the request to “hold the cashews.” Yes, cashew chicken without cashews. (Hey, toasted raviolis aren’t really toasted. Don’t judge.) Note that the accompanying rice is an often-overlooked but vital element of the dish. Properly, it’s given a smidge of chicken broth when cooked; it also gets a stingy splatter of oil that gives it a richer feel on the palate. That’s a detail that's almost always overlooked in the home preparation of cashew chicken.
Courtesy Leong family
Leong’s Tea House used to bring the dish to the linen-covered tables on silver trays, and customers would dress as they might for a formal dinner. A dinner at Leong’s was for Springfieldians what an evening at Rigazzi’s or Al’s was for St. Louisans back in the '60s. The place was generally packed. Leong could have maintained his monopoly on the Double C, but he happily shared the recipe with numerous would-be restaurateurs. Cashew chicken flourished at the Tea House and other restaurants specializing in it all over the city.
Eventually, in 1997, Leong closed the restaurant after his wife died. His son, Wing Yee, reared in the restaurant’s kitchen, cooked at several local places; whenever his father’s cashew chicken was on the menu, it remained a hit. In 2010, Leong felt the call of cashew chicken again and, with his son, Wing Yee, opened Leong’s Asian Diner in west Springfield. Into his nineties, Leong continued to be at the restaurant regularly.
Leong, who died last week, less than a month short of his 100th birthday, was an immigrant from Guangzhou with a sixth-grade education who stormed Omaha Beach for his adopted country, who uprooted himself to come to Missouri at the invitation of an eccentric surgeon, who endured a bombing and racism. Yet somehow, he became the godfather of one of the most iconic dishes of the Ozarks, carving out a legacy you can still find slathered in that glossy gravy of oyster and soy sauce, in a town that made it as synonymous with Ozark cuisine as Aunt Edith’s scalloped potatoes.
