Chinese Eateries

Neon Memes • This past Saturday afternoon at Lemay Garden (2550 Lemay Ferry Road, 314.892.8636), I treated myself to an order of shrimp fried rice, $5.50 plus tax. Nothing notable, alas. The shrimp, though plentiful enough, could have lingered longer in the wok, and the dish otherwise tended toward minimalism―onion, green onion, egg and short-grain rice instead of the preferable medium-grain variety. (It almost goes without saying that this meditation scarcely involves haute cuisine; even if it did, though, I claim nothing like the expertise of my colleague Dave Lowry, whose Connoisseur's Guide to Sushi establishes that he's probably forgot more about rice than I'll ever know.) The door was propped open, and an autumn-like breeze cooled the restaurant, which appeared to seat just 32―a brace of two-tops and everything else in four-tops. There in that strip shopping center equidistant between South City and South County, I reflected on Lemay Garden's similarity to so many other putative Oriental restaurants locally―déclassé oases of interzonal serenity―and wondered this: Since McDonald's and its ilk eclipsed the classic diner for burgers-and-fries fare, have non-franchise Chinese eateries, in their ubiquity, taken the place of "greasy spoons" of the '40s, '50s and '60s? ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor