A step into Woodland, California’s, Chicago Café is an immediate leap into the past.
Customers sit on black swivel stools at a classic diner counter enjoying $12 combination plates heaped with chow mein, pork fried rice, fried shrimp and egg foo young (hot tea and fortune cookie included — cash only).
Regulars know to enter the shotgun-layout restaurant through the kitchen in back, where boisterous café owner Paul Fong, 75, greets customers before turning back to cook alongside his wife, Nancy, 67.
Their lone employee, server Dianna Olstad, 57, delivers iced water to tables in throwback red plastic tumblers, sprinkles “honeys” and “sweeties” like salt and pepper, and good-naturedly chides customers who go too long between visits to the café.
“She has gotten on me for not showing up,” said Wes Hensley, 36, during a Tuesday lunch in September with his parents, Lori Hensley, 63, and Gene Hensley, 65. A lifelong Woodland resident and Chicago Café customer, Wes “probably has only been here a half-dozen times this year,” he admitted somewhat sheepishly. His mom, on the other hand, dines at the café at least once a week.
The scene is charmingly — almost cinematically — retro, a reminder of when this Sacramento and Davis suburb of 62,000 was still a small farm town. But the café’s significance goes well beyond Woodland, where for families like the Hensleys, it has just always seemed to be there.
UC Davis School of Law Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin is leading interdisciplinary research into the restaurant, a piece of living history standing amid the vestiges of Woodland’s one-time Chinatown. With a group of students, Chin aims to document the diner’s past and how such institutions reflect the Chinese American experience. After a deep dive into local archives, they have concluded the Chicago Café might be the oldest continuously running Chinese restaurant in California and perhaps even the United States.
Researching the…
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