Hua Mei
Restaurant
By Scott Millsop
Hua Mei Restaurant
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If you’ve been to an Ethnosh event you probably know Michael Grooms. He usually acts as a sort of MC and guides the evening along. He loves being on stage. He’s a former professional dancer and is an advocate for the good life, and part of that role is finding these terrific, immigrant owned restaurants that we visit. Most of us would not even notice some of these places. They’re on side streets in a faraway part of town, or attached to ethnic grocery stores. Most of us would be unlikely to visit these shops on our own, so Michael is a kind of culinary scout. It’s a fun job.
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He found Hua Mei Restaurant for our March Ethnosh and we want to say Thank You Michael!
Photos by Bobby Tewksbury
It’s safe to say most of us would not have discovered this marvelous, intriguing spot on our own. It is literally at the east gate of the massive Fuyao facility where they make automobile glass. This is the old GM factory in Moraine and there are some very interesting stories to be found, including a movie about the factory that won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. There is a lot of cultural relevance to the story. A lot of ideas are in play. Some of what is so interesting about all of this will tease your palette too, because Hua Mei is right in the middle of the story.
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Fuyao is a Chinese company with some 2000 employees, a good portion of which are people who came to Dayton from China. It follows that they need good Chinese food, so Hua Mei is right there, literally just outside the gate. They’ve been around for about three years. And they are authentic.
Most international foods are “Americanized” by the time we get to taste them, and that is probably most true of Chinese food. For example, done properly most Chinese meals include soup. So we’ll be having Pickled Cabbage Fish Soup. That’s not going to appear on most Chinese restaurant menus, but the chefs at Hua Mei managed to let us know right through the language barrier that this is something to look forward to.
This Ethnosh will be real Chinese food. We had to find a translator to guide us through the set-up of this event. We met Mr. Lee and Mr. Zhang. They came from China – where they ran a restaurant – to be with family. When we asked, “Why is the food so good?” we got a virtual explosion of enthusiasm from Mr. Zhang, the chef. There was shouting and smiling and laughter and fist-pounding insistence as he talked about his food while the Ethnosh team sat astonished and didn’t understand a word of it. Then Henry, the translator, helped us to understand that it is the same food you would get in China. He’s very proud of it. He talked about regional differences in Chinese food culture including Fuzhou, Sichuan, Cantonese and others. Maybe it would help to know at this point that there are KFC restaurants in China where they “Chinafy” the Kentucky menu. Imagine what that must be like and then guess how much Americans change the authentic Chinese food to suit our tastes. Hua Mei serves authentic Chinese food to a mostly Chinese clientele. And this Ethnosh, we get to learn what that means, how that tastes.