The Tragedy of 88 Club and Firstborn

Two chef-driven Chinese restaurants, two entirely unique kinds of disappointment.

Welcome to the first essay edition of Spill the Beans. Every two weeks, I’ll be publishing a different behind-the-scenes piece about what it’s really like to be a professional food critic in Los Angeles. This includes a handful of various SEO-unfriendly ideas that were left on the metaphorical cutting-room floor, some personal(er) essays and other hyper-specific, more nuanced critical analyses of the LA food scene. (Free subscribers will be able to read the first few paragraphs of each piece—upgrade your subscription to read the whole thing!)

With my family being approximately two generations removed from mainland China, I consider myself a somewhat ersatz Chinese person, my grasp of the language and culture as piecemeal and jerry-rigged as any third, fourth, or fifth-generation Chinese American whose great-great grandparents may have come over before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or great-grandparents managed to con their way past San Francisco’s Angel Island. My parents are not exactly sentimental people, and though they both speak a variant of Hokkien—historically, the predominant lingua franca of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora—they weren’t, and still aren’t, adept at bridging the open maw between us and the rest of the people with similar DNA.

Food, by and large, has been the major way I have understood and framed my Chinese identity. That, and inconsistent Mandarin lessons in middle school given by a woman named Mei who first introduced me to the shengjianbao at Kang Kang Food Court. If I wasn’t really Chinese, I could at least study up and determine the handful of ways in which my experiences overlap with ABCs. I could also at least study up and pretend a little bit. Growing up, I read early food blogs like Diana Kuan’s Appetite for China—and yes, I was craving tanghulu a full decade and a half before it was a viral ASMR snack. (I didn’t try it until I visited Taipei in 2019. It was fine.)

Even now, as a professional food writer, I still don’t consider myself a foremost expert on the subject as a whole. For various reasons, I’ll never forget Calvin Trillin’s asinine New Yorker poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” Chinese food, both in the motherland and abroad, is a vast, ever-expanding universe, and I am just one ersatz Chinese person out of literally billions, screaming into the void. I’ve yet to visit any major city in China, nor have I been to Flushing or Vancouver, and I have only a mild interest in doing so. Plus, as a native Westsider and non-Mandarin speaker whose culinary grasp of the San Gabriel Valley has solely been through occasional weekend trips literally since birth (and quite possibly before), I’ve only sampled the creme de la creme of LA’s Chinese dining scene. Think places you’ve seen highlighted by David Chang and the like, plus spots like Mandarin Noodle House that no longer exist. (Former Monterey Park third-generation owner Denny Mu, however, is fundraising to reopen elsewhere!)

But after methodically visiting over three dozen Chinese restaurants across Los Angeles County to put together a well-researched cuisine guide for work, I’d like to think I know a thing or two about the cuisine, at least in a local context. Which is why it was so disappointing to recently visit 88 Club and Firstborn, two equally buzzy new LA Chinese restaurants, only to discover that both experiences sadly fell a bit short, albeit for vastly different reasons.