Storied cookies

Today’s National Chinese Almond Cookie Day conjures memories.

When I read L.A. Son by Roy Choi, his passage about Chinese almond cookies stuck in my mind. This is not surprising given my obsession with food as a mnemonic device and the interwoven influence of place. Choi, then, has memories of Chinese almond cookies. Here he recounts his childhood on the streets hustling for the family business.

Finally, the last stop of the day for one last piece of treasure: Chinatown for some almond cookies. Phoenix Bakery’s sun-bleached sign has sat on the north end of Broadway for decades. It’s a real old-school place with sprinkled cakes, big smiley-face cookies, and shoehorn pastries. The girls working there always seemed like the owners’ daughters, just a bit older than me. I crushed on them hard. Twelve to thirteen with a dream — can you blame me?

But more than anything, I loved the bakery for those almond cookies. Glazed and buttery. Dense and filled with sweet aromas of almond paste and extract. I’d run up and take a number, wait for a pretty girl to call me up, and order a pink box filled with the best cookies I would ever eat in my life, ever.

I, too, have hazy memories of L.A.’s Chinatown.

Choi entered the history books by introducing Korean tacos and modern food trucks to the city and world. I entered L.A. food writing while this was happening and consumed Choi’s Kogi tacos along with everyone else. As with Choi, the streets were my classroom and food was iconographic shorthand for the metropolis.

Here’s how the late Jonathan Gold contextualized Choi’s Korean tacos when they were novel circa 2009.

Kogi’s taco is a new paradigm of a restaurant, an art-directed take on Korean street food previously unimaginable in both California and Seoul: cheap, unbelievably delicious and unmistakably from Los Angeles, food that makes you feel plugged into the rhythms of the city just by eating it.

Buying cookies in New York’s Chinatown, I felt similarly plugged into the city’s rhythms. After some quick but hyperattentive online research, I selected two bakeries to visit.

I found an almond cookie at the first bakery.

The second bakery had no cookies, but offered a slice of almond cake. Sold. When everything is nuts, modifications are to be expected. With no seating, I composed a picture on a stoop with props on hand. It was indeed a memorable National Chinese Almond Cookie Day.