Despite its happy-go-lucky name, Dai Wah Yummy City is a very serious place. No red dragons with glimmering eyes sprawl across the wall. No potted plants perch on pedestals. There are no futuristic light fixtures, nor wildly uniformed waiters in pastel waistcoats, either—just a big, boxy room with white walls, made to seem even barer by maximum wattage. The only decorations are a floral mural on the rear wall that seems like the artist ran off after half executing it, and a giant plasma TV dangling from the ceiling. Rather than showing chop-socky videos, it follows international events. On our first visit, President Obama was receiving Chinese president Hu Jintao at the White House as we ate, which lent gravitas—if not gravy—to a superlative meal. The patrons of Yummy City tend to be well-off immigrants who have moved out of Chinatowns into the front-yarded swaths of middle-class housing in Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst. The restaurants they patronize aren’t concentrated in one area, but scattered throughout the neighborhood, and they tend to be high-quality, but bare-bones. The tables at Yummy City are mainly gigantic round affairs, and the waiter had some difficulty finding a place for our tiny party of four. All around us sat extended families, the parental generation chattering in Chinese, while the fully assimilated kids amused themselves with computing devices in apparent disdain of what their elders were saying and eating.
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