When Judy and Jason Lai opened a Chinese restaurant on the northwest side, they had no plans to serve their own regional cuisine. “We opened Dragon Palace in December 1984,” Jason Lai says, “but we did not serve only Hakka food. We served mainly Cantonese and Szechuan dishes because Americans are more familiar with these.”
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Today the Dragon Palace is known primarily for its Hakkanese and Taiwanese cooking, and may be the only restaurant in Chicago–and probably the Midwest–that serves these cuisines.
Lai’s Hakkanese ancestors moved all over Asia for centuries. They were originally a poor people who lived in northern China who were forced to flee when the Tatars invaded. Since that time, the Hakkanese have lived primarily in the south, most of them in the mountains around Canton and Fukien. “In Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, there are many Hakkas living,” says Lai. “Hakka means ‘guest people,’ because we have moved so often.”
More popular with American patrons are the seaweed salad (made of thin strips of chewy seaweed that are boiled, chilled, and tossed with a sesame oil, garlic, and ginger dressing), fried Chinese sausage (made on the premises), turnip cake, hot and sour jellyfish, taro cake, crispy chicken, cold squid, and crispy baked prawns.
