Feature article
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Barbecued chicken you're Gong to like
By Fred Sauceman
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| Fortune Dragon Chinese Restaurant |
Joe’s Chicken is back. This deboned, deconstructed, reassembled dish was once the most frequently ordered specialty prepared by the first Chinese restaurant in the Tri-Cities. With the closing of Joe Gong’s, a Kingsport institution from 1969 to 1994, Joe’s Famous Barbecued Chicken disappeared.
When my colleague Pamela Ripley was traveling Stone Drive recently, she noticed a sign that stopped her Subaru cold as she awaited a plain tea in the drive-through line at Pal’s: “Uncle Joe’s Barbecued Chicken.”
It was posted outside a place neither of us had ever visited, the Fortune Dragon Chinese Restaurant. Pam remembered being introduced to this unusual plate of poultry at Joe Gong’s by fellow reporters at the Times-News in the 1970s.
Here’s the story. Joe Gong, who still resides in Kingsport, owns the building now occupied by the Fortune Dragon. It was once Joe Gong’s Two. Out of admiration for the young Chinese family that operates the restaurant, and with the desire to preserve a part of the region’s ethnic culinary heritage, Joe resurrected the recipe.
He carefully taught owner Yi Xue and his wife Ying Wang how to steam the chicken to preserve its moistness, how to debone and freeze it, and then how to put the boneless bird back together in a roll before dredging it in flour and deep-frying it.
The cooking liquid from the chicken forms the basis for a greenish-hued sauce, with a kick of salt and Chinese five-spice powder, topped with a sprinkling of minced scallions. Having lived in Appalachia for 50 years now, Joe, a native of the Canton province of China, prefers to call it “gravy.”
IF YOU GO THERE...
Fortune Dragon Chinese Restaurant
Location: 1112 East Stone Drive, Kingsport, Tennessee
Hours: Open Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Fri day and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 9 p.m.
Menu sample: Joe’s Famous Barbecued Chicken, $4.75 at lunch, $7.95 at dinner; Peking Duck, half, $9.95; Orange Beef, $10.95; Lucky Shrimp, $10.95; Pork with Black Bean Sauce, $7.25; Shredded Beef Szechuan Style, $7.75; Chicken with Cashew Nuts, $7.25; Shrimp Egg Foo Young, $5.95; Sesame Banana, $2.95.
Lunch buffet Monday through Saturday, $5.25; Sunday, $5.45; Dinner buffet $6.95. Luncheon specials served from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., all under $5, including fried rice and egg roll.
Contact: (423) 245-5300 or fortunedragonrestaurant.com
Miscellany: Most major credit cards accepted
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Joe’s Chicken caught on so quickly in this region because it shares certain characteristics with the Southern fried version: moist inside, crispy coating, and thick gravy. Each flour-encrusted slice contains both white and dark meat, and the sauce provides an “exotic” taste, with 10 different seasonings, that diners in 1969 were totally unaccustomed to, in the days when you couldn’t even find a piece of fresh ginger or a head of bok choy in area grocery stores. Orange peel in chicken gravy was a revolutionary idea then.
“I went through 20 cases of chicken in a week, and there were 30 chickens in a case,” says Joe Gong. “That’s 600 chickens in a week.”
Although the method of serving at the Fortune Dragon differs from Joe’s approach, diner Patricia Leedy says Yi Xue and his family “have it down good.”
“They’re nice young people, and I want to see them succeed in the busi ness,” she said.
Fortune Dragon is a family enterprise in every sense. Yi Xue’s father, Shuang Xue, is the chef, who has created most of the recipes, including mushrooms fried in tempura batter, a new salmon steak with garlic sauce, and a crabmeat bacon roll.
He even thought up the name for the restaurant, based on a childhood memory of a giant jade dragon in Fujian Province that he hopes will bring luck to the family. His wife, Xiu Ying Zheng, is a constant presence in the kitchen, and their grandchildren, Ling, age 5, and Ming, age 3, entertain customers with their lively, happy play. Ming even modeled her new denim outfit during our last visit. And they openly share their delight in American whipped cream.
“We use the freshest ingredients, we make everything ourselves, we have a distinct sauce for every dish, and we guarantee our foods are always fresh and clean,” remarks Ying Wang, who al so holds down a full-time job as applications programmer for Clinical Trial Management Services in Bristol.
Fortune Dragon’s menu features over 130 items, and a buffet is avail able at lunch and dinner. Even at a price of $6.95, the dinner buffet does not scrimp on seafood. Shrimp with Hot Tomato Sauce is a sweet-hot crustacean stew. The Seafood Combination is a simmered mixture of crab, scallops, and jumbo shrimp. Pepper steak, thin and tender, is well seasoned with shots of thick, brown oyster sauce. Orange Beef is sweet, sticky, spicy, and flavored with orange peel.
Shuang Xue will do a whole Peking Duck for you, complete with pancakes, spring onions and plum sauce. For lovers of gravy and eggs, there are six different varieties of Egg Foo Young.
Among the desserts is Sesame Banana. Chunks of banana are dipped in pancake batter, fried, and then drizzled with pancake syrup and sesame seeds.
Fortune Dragon is a bright place, illuminated by traditional Chinese lanterns, track lights, and recessed bulbs, reflecting off rose-colored Naugahyde booths.
What started out as a simple land lord-tenant relationship has brought together two formerly unfamiliar families, one speaking Cantonese, one Mandarin, to keep alive, for diners in these mountains, a flavor of the Far East that would otherwise have been forgotten.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, the author of “Home and Away: A University Brings Food to the Table,” is the executive assistant to the president for university relations at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@xtn.net.
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