Chinese Food on Christmas Is a Jewish Diasporic Tradition Everyone Can Adopt

There were a lot of people dining at San Francisco’s R&G Lounge last Christmas, but not as many — it’s okay, as a Jew I can say this — Jewish people as I expected.

American Jews have been celebrating Jesus’s birth over egg drop soup since fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe for Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century. Ultimately landing on the Lower East Side, they lived side by side with Chinese immigrants in search of peace and prosperity.

“Celebrating” isn’t quite the right word. More like… gathering? Passing the time? Eating, at essentially the only establishments open on Christmas.

Today, Jews ordering beef and broccoli on Christmas has become as much a holiday tradition as WASPs honey-glazing a giant ham. It’s an almost Rockwellian (or Rothberg-ian) cliché. Every Christmas Eve or Day, or often both, Jews — just 2.4 percent of the U.S. population — crowd institutions from Los Angeles’s Twin Dragon to NYC’s Shun Lee to the Boston area’s Golden Temple in the name of nourishment. Chinese restaurants in cities and towns across the country, doubling as de facto JCCs (Jewish community centers), help create community on an otherwise quiet, lonely day, crammed with multigenerational families; old camp friends and new best friends; toddler-toting parents and similar-looking sorority sisters; Hebrew school sweethearts and serial J-daters.

Every Jewish family, it seems, has a Christmas-dinner lore. My cousin Dave Rubin’s favorite anecdote dates back to the now-shuttered Chinese- and Japanese-inflected Tempura House in Boca Raton, Florida: “People were yelling and fighting, storming the hostess stand like, ‘We’re next! We’re next!’” he said. “[The hostess] couldn’t keep control. She just… left!” It was the first time his new girlfriend, Ricki, was meeting the family. And the Rubins, like everyone else clamoring for Boca’s finest kung pao chicken, were hungry. “It was anarchy! Lord of the Flies! There was no one to run the show!” Suddenly, Ricki spotted an empty table for ten. She just sat down and took it. “My mom was impressed,” said Dave. Chutzpah. (Ricki and Dave are now married, with a 2-year-old who recently discovered a love of lo mein.)

So, walking into Chinatown’s R&G Lounge, I expected a sea of equally (as a Jew I can also say this) loud Jewish families, making their own memories. Families with scarcity issues passed down like heirlooms. Families who have no qualms complaining about the inevitably epic, hectic Christmas wait. Instead, what I saw appeared to be… gentiles. Put another way: more dangly Santa earrings than Stars of David.

As a native East Coaster who usually schleps to Florida for “the holidays,” I admit I had no idea. Turns out, Chinese food on Christmas is not just for Jews. “It isn’t really a thing here,” said my Jewish friend Lauren, born and raised in San Francisco. I asked her: What was your family’s go-to Chinese spot for Christmas? “We didn’t have one,” she said. Well, then, what would you do? “Sit around,” she said. Today, she and her wife and son trim a tree, exchange gifts, maybe take in a movie.

San Francisco Jews were among the earliest Jewish American adopters of actual Christmas. In 1896, the local newspaper Emanu-El published a 19th-century version of a #hottake titled, “A Jewish Opinion on Christmas.” (The opinion: Jews do it.) Some 130 years later, they still do. According to a 21st-century op-ed in the J. by fifth-generation San Francisco Jew Frances Dinkelspiel: “Jews Celebrating Christmas: It’s a California Thing.” The first sentence declared, “Growing up in San Francisco, almost every Jewish family I knew celebrated Christmas.”

Maybe that’s why I encountered so few Jews at R&G Lounge last December. They must’ve been busy caroling.

Instead, I met a group of dudes clad in matching red plaid. And a single woman in a Santa hat and 6-inch sparkly boots. And a goateed professor named Peter, with a stuffed pocket square for the occasion. He and his wife, Kate, ventured out this year to show their love and support for San Francisco. “We’re so tired of the doom loop,” he said, referring to negative media publicity. “We like to squeeze the juice out of this city! There’s so much here! All our friends are like, ‘We heard about what’s happening in San Francisco…’ I’m like: ‘Would you rather visit Pittsburgh? No? Philly? No? So, shut the fuck up.” For Christmas 2022, they attended Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, the local pioneering “pot stickers and a show” that has sold out every Christmas (except during COVID) since 1993. “We’re not Jewish,” Kate said. “We just went because we could!” She added extra cred. “I actually worked at the Hillel House in college.”

I also observed a trio of elderly ladies sitting on a bench, in slacks and surgical masks, chatting in Cantonese. And a beefy guy, hair slicked back, who’d never been to R&G before. His usual tradition? “Avoiding my mother,” he said. “But don’t print that!” There was a young guy with a keffiyeh wrapped around his neck putting his name in. And a blond mom from Marin sipping a Mai Tai, who’d put her foot down. “I just told everyone: ‘I am not cooking this Christmas!’”

I approached a rowdy crew of Australians topped in paper crowns, putting back beers and platters of salt-and-pepper crab. “The Lazy Susan is always a good time!” said one expat, unfolding his fortune from a cookie. “Your leadership qualities will shine soon.” He beamed. “I’m putting that on my resume!” His date, in aforementioned dangly Santa earrings, chimed in: “Our Jewish friends always eat Chinese on Christmas. We thought we’d give it a try.”

As the sky darkened, the sidewalk crowds swelled. In the bar, a fire flickered on one flatscreen. NFL football flashed on another. A server squeezed by with a tray of martinis.

Here, the R&G hostess had it dialed in. At a podium protected by Plexiglass, wearing a blazer and headset, while tapping madly into her iPad and shouting names and numbers into a mic, she was unfazed by all the faces closing in.

“When I see this many people, it makes me anxious,” said Ben, a nice, graying Jewish boy visiting from Manhattan. “But then I remembered: It’s okay. We have a reservation.” Ben, a total stranger, seemed different from almost everyone else I accosted (or, okay, profiled) in the packed, three-level place over the next four hours. He felt familiar. Familial.

Like a needle in a haystack, I also located a lone bubbe from Long Island. And a short-brown-haired mom-daughter duo who were delegated to “check the wait at R&G” while father-son sussed out the scene around the corner at Z&Y, a local Szechuan institution since 2008. I also met Adam, a dentist — “but only half-Jewish”— armed with his girlfriend and a BYO bottle of 2017 Peter Michael pinot. (“It goes really well with the Peking duck.”)

Otherwise, there were locals and tourists of all ethnicities and ages: from newborns in strollers, to kids home from college, to seniors from the outermost suburbs who’d been coming here their entire lives. Or at least since 1985, when co-founder Kinson Wong first opened R&G on Kearny Street with just 50 basement seats. It’s since ballooned to 200 seats and is considered one of the most beloved Chinese restaurants in the nation, graced by royalty, including Anthony Bourdain, Padma Lakshmi, and SF-raised Ali Wong, who had her wedding party here and often pops in unannounced with her family.

And then there was me and my family, and my sister and her family, who’d agreed to schlep West for a visit. We’ve always been of the religious belief that it’s not where you eat Chinese food on Christmas, it’s that you eat Chinese food on Christmas. But, this year: Rejoice! Instead of devouring boneless pink-dyed spareribs dipped in duck sauce around my parents’ dining room table in Delray Beach, we were out in San Francisco’s Chinatown, feasting on the real deal.

I looked around the bottom-floor banquet room at the plastic white takeout bags piled on the counter; at our sweet server in a starched white shirt who’s been with R&G since the first Bush administration; at all the roundtables digging into their Dungeness crabs. By the end of the night, more than 1,000 diners would come through. I wondered how many were Jews. Then I realized: It doesn’t really matter.

Turns out, even at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas — at least in secular San Francisco — Jews still are, well, what Jews are: a minority. A minority communing with people, if not exactly our people. For a second, I missed Boca. But then my sister passed the Peking duck.

Rachel Levin is the co-author of the cookbook Eat Something, which makes a great gift for Hanukkah, or Christmas. (As do her other books! Look Big, Steamed, and her first kids’ book: Who Ate What?)
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis