The Empire Garden restaurant in Boston's Chinatown has been sliced and diced into the balcony area of what was once the Globe Theater, a turn-of-the-century downtown destination for burlesque entertainments designed by architect Arthur Vinal in the French Renaissance style, and although Dim Sum may top the menu today, Gypsy Rose Lee and Al Jolson topped the bill during the theater's heyday in the 1930s.
Despite the addition of de-rigueur ceramic mandarins and wild-eyed dragons that now grin beneath the Globe's proscenium arch and golden trim, the spaciously sumptuous interior exists in a remarkable state of almost perfect preservation, as if a troupe of sequinned and feathered chorus girls might high-kick their way out of the kitchen at any second, perhaps delivering spot-lit plates of gleaming noodles to the gentlemen at table five.
Of course, dining amid such gilded and stuccoed surroundings is rather like being cast in a audience-participation musical comedy set in a Chinese restaurant, especially when thehighly pretentious fortune cookies arrive. My friend Abby's fortune ticket appears below:
How very true that is.
In the 1950s, the Globe Theater became the Center Cinema, a rather seedy destination exhibiting a variety of cheescake "adult" movies, then morphed into a Chinese-language action movie showcase called "The Pagoda," before re-inventing itself as The Empire Garden: the scallion cake and spicy squid are recommended. From human burlesque to restaurant burlesque, the show must go on.
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