*Why yes, it is Wednesday.

Chef Joseph Poon is sixty, but you wouldn't know it when you meet him. It's only once you start doing the math while he's talking—it seems as if the Chef has had hundreds of restaurant jobs, on top of owning no fewer than than four establishments over the years—that you realize that he couldn't possibly be as young as you first thought. Nobody can blame you for your misconceptions, and it's not just because of the stereotype (whether correct or not) that people of Asian descent don't show their age. No: Chef Joe seems young because he acts young. Whether he's trotting across North Ninth Street ("I talk very fast. I move very fast. You'll have to chase me.") to prove that motorists in Chinatown do not, indeed, stop for pedestrians, or racing through a restaurant supply store lecturing on the number of BTUs in a wok stove, Chef Joe is completely timeless. Continued after the gallery and jump...

Chef Joseph Poon leads a tour through Chinatown for young and old alike. (Photo by Ross Currie.)

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Arriving at the respected chef's now-[mostly-]closed Chef Kitchen, I'll admit that we were unsure of what to expect. The agenda was lunch, then tour. Vague. And yet exciting. I'd been to Chinatown plenty of times before, but I'd never really explored Chinatown. There's that one place for dim sum. That one place for noodles. That one place for my vegetarian friends. That one place my friend bought a futon. The Troc. And everything else was more or less mystery cloaked in several different dialects of a language I didn't even pretend to understand. Ross and I were not alone in feeling this way, and I guess that's Chef Joe's primary motivation for leading his Wok 'n' Walk tours. It's also why his first bit of advice to me, delivered within moments of his entrance at Chef Kitchen, seemed so strongly felt.

"You're the writer? You're so young. Travel. Then write."

I was immediately taken aback. He had a point. At twenty-four, I've never had the opportunity to leave the North American continent. To prove my naivete, he then brought three containers full of saffron and quizzed me about where the seasoning is found and how much it costs. I passed his test, but barely, before he explained that he wasn't trying to be mean so much as he was trying to teach: "I love to share [my knowledge]. I want to give everything away before I die." And then, almost as quickly as he'd appeared, he was gone—off to talk to a group of youngsters who would be joining us for lunch and accompanying us to the fortune cookie factory before going off to do more interesting (to them, at least) things.

Watching Chef Joe with the kids, I didn't know whether to laugh or to race over with all of my underdeveloped maternal instincts and tell him to be nice. "I hate you," he said to the lone boy in the group when he asked a smart-alecky question. "You sit down now." But it was all in good fun—clearly, there were no hard feelings—so I suppressed the genes I inherited from my mother and laughed along with the boy's parents. I'm glad I did: as lunch (which I'll get back to) progressed, it became clear that Chef Joe did not, in fact, hate the boy. In fact, he was truly relishing his role as teacher—the kind of teacher I loved when I was the boy's age. The kind of teacher who could relate to you, no matter how old you were.

Chef Joe's innate ability to relate to everyone in the room, whether they were ten or seventy, came in handy: although there was nothing "weird" (chickens' feet, fish heads, etc.) on the menu that day, we were certainly exposed to a number of new ingredients—ingredients that many of us (whether ten or seventy) might have pushed to the side of the plate without the chef's explanations and encouragement. Ingredients like the "red capers" that appeared in three of our four courses—we would later discover these to be re-hydrated goliberries, also known as lycii (as opposed to lychee) fruit. Though they resembled capers in appearance, their taste and texture was something altogether different, and quite unlike anything I can remember eating. But I ate every single one of them: in my wonton soup with mushrooms (which I ate, even though I typically avoid the fungal delicacies); in my mixed green salad (topped with yummy, not at all spicy, wasabi peas); and sprinkled atop my "General Joe's" chicken (it wasn't fried!). If they'd been part of my cheesecake dessert (I avoided the chocolate crust, as I always do), I would have eaten them then, too. The small red fruit was likewise absent from the exquisitely crispy vegetarian springroll and light, un-fried (take that, food courts across America!) bourbon chicken skewer that accompanied the aforementioned salad, but neither dish felt like it was missing a thing.

After the dessert plates were cleared, we were hustled down the stairs and out the door into the sweltering heat (the heat index that particular Sunday was well over 100) for our first stop: the fortune cookie factory.

I have no idea if that's a proper name ("Fortune Cookie Factory") or if there is, indeed, any proper name for the bakery. What I do know is that they're not usually open on Sundays ("They open for me!" Chef Poon explained), but that when they are open, their tiny, un-airconditioned headquarters produces upwards of six thousand fortune cookies every hour. I also know that their cookies are delicious. We each left with a bag. (Mine is sitting in my office refrigerator, much to the delight of my coworkers.)

After the factory, the young'uns departed (not without a few words of wisdom from Chef Joe), and we five remaining adults (I was the youngest) continued on our tour of Chinatown. Between stops at a Hong Kong-style bakery for bubble tea and custard-filled steamed rolls, an underground Chinese grocery, and a bookstore where Chef Joe demonstrated the art of calligraphy for us, the sprightly chef expounded upon Chinatown's history (the first business in the neighborhood was a laundry operated by one Mr. Lou—pronounced "Low"), its very brief occupation by the Chinese Mafia, the significance of the Friendship Gate at 10th and Arch (it's a copy of a gate at the Forbidden City), and its store owners' love of the Japanese Lucky Cat. I was awarded a cake for knowing what a durian is; a gigantic wok was awarded to another person on the tour for guessing the number of BTUs on a Wok stove. (Answer: about ten times more than a conventional stove. Yikes!) We learned that there are, in fact, multiple kinds of ginseng, and that the American varietal can cost a pretty penny. We played "guess this strange-looking object" with a number of dried roots and animal parts (all generously called "herbs" by Chef Joe). We received a lesson on foreign commerce ("Always pay exact change if you don't speak the language.") and were told the best place to go for Dim Sum in Chinatown (I'd know it if I saw it again).

All in all, Chef Joe's tour was nothing if not educational. Fitting because, as he told me at the tour's end: "I hope I taught you. I hope you learned from me. Steal my brain, steal my heart."

Well, Chef Joe, you certainly stole mine.