Cashew chicken on a stick, fried in cashew flour, with an oyster dipping sauce. “One year the Rasta Grill did a jerk cashew oyster sauce,” recalled Wing Yee Leong, as he worked a pair of chopsticks, pulling noodles from a bowl of soup. One recent morning, as David Leong read a Cantonese language newspaper, Wing Yee Leong and Foon Wong reminisced about the Cashew Craze fund-raiser that used to take place as a benefit for the Developmental Center of the Ozarks. Occasionally the younger Leong joins his father for an early coffee at Canton Inn. Thach took pride in the dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili purée, that he served with sushi rolls and the cashew chicken recipe he adapted from the Leong tradition. The restaurant closed recently, but before it did, Mr. More recently, Wing Yee Leong was a consulting chef at Pan Asia, a downtown Springfield restaurant owned by Dara Thach, a Cambodian immigrant. Each of those restaurants has adopted cashew chicken as its own. Over the last decade he has moved from Cartoon’s Oyster Bar to Mikayla’s at the Millwood Golf and Racquet Club to Fire and Ice, where he fried chicken and blanched cashews until last December. ![]() Wing Yee Leong, 52, another of David’s sons, who was manning the fry station at Leong’s Tea House when the family restaurant closed, now works as a journeyman chef. (Soon after, he died.) Cheong Leong moved to Las Vegas. Infused with the original ingredients of this beloved. In July 2000, his brother Gee Leong closed Gee’s East Wind. Hopsings Springfield-Style Cashew chicken sauce boasts with a bold, savoury, and salty flavors. In 1997, after the death of his wife, Wong Shau Ngor, David Leong closed Leong’s Tea House. The Leongs bounced back, repairing the damage quickly and opening the 350-seat white-tablecloth restaurant within a couple of weeks.Īt the moment, no Leong family member runs a Springfield kitchen. But, as was the case with many incidents of bigotry-born violence in the 1960s, no convictions followed. In November 1963, less than a week before the new restaurant was set to open, someone tossed 10 sticks of dynamite at the base of the low-slung building and stole the lion statues that flanked the front door. “They thought all Asians were Japanese kamikazes.” “This was not long after the war,” David Leong said. And some locals suspected the motives of Asian immigrants. ![]() That new place, Leong’s Tea House, set on the suburban fringe of town in what had recently been a cornfield, didn’t come easily. Wasn’t long before he was begging me to come back. “Bill Grove didn’t want to pay me to cook,” David Leong said of the owner. After six years at the Grove, the brothers departed.
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