Montreal diner Ho Ho’s
The door swings open and the air is thick with conversation, cigarette smoke, and the smell of freshly baked bread. On one side, a long orange counter runs along the restaurant, and on the other side is a series of windows, showing the passersby on de la Gauchetière street.
The menu offers diner items reflective of the community’s origin in China, as well as their adoptive home in Quebec. Western classics such as scrambled eggs or roast beef were available, alongside Chinese beef stew and barbeque pork buns.
However, one of the most popular items were the buns, or baos (包) in Chinese. And the most coveted bun – the one that the hungry, mostly male patrons would order regularly, and that ladies and families would order to take away – was the buttah loh, what Chinese diners would call the buttery rolls.
This diner was Ho Ho’s, a café that between 1946 - 2000, was a gathering place for many Chinese residents and other people in Chinatown. At a time when Montreal’s Chinatown was the only place for immigrants of Chinese descent to preserve and celebrate their culture, the Ho Ho’s diner and the food they offered were cornerstones to the Chinese Montrealer experience.
From 1946 - 2000 the 40s to the 90s at the southwest corner of de la Gauchetière and Clark, passersby would not be able to miss the neon glow of signs marking the Nanking Restaurant on the second floor, beckoning people to enter for a meal of Chinese food. On the third level was a rooming house, and on the ground floor was a simple door that led to a coffee shop and diner where many new immigrants from China gathered. For Toishanese speakers, this diner was called Ho Ho’s, and To To’s for the Cantonese.
A gathering space for immigrants and longtime residents
The diner opened in 1946, the year before the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act ended. This discriminatory piece of legislation from the Government of Canada prevented any Chinese immigrants from entering the country. Combined with the Chinese Head Tax in previous years which levied prohibitive fees towards Chinese immigrants, creating a bachelor society, where the majority of Chinese immigrants were men who came here for new opportunities or as labourers, but were not able to bring their wives or families over. Upon arriving, some of these newcomers took a room on the third floor of the Nanking building, and some found work in the restaurant’s kitchen.
For a quick, affordable meal and a place to socialize, residents would conveniently go to the diner on the ground floor. According to museologist, Chinatown activist, and tour guide Jean-Philippe Riopel, “Ho Ho’s was an important element for the neighbourhood, because it was a rallying point for the people of Chinatown. There was a mix of older folks who lived in the area, and people who lived elsewhere, but who came on Sundays to go to the family or clan associations. I went often with my father and while we were not Chinese, there was always a feeling of welcome and familiarity; it was a landmark in my childhood.”
Up to the 1980s, Ho Ho’s was part of a Chinatown that was not only a refuge for these new immigrants, but also a place known across the city as being always open. Like several other businesses, Ho Ho’s was open for 24 hours a day, and in the evenings, customers could come in for a cup of coffee and a pastry before heading to the back gambling room to play mahjong or cards. Its central location in the area made it a hub for the community.
Cigarettes and spinning stools
As the door swung open, the air was often thick with conversation, cigarette smoke, and the smell of freshly baked bread. On one side, an orange formica counter ran along the restaurant, and on the other side was a series of windows with a chest-height counter, showing the traffic and passersby on de la Gauchetière street. The mostly male clientele gathered before or after a shift at work, chatting about job opportunities, living in a land that held both promise and adversity, and their wives and families worlds away.
Sandy Yep’s family lived further west on de la Gauchetière, and he reminisced about the space, “When you go there, it’s got the beautiful sentiment of the old time cafés, with a high counter top, and stools that revolve.” Yep is now an education officer at the Ministry of Education in Ontario, but considers himself a québecois chinois at the core, with three generations of his family having lived in Montreal’s Quartier chinois. He calls the area his ancestral village: “it’s where my roots now start, it’s where the Yep family arrived.”
And Yep is not alone in remembering the stools at Ho Ho’s. Vinyl-covered stools are common across diners, but many people who went to the diner as children, including the graphic designer and illustrator Vivian Yu, remembered the stools as being the height of a child, and an easy toy in the way they resembled spinning giant cookies. Yu’s family frequented Ho Ho’s and her dad lovingly remembers the stools as bang jai dung (饼干凳) cookie stools, since they resembled giant, turning sandwich cookies.
Roast beef and ngau laam
Of course, people also remember Ho Ho’s for its food, and the coffee was a draw for customers, with the café selling up to 700 cups a day at the height of the diner’s popularity. With a long flat-top grill, cooks would prepare Western classics such as scrambled eggs, or the roast beef special on Wednesdays, paired with a slice of pie. In classic diner fashion, patrons could add condiments that were found along the counters in chrome sauce holders.
Out of the same kitchen was an offering of simple, Chinese foods such as ngau laam (牛腩) beef stew, yeem gook gai (盐焗鸡) salted baked chicken rice, or smaller snacks such as char sui bao (叉烧包) barbeque pork buns or ham sui gok (咸水角) fried glutinous rice dumplings. The availability of Western dishes made the diner a location where new immigrants could become acquainted with the foods of their adopted home in Canada. At the same time, it was an opportunity for Quebecois residents and other locals who lived in Canada for more generations to taste food from the East.
The famous buttah loh
One of the most popular items from the Chinese menu were the buns, or baos (包) in Chinese. And the most coveted bun – the one that the hungry, mostly male patrons would order regularly, and that ladies and families would order to take away – was the buttah loh, what Chinese diners would call the buttery rolls. The rolls were made of a fluffy dough, coiled upon itself in a spiral slightly larger than a palm. On the outside was a golden crust that yielded easily to a hungry child’s hands, and the roll was topped with a thin layer of sugar glaze, creating a pale white snail shape where the glaze pooled into the divots of the dough.
The diner was passed through the Wong family with the last owner being Bill Wong. The selection of baked goods grew when the diner was passed to Wong’s parents, since his mother trained in pastry in Hong Kong before immigrating. The butter rolls were part of the baked goods offered by Ho Ho’s, among items such as egg tarts, buns filled with shredded and sweetened coconut, and baak tong goh (白糖糕) – a yeasty steamed white sugar sponge cake.
The pastries and breads were kept behind the counter on a tray covered by a plastic sheet, and then transferred to a paper box and wrapped in white string when ordered to go. While there are several bakeries in Chinatown today, for a long time Ho Ho’s was the only place that offered these baos. “Ho Ho’s was so part of the bai san (honouring ancestors) ritual, because at the time, it was the only place to go buy baos, it was the only bakery,” explains food blogger and writer Jason Lee.
Talking about the rolls, Lee explains, “people have asked to find the original recipe and nobody knows anymore.” Across the street on de la Gauchetière, Restaurant Jade sells a reasonable facsimile of the butter roll at Ho Ho’s, albeit never quite the same.
The butter rolls were especially popular on the weekends: Lee remembers stopping by Ho Ho’s and getting a snack after Chinese school, and Wong remembers Sundays as the busiest day, when congregants would file out of the Catholic and Presbyterian churches in Chinatown to get a bite. Riopel also remembers members of the clan associations getting paper boxes full of baos ahead of meetings.
The 1980s brought a new wave of immigrants from Hong Kong, enticed by a new program from the Canadian government that allowed investors and their families to immigrate in exchange for a $250,000 investment in the country. While some settled in Montreal, many of these new immigrants moved to Brossard, creating a satellite Chinese community on the South Shore. During this same period, the City of Montreal wanted to attract more tourists to the city and its Chinatown, and made de la Gauchetière a pedestrian street. The window at Ho Ho’s now looked out onto crowds of people instead of cars.
Loss of communal spaces in Chinatown
In 2000, the owner Bill Wong closed Ho Ho’s. New food businesses opened in Chinatown that offered similar items with a Hong Kong influence, and Wong decided to move on from Ho Ho’s, weary from decades of working 7 days a week. As the diner closed, it joined the list of fading building façades in a neighbourhood that has seen perpetual change. However, its existence for 54 years is a testament to its role in the community as a cornerstone, having acted as a place for new immigrants to reminisce about the families they left behind in China, as a place for grandparents to pick up treats for visiting grandchildren, and as a place for a quick bite while people-watching out the long window.
The loss of Ho Ho’s is perhaps easier to understand in the context of other places that were lost in the waves of development in and around Chinatown, including the building of the Palais des congrès, Complexe Guy-Favreau, and the Ville-Marie highway. Despite the protest of community members in Chinatown, residences, businesses, several Chinese churches, and a park were demolished. More than a diner and café, Ho Ho’s was another community space that was lost. Yep has personally witnessed the loss of many of these spaces, and reflects, “It was another way for us to be erased and dismissed for what we contributed. The government just stepped in and dismantled our community.”
Future of Chinatown
Today, many remember the compact diner as a nostalgic place of their childhood. Both Yep and Lee wonder how we will recognize the importance of gathering spaces like Ho Ho’s, and preserve and create new spaces that are necessary to a cross section of the community, because it is where they can find belonging, remember where they came from, and sketch out the future. Despite its name, Chinatown has been the home for many communities including the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Jewish, who yes, share an experience of marginalisation, but also share in knitting the fabric of quebecois and Canadian society.
Across many communities, myths help people make sense of the world, and its stories are instructive and illustrate shared values. Remembering the colourful glow of the lights outside and the warmth inside of Ho Ho’s, Riopel smiles and says, “it’s strange, as we start to age a bit, our memories become mythical.”
This article was part of the project “Lieux de mémoires du Quartier chinois” from the Centre des mémoires montréalaises, from the City of Montreal. Many thanks to all of the interviewees, including Sandy Yep, Jean-Philippe Riopel, Jason Lee, and Vivian Yu, as well as to the organizing team behind this projet, especially Parker Mah. See here for other stories about historic Chinatown.
