A Toast To Mary Chung’s
Once upon a time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just up the road from MIT, there was a terrific Chinese restaurant named Mary Chung’s. The proprietor, Mary, helped to introduce Chinese food to many MIT students across several generations. For those students who did not have a wide selection of cuisine before going to college, Mary’s was a gateway drug to the wide world of food and gastronomy. Students would go there to celebrate achievements, or to drown their sorrows, or most often just for tasty nourishment. As one of those students, I can tell you that Mary’s fortified many of us sufficiently to face the rigors of MIT, or maybe it’s more truthful to say that she fattened us up sufficiently to face the rigors of MIT. Most likely, it’s both.
Sadly at the end of 2022, it came time for Mary to embark on a well-earned retirement and so she closed the
restaurant. Several of her fans started sharing tales about the restaurant across social media: The gatherings of
friends, the best dishes, and stories of their first visits. It reminded me of my own first visit, which I still
remember decades later.
In 1984, I was a sophomore with an undergraduate research project (UROP) in the MIT AI lab. The project I was working on was a robot named TARDIS, which was an acronym for Tea And Ravioli Delivery Service. At some meeting, I said “that’s a funny name”, revealing my lack of knowledge about both Dr Who and Mary Chung’s. Some kind grad student took pity on me and dragged me to Mary’s to cure some of my ignorance.
When you sat down at the restaurant back then, the table was set with tea cups and a pitcher of water. The missing teapot and missing water glasses would arrive at first service, but until then you were left no possibility of quenching your thirst, because nobody would dare pour water into the tea cups unless you had the manners of someone raised by wolves.
The grad student told me this part of the meal was called The Chinese Beverage Torture.
Naturally, since I was a sophomore with a sophomoric sense of humor, I proceeded to tell everyone I knew about this Chinese restaurant which was great as long as you could endure The Chinese Beverage Torture. One person I told was a high-school friend down the road at Harvard, who then proceeded speak at length about The Chinese Beverage Torture to anyone in his dorm who would listen. The dead horse was beaten so often and so prolifically his dormmates told me they had dubbed it The Chinese-Beverage-Torture Joke Torture.
So join me and raise your teacups and water glasses to Mary and her legacy of spreading joy and happiness and full stomachs to the good people around Cambridge. I will remember Mary’s always for the Suan la Chow Show, the Peking Ravs, the Dun Dun Noodles and especially for the Beverage Torture, the last of which was the start of many great conversations.
[Note: These initial posts are a series of stories on restaurants. They were originally posted elsewhere, and I wanted to revisit and collect them here.]