What can I say about Jimmy Woo's Jade Pagoda, the Broadway restaurant-lounge, which closed on Aug. 31?
It was one of scads of eating and drinking spots around town that that opened up in 1933, the year Prohibition ended. It served beer and wine with its Chinese meals for the first 15 years or so. Then, as the state's Class H liquor license came into being, Woo added a cocktail lounge in a side room.
It was what all cocktail places in Washington state were from the late 1940s until the late 1990s-a large, often empty dining room with a small, often crowded barroom. This was due to a state law in those days. Bars serving the hard stuff had to be appendages to larger restaurants, and had to make a certain percentage of their income from food sales.
The Jade Pagoda's food could never be called memorable. What it lacked in "authenticity" it made up for in dependability. It was hearty and economical, if bland and familiar, Chinese-American food; which is to say, the fare you could get in a thousand Chinese restaurants in America and nowhere in China.
But it's not the food for which the Jade Pagoda will be remembered.
It's the little room, the bar, that made it memorable. Not for what it looked like-a drab, dimly lit, claustrophobia-inducing little room with a handful of tables and a bar just long enough for a half dozen or so barstools, with few decorations besides a giveaway calendar from an Asian restaurant-supply company.
The Jade Pagoda bar had stiff drinks served up by a loyal staff to generations that had grown old with the place. Its core clientele was old men who'd come of age back when few women frequented such places, and whose numbers steadily dwindled due to death, old age or doctor's orders. In their place came younger men and women who'd discovered the place, initially found it cute in a retro sort of way, then kept going back for the good prices, the good camaraderie and the good vibes.
The Jade Pagoda was one of the three or four last places of its kind on the Hill. I'll let you decide which others qualify as true "dive bars." For that's what it was, with no apologies, no pretensions, no postmodern self-parody. It was an honest place that served an honest drink at an honest price, usually to honest people.
It's the sort of place you can't recreate from scratch. If you tried, you'd only end up with a trite hipster pastiche of a dive bar, adjoining a trite hipster pastiche of an Asian-American restaurant.
And even then, it probably wouldn't succeed as a business model. What, the investors would ask, no pan-Asian fusion cuisine? No celebrity chef? No flavor-infused-vodka specialty drinks? No track lighting? No handcrafted metal furniture? No widescreen TVs? No couples-friendly decor?
So we remember the old beloved dives as they pass into history. (A toast to Ernie Steele's, Glynn's Cove, or the original Vito's would be appropriate right about now.) We patronize the dwindling number of dives that are still among us (though without the second-hand smoke that used to infest them all), and those newer parlors that at least attempt to offer the old-style, straight-no-chaser experience of the old places.
In the 1987 film "House of Games," Lindsay Crouse's character remarks about "the need for dark places to transact dark business." This was in a scene shot at Charlie's Tavern on Pike Street, which was soon thereafter razed for the Niketown/Planet Hollywood complex.
But it could have taken place at the Pagoda or any of a hundred other onetime dark Seattle bars. The "dark business" conducted in these places might not have been the con games depicted in that film. More often, it would have been the daily trade in friendships and the drowning of sorrows.
Clark Humphrey's column appears in the first week of each month. His new book "Vanishing Seattle" chronicles scores of former local icons and landmarks. It will be available soon from Arcadia Publishing.
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