A neon bowl of rice with chopsticks and a three-and-a-half storey stream of steam once illuminated the corner of East Pender and Columbia to advertise Ho Ho Chop Suey House.

Today, the Ho Ho, now Foo's Ho Ho, named for two restaurants, is a shadow of its former self. The green, red and yellow painted sign on the corner of the scruffy brick building is the most eye-catching exterior feature. A double entrance with a glazed set of second doors barely hints at a restaurant within.

At the height of its popularity in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, however, the place was packed thanks to its popular Westernized and authentic Chinese food, which Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame says was the best in Chinatown. He and his friends often landed there because the dishes were tasty and cheap.

"You could feed an army for $11 plus tip," he says on the phone from his home in California. "You could get a meal for a buck and a half, a good meal, too."

Chong, his bandmates and friends would head to the Ho Ho after gigs, gather at the round tables and fill up. On Sundays people queued to get in and the restaurant was clogged with families, highchairs and kids.

Chinatown was also an enclave for nightclubs, or bottle clubs--the establishments weren't licensed but patrons brought their own booze--and Pender and Keefer streets were restaurant row. Compartments for the booze were hidden under Ho Ho's tables. Mix was provided at each table and customers simply ordered a glass of ice.

Everyone from University of B.C. students to tourists ate at the Ho Ho, Chong says. "You'd have a few junkies nodding out in one of the booths, then you'd have the elite from the Sun newspaper, a lot of businessmen through the lunch hour," he recalls. Open drug use in doorways and alleys in recent years scared old-time evening customers away, and when the situation improved, it seemed patrons had forgotten Foo's Ho Ho existed.

When members of the Chinese-Canadian community learned last summer the only remaining restaurant serving old-style village food was closing, they rallied, forming Friends of Foo's Ho Ho to keep the faded landmark alive.

The Friends told owner Joanne Sam they'd pull in customers to keep the business afloat. Joanne told them she'd keep the restaurant open a year, and decide from there. They're determined not to let the portal that serves up the taste of their childhood memories close. "I call it eating memories," says Friends of Foo's Ho Ho co-chair, writer and historian Jim Wong-Chu.

At 3 p.m. on a Friday in early June, only two of the 15 tables are occupied. Red paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling pick up the red of the Canadian flag inexplicably taped to a panelled section of wall, averting attention from the stained blue-grey carpet. Faux wood panelling separates some of the tables.

It's obviously nostalgia--not the dowdy interior--that drew the Friends back to Foo's Ho Ho.

While waiting for Friends of Foo's Ho Ho co-chair Jacqueline Young to arrive, Wong-Chu launches into a passionate description of the food. The cuisine at this location has always followed two streams, Wong-Chu says, Westernized fare and old-style Cantonese village dishes.

The egg fu-yung is the best in the city, he insists, claiming owner/chef Joanne makes the egg of the Chinese omelette especially light and fluffy and tops it with the perfect amount of delicate gravy so the layered textures of crunchy bean sprouts, chewy Chinese mushrooms, and savoury julienned BBQ pork or chicken aren't drowned out.

Her curried beef and potatoes dish differs from the pack, he adds, because she pan-fries the spuds crispy brown instead of just boiling them and blends her own curry spices. The dish most popular with the lo wah kiu, or Chinese-Canadian old-timers, according to Wong-Chu, is the labour-intensive crispy chicken with glutinous rice that involves deboning a whole chicken, marinating it, butterflying it over sticky rice and freezing it, then deep frying the two together to create a dish that's crispy and comforting.

Even the chow mein lights him up. You can't get the same flavour and fragrance of onions and bean sprouts so perfectly singed without a wok and a really hot gas flame, he says. "Food is really the essential thing that holds everything together, holds family, holds community and it holds history," Wong-Chu says.

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"Really, the concept of eating memories is what brings me down here because, for me, it's a memory that goes way back," he adds.

When the 61-year-old was a child, his uncle visiting from Merritt would celebrate a good day at the Hastings Racetrack and treat Wong-Chu to a heaping plate of chow mein. "I was beyond bliss," he says. "Every one of us who grew out of this historical Chinatown and have flowed out of it and have prospered and have grandchildren and created dynasties on their own, the food is still the essential thing that ties them down."

Before he become known as half of the stoner comedy duo Cheech and Chong, Chong played in bands and ran nightclubs, including a topless improv club in Vancouver where he met Cheech Marin.

Chong started eating at the Ho Ho when he moved to Vancouver in 1958. Local Chinese-Canadian friends pointed the half-Chinese Calgarian to the more traditional dishes the chefs would eat at the end of their shifts, ones that weren't on the English menu, like hamburger or pork chopped up with preserved turnip root or preserved egg steamed over minced pork with preserved turnip. "It's Cheech's favourite dish," Chong says. "He'll go to these Chinese restaurants and it'll take about 15 waiters to figure out what he's trying to say [because it's not on the menu]."

It takes Red Robinson at least five minutes to make his way to a red vinyl chair at his usual lunch table in Foo's Ho Ho on a cool Thursday in June. Everyone wants to chat with him.

His old classmates from the now gone King Edward high school, poised to celebrate their 50th reunion, sit at one of the three round tables crowded by half a dozen men. Robinson, a legendary broadcaster and music impresario, notes the customers are First Nations, Japanese-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, and white, a mix he says has always been present at Ho Ho. He's walked the two blocks from the office he shares with Bruce Allen in the B.C. Electric Building and ordered almond chicken, sweet and sour pork, beef and broccoli and "Old Chinese Style Chow Mein."

Robinson's been ordering the same dishes here since the 1950s. "It's my comfort food," he says.

The Irish-Scottish Canadian Robinson, whose mother was apt to turn a piece of beef into shoe leather, was grateful his classmates of different ethnic backgrounds turned him on to other cuisine, including pasta at Nick's Spaghetti House on Commercial Drive and Chinese at the Ho Ho.

The restaurants are favourite haunts he frequents today along with Hy's Encore Steakhouse (the Cave nightclub used to be across the street) and White Spot. But it wasn't just the food that brought Robinson to Chinatown decades ago. He and his high school friends had their zoot suits custom-made in Chinatown at Modernize Tailors and On Wo. "One of the great slogans was 'Don't be a schmo, go to On Wo," Robinson says.

The Marco Polo Supper Club, which sat across Columbia Street from the Ho Ho, brought in Bill Haley and the Comets and The 5th Dimension. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau also liked to patronize the Ho Ho and the On On Tea Garden when he was in town.

Chinatown was ghettoized before the Second World War, says Wong-Chu, but the captive audience meant some of the best chefs were brought in from Canton province.

James Sam, owner Joanne Sam's late husband who was known simply as Sam, emigrated from China and apprenticed under his father who was a top chef at the W.K. Oriental Garden restaurant until the Marco Polo lured the younger man away.

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He eventually took over Foo's, which ran next to the Chinese Cultural Centre. Joanne, who'd come to Canada in 1979 as a refugee from Vietnam, took a second job at Foo's and married Sam in 1997.

High rent forced them to close Foo's and move to the old Ho Ho, combining the two restaurants' names and opening in 1998. The Ho Ho closed in the 1990s and remained vacant--except when it served as a film set--for as long as eight years following a fire. It took a year and a half to upgrade.

Chinatown pioneer P.C. Quon, Ben Chong and May Lew opened the Ho Ho in 1954, largely catering to Western tastes downstairs and serving the appetites of Chinese banquet-goers upstairs.

Ho means good in Cantonese, ho ho translates as very good. The banquet facility, with its large round tables, has hosted countless wedding, birthday and society dinners over the last half century. Those who moved out of the neighbourhood would return to Chinatown restaurants including the Ho Ho to celebrate important milestones. "Many good things happened there in that restaurant, for many families," says Jacqueline Young, who married there in 1967 and had her son's full moon party there in 1969. "I'm just speaking for the multitude because you can name it to almost any pioneer Chinese-Canadian that they celebrated at some place like Ho Ho, and Ho Ho actually was a cornerstone."

Chuck Lew, May Lew's son, who still practises law part-time downtown at age 79, filled both floors with a couple hundred well-wishers for his son's full moon party a month after his birth in 1959. A 10-course dinner cost only $50 for a table of 10.

Lew continues to eat at Foo's once a month with buddies from the YMCA, and twice a year with his UBC law class friends, including prominent former judges Tom Berger and Tom Braidwood. "The calamari is the best in town," Lew says.

Joanne decided to close Foo's last summer after a doctor told her Sam had, at most, six months to live and her husband asked her to stay with him in palliative care. She was exhausted from shuttling between the restaurant and the hospital.

When fans of Foo's Ho Ho, including Wong-Chu, learned July 9 last year the restaurant was to close two days later, they fired off emails so everyone could enjoy one last meal and lend financial support to Joanne and Sam.

They packed the place. Sam died eight days later.

Joanne reopened Foo's Ho Ho Aug. 10 last year and folks who were concerned about losing the last remaining restaurant in Metro Vancouver that serves old-style Cantonese country food started organizing events, including the Chinese Laundry Kids author readings.

At the end of last year, Joanne, now 58, had to decide whether to keep the restaurant open. She needed to pay $5,000, half of that to renew her restaurant licence to stay open another year. The business was in rough shape. The folks who became the Friends of Foo's Ho Ho told her they'd continue to drum up customers and Joanne told them she'd give it another year and decide from there. Seven months in, the Friends have raised $5,000.

Joanne does the bulk of the shopping, prepping and cooking and has part-time staff to take orders on weekends. A friend helps her Fridays and Saturdays for no pay, calling in her husband if they're extra busy. When Foo's hosts banquets, Joanne calls upon her family, which owns Au Petit Cafe on Main Street, to lend a hand.

While Joanne handles the day-to-day work, the architects, historians, community organizers, a police officer and social media types who make up Friends of Foo's Ho Ho hatch plans to make the restaurant prosper over the long term. They intend to improve the restaurant's interior and exterior, with an eye to retaining its old-school ambience. Their events have brought together Chinatown old-timers with younger folks, reviving tales of times past. They want the restaurant to live on as a community gathering place with a connection to the past not only through food, but also, perhaps, through old photos and stories they could imbed in the tables and frame on the walls.

The Friends are pleased "condo king" Bob Rennie and others are respecting the community's history while they renovate and revitalize local buildings, and they want to make sure this cornerstone lives on, even as the neighbourhood gentrifies, so Chinatown includes genuine links to its past. What they don't want are caricature-like facades.

Joanne will decide by the end of the year whether Foo's will carry on. The Friends hope to make the business attractive to potential new owners who she could train to cook the old-style food. But while Wong-Chu is passionate about sustaining stories and sensual ties to Chinatown's past, he can appreciate the absurdity of the task.

"We're like a bunch of little kids going 'keep it going, keep it going, we want to eat here,'" he says. "And Joanne's just saying OK... She actually feels it. She feels the emotional attachment."

crossi@vancourier.com