St. Paul Sandwich
ON THE ROAD
RUDY LIEU FIRST ate egg foo yong at the age of 15 on a visit to his uncle’s Chinese restaurant in St. Louis. It was a new concept for a kid from Los Angeles: a deep-fried omelet filled with bean sprouts, onions, and meat smothered in a savory brown gravy. He hurried home to share this new dish with his friends and family. “People just thought I was crazy,” says Rudy. “They asked, ‘Why are you frying an omelet?’”
On the same fateful trip, Rudy tried St. Louis’s famous St. Paul sandwich: an egg foo yong patty nestled between two slices of white bread with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and mayonnaise. “When you have it for the first time, it’s like, Whoa! This is interesting.”
In the early 1980s, Rudy’s uncle, Anthony Lieu, worked for a man named Stephen Yuen at his restaurant Park Chop Suey. Rudy refers to Yuen as a “pioneer” of the Chinese restaurant scene at that time. Yuen had moved to St. Louis from St. Paul, Minnesota, a city he loved, so he invented the St. Paul sandwich as an homage. It became well-known in St. Louis but remained virtually unheard of in St. Paul. “It started selling like hotcakes. Everyone [in St. Louis] started making St. Paul sandwiches,” says Rudy.
Today, Rudy invites me into the
