16 pp., including 8 pp. of recipes. 3½x6½" original red decorative wrappers.
Wo Fat (meaning “peace and prosperity”) was the oldest restaurant in Honolulu’s Chinatown, founded in 1882 and in operation until 2005. Its picturesque pagoda-like architecture housed three floors with a bar, two dining rooms and a dance hall, particularly popular with World War II American servicemen who were given free dining coupons. Its patrons included Frank Sinatra, Jackie Kennedy – and TV writer-producer Leonard Freeman who, in 1968, created the long-running television series “Hawaii Five-O”. Appearing throughout the show’s 12 seasons was an actor of Egyptian-Sudanese descent who played the Fu Manchu-like Chinese Communist master-spy “Wo Fat”, a name Freeman borrowed from the restaurant. This earlier wartime booklet touts “the two great Democracies of the Pacific…America and China”, has notes about Chinese Food, Hospitality, Tea, Wine, Drinking Customs and Holidays, and offers recipes for Fried Rice, Pork Hash, Pineapple and Shrimp, Bird Nest Soup, Chicken Almond, Sesame Cakes, Shrimp and Vegetable, Chop Suey, Tomato Beef, Chow Mein, Beef Broccoli, Chinese-Hawaiian Steak, Curry Eggs and Fried Squab. Though given as a “gift” to countless soldiers and sailors after Pearl Harbor, it is apparently scarce. WorldCat records no institutional holding.