Thousands of restaurants have come and gone in New York over the years, and this is one of them: Pearl de Orient, an interestingly named but otherwise ordinary sounding Chinese restaurant in the Financial District.
Aside from an ad in New York from 1993, I couldn’t find a trace of the place. The corner of Pearl Street and Maiden Lane looks like it’s been renovated and modernized since then.
All that’s left of Pearl de Orient is this matchbook. Remember restaurant matchbooks?
Inexpensive Chinese restaurants have a long history in the city—chop suey was even invented in New York! Now, a previously hidden sign is back on display.
Hunan & Szechuan Cuisine, on Fourth Avenue and 13th Street, had been covered up by a different sign for Young Chow Restaurant—it’s now gone, the place shuttered one recent morning and sporting this (1980s?) signage.
Edward Hopper’s 1929 painting Chop Suey is a reminder of a much older New York, when this dish was advertised in neon outside Chinese restaurants around the city.
“These fashionable women are dining at a modest Chinese restaurant not unlike one the Hoppers frequented,” writes the National Gallery of Art.
“Characteristically, Hopper depicts a moment before or after the main event—here, the meal—takes place. Also typical is the isolation and ambiguous relationship between the figures: it is not clear whether the dining companions are even looking at or conversing with one another.”
Ephemeral New York 