Diaz Café

Ketchikan, 
2015 

Our family had a wonderful time this summer traipsing through Southeast Alaska. In Ketchikan, we lunched at the Diaz Café situated a short walk from the heavily touristed area where the cruise ships dock. Despite its proximity to these modern-day leviathans, the modest restaurant evoked a bygone era. Its laminated 8½- x 14-inch menu offered typical American fare on one side and on the other, an eclectic mixture of Asian cuisines that included chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo yong. Seeing this triumvirate of old-fashioned Chinese-American dishes, I asked our server when the menu had last been updated. When she said nothing had changed since the late 1940s, I knew we had struck culinary gold.


Ketchikan is a well-known tourist destination. Nestled in a ten-block-wide strip of land on a rainy island, the town of 13,000 may receive almost as many visitors on any given day. Unlike many of the small shops in town, the Diaz Café is not owned by one of the cruise ship companies and is mostly patronized by local residents. Proprietor Clara Diaz is the daughter-in-law of the original owners who first opened a restaurant in Juneau in the 1930s. They later relocated the restaurant to Ketchikan where it became an integral part of the local Filipino community.1
  

Clara Diaz, 2015

Given the history, we ordered chicken adobo which is considered a national dish in the Philippines. It is prepared by marinating chicken pieces in soy sauce, white vinegar, crushed garlic cloves, black pepper, and bay leaves for about three hours, before simmering in a covered pot for an hour. 

We were also tempted to try the chop suey, but in the end, we couldn’t resist the pancit bihon (spelled “bijon” on the above menu.)2 This Chinese-Filipino noodle dish comprises rice vermicelli simply seasoned with citrus and fish sauce. We ordered ours with shrimp. Interestingly, the early history of chop suey and pancit bihon is similar in that overseas Chinese restaurateurs introduced these dishes in countries that adopted them as part of their national cuisine. While the popularity of chop suey has declined precipitously in recent decades, pancit bihon remains a mainstay in the Philippines, and is now gaining a following in the United States where it is considered an authentic regional dish. 

Notes

1. The Philippine-Americans call themselves the “Alaskeros.” They came to work in Ketchikan’s booming fish canneries in the 1920s when US laws restricted Chinese and Japanese immigration.
2. The term “pancit,” meaning “convenient food,” is derived from Hokkien, a dialect that originated in the province of Fujian on the southeast coast of China. Pancit is now used as a catch-all word for many types of Filipino noodles, with pancit bihon being the most common rice noodle dish.