![]() “I haven’t gone much since the virus hit but I have made the trip a few times, mostly when I'm just like, ‘I need my Boba fix!’” she says with a laugh. Wong now lives on the North Side and although both the pandemic and her recent departure from the Tribune and their centrally located office has made travelling down to Chinatown a bit less convenient, she still manages to pay her favorite establishments a visit every now and then. ![]() I remember being a kid and carrying giant plastic buckets around because we would pick up live crabs and live fish, stuff like that.” “We would go for dim sum in the morning and then the entire afternoon we’d be following my mom around to all these different specialty grocery stores so she could get the ingredients she needed to make dishes from her homeland. “It was always just a huge deal, piling into the van,” she continues. There were maybe two small Asian grocery stores at the time when we got an H Mart, it was literally the biggest news of my life. “When I was growing up, we’d make this semi-monthly pilgrimage into Chicago, especially Chinatown and the Argyle area, to get supplies because there was no real Asian population where we lived. “Both my parents are from Shanghai and they immigrated to Naperville, which is about 40 minutes outside of the city,” says the esteemed former dining reporter, recalling her suburban upbringing. Chicago’s Chinatown, a triangular slice of the Near South Side loosely bordered by Cermak Road, Wentworth Avenue, and a northbound-snaking branch of the Chicago river, has been fueling Grace Wong’s culinary cravings long before she cut her teeth dishing on the city’s vibrant restaurant scene for the Chicago Tribune.
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