The Empress of Egg Roll

The Empress of Egg Roll

Houston produces 80% of the egg rolls sold in grocery stores, and the bayou city is home to the best and fastest egg roll wrappers. A skilled wrapper can turn out 4,000 egg rolls in an 8-hour shift.

Would you like to see an egg roll being made?

You must have the Windows Media Player for the Chef Larry video segment.

Still, even at the top, some are better than others. The "Empress of Egg Roll" can top 6,000. "Her fingers move with astonishing speed, placing a glutinous vegetable mixture on a small sheet of pastry before rolling it closed in one smooth stroke," reports The Wall Street Journal. Three seconds!

Not everyone is cut out to be a professional egg roll wrapper; in fact only about 20% of applicants at Chung's Gourmet make the cut. But from the start, she could handle dim sum and then some. So, which of Houston's 110,000 Asian citizens is the mysterious rapid wrapper? None of them.

It's Paula Villalta, a Salvadoran Texan who first tasted Chinese food in 1987. In fact, none of the 44 wrappers at Chung's were raised on Chinese food, nor do any of them speak Chinese. All speak Spanish.

But that doesn't matter; their supervisor, Mai-Yuan Miao, is bilingual. She speaks Spanish and Chinese.

Wartzman, Rick, "Houston Turns Out To Be the Capital Of the Egg Roll," The Wall Street Journal, December 7, 1995, p. 1A ff.pp. 13-14.

Mary Grace Ketner