$54 million pants suit appeal gets rejected: Korean dry cleaners may get their lives back

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Court sketch of DC Administrative Judge Roy Pearson Jr. during his $54 million lawsuit against Korean dry cleaners whom he accused of losing his pants.

It’s been over three years, but the legal ordeal of a Korean couple in Washington DC may finally be over. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals turned down an appeal by former DC Administrative Judge Roy Pearson Jr., who came to symbolize frivolous lawsuits when he sued Jin and Soo Chung, owners of Custom Cleaners, for an astounding $54 million.

Pearson claimed that the Chungs lost a pair of his pants when he brought them in for alterations, and that signs in the shop promising “Satisfaction Guaranteed” and “Same Day Service” meant he could take the couple to court under consumer protection laws, which allowed him thousands of dollars for every day since his loss. The Chungs claimed they gave him his trousers but Pearson said the couple substituted a cheaper pair of pants.

The public opinion sided with the Chungs, because of the amount of damages Pearson asked for. Apparently, so the the courts. The Chungs may have lost his pants, but Pearson lost his suit.

He took his case to the District Court of Appeals, which turned him down today. The Chungs’ attorney, whose firm took on the case pro bono, said the appeals court “ruled resoundingly in favor of the Chung family and denied Mr. Roy Pearson’s appeal of the case completely.”
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Bento Zanmai in Boulder hits the ramen spot

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Bento Zanmai in Boulder serves wonderful, rich ramen.

OK, I can stop whining. I’ve been on a ramen hunt for a couple of months. But I’ve finally sated my jones, with a trip top Bento Zanmai on the Hill in Boulder.

Unlike Los Angeles, where a row of ramen shops take up most of a block along Little Tokyo, and San Francisco’s Japantown, which has a several stellar restaurants that specialize in ramen, Denver is a ramen-lover’s desert island. We’re stranded in a place with no ramen in sight, and we’re left holding an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks.

I overstate our condition. We used to go to Oshima Ramen, but it’s not as good as it was when it opened a decade ago. Plus, their ramen is pricey.

We’ve heard about a couple of Japanese restaurants north of Denver that apparently serve ramen, but we just don’t feel like driving that far. We’ll make the trip someday.

But when we were dining at one of our favorite restaurants, Amu, in Boulder (we live close to Boulder, so it’s not so far), we were talking with the owner, Nao-san, and we groused that he should serve ramen. He said, quite nonchalantly, that he was already serving ramen. Conversation at the izakaya‘s bar, where he was making up people’s tapas-like orders, came to a silent halt. The 10 people at the bar asked, in unison, “You make ramen? Why didn’t you say so?”

He explained that the ramen was available at his new restaurant, Bento Zanmai, at 13th and College in Boulder’s University Hill neighborhood. He warned that the ramen was only available from 3 to 6 pm — weird hours — but I was ready. I wanted ramen.
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Peking-Tokyo Restaurant, a Chinese-Vietnamese success story

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The bun dac biet and noodle soup are Vietnamese specialties of Peking-Tokyo Restaurant.

Erin and I had dinner tonight at a restaurant we hadn’t visited in a couple of years — it’s been too long. Peking-Tokyo Restaurant is located in the southern part of the suburb of Lakewood, across town from where we live. Back a decade ago, when we both worked a few blocks from Peking-Tokyo Express, as it was called, we ate there often. It had an interesting menu of Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai dishes. Despite its name, there were only a couple of token Japanese items on the menu (the name was a holdover from the business’ previous owners).

Erin’s favorite was a noodle soup with two kinds of noodles, the Vietnamese rice noodles that are now familiar to fans of Pho (but this was before Pho was as common and popular as it is now) and thin egg noodles like the kind you might see in Chinese lo mein, or Japanese ramen. The soup is topped off with slices of chashu pork, shrimp, chicken and chunks of crab.

My favorite was bun dac biet, a combination of grilled meat served on top of cold rice noodles, lettuce and cucumbers with a side of vinegary fish sauce. The meat includes pork, chicken, beef and shrimp, and an incredible and unique treat: a stuffed grilled chicken wing, plump with pork, flavorings and clear noodles.

We usually ordered Vietnamese spring rolls for appetizers, and I’d usually order Thai iced coffee or ice tea as an energy drink before such things as Red Bull existed. We’ve tried both the Thai and Chinese food there too, and the flavor is full and the servings substantial. But both our favorite dishes are so superior that after a while it was hard to order anything else.

We liked he place so much that we got our friend John Lehndorff at the Rocky Mountain News to go and review Peking-Tokyo Express.

We learned the story of the family, the Wangs, who own the restaurant. We got to know one of the daughters, Melissa, and one of the sons, Tommy. I had assumed they were Vietnamese, but it turns out they’re ethnic Chinese. Tommy and Melissa’s grandparents had moved to Vietnam decades ago, but the family got caught up in the turmoil of the Vietnam war and ended up coming to the US with the Vietnamese “boat people” refugees in the late ’70s, when Melissa was a baby. Tommy told us the heartbreaking story of their Aunt, who was murdered by Cambodian pirates as the family escaped Vietnam.
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‘Gran Torino’: Clint Eastwood among the Hmong

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Clint Eastwood in a scene from his new movie, "Gran Torino."

Clint Eastwood, who looked at one of the most famous battles of World War II through the eyes of doomed Japanese soldiers in the 2006 film, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” is now lookng at Asian Americans and racism in an upcoming movie, “Gran Torino.”

Eastwood plays a racist Korean War veteran and retired Ford factory employee, Walt Kowalski, who’s been beaten down by life. The only two steadfast things in his life are his 1972 Gran Torino, an artifact from the glory days of Ford muscle, and his M-1 rifle, an artifact from the glory days of American muscle. Everything else around him is going to hell: his wife has recently died, he’s estranged from his grown kids, and to his dismay, his rundown neighborhood is becoming over-run by Asians.

The incoming foreigners are Hmong, not Korean. Eastwood’s character gets to know the Hmong family that moves in next door after their 16-year-old son tries to steal his Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. Predictably, Eastwood at first hates them but then grows close, and protects them against the gang.

The movie’s trailer shows some typical interactions between a cranky white man and black neighborhood punks and scary-looking Asian gang members. Knowing Eastwood, I bet the plot is more complicated than the predictable scenes in the trailer, though.

This is the first time a Hollywood movie has taken a deep dive into the Hmong community, so it’s an opportunity to teach Americans about their history and culture, and of the AAPI culture of second generation Hmong Americans.

Besides Eastwood, the movie stars a group of first-time actors, most if not all Hmong (no hiring of non-ethnically accurate actors just for the right “talent” or “star power” a la “Memoirs of a Geisha”), and the casting was featured in a series of interviews in a Hmong news site, Suab Hmong Radio:
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A Taste of Tokyo on Colfax Ave.: Taki’s Restaurant

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Special ramen at Taki

I’m having leftovers for lunch as I type. Really good leftovers: ramen from Taki’s Restaurant, an inventive, unique and funky dive of a Japanese joint on E. Colfax Avenue and Pennsylvania in downtown Denver’s Capitol Hill district. It a block from the state Capitol, and three blocks from my office.

Ramen is relatively new to Taki’s. The restaurant usually serves udon, the thick Japanese noodle, or soba, the thin but brittle Japanese buckwheat noodle. The owner, Hisashi “Brian” Takimoto, who usually just goes by “Taki,” (I call him “Taki-san” out of respect but he’s too unassuming to think he deserves an honorofic and seem embarrassed by it, just began buying fresh-made and packaged ramen noodles from a company in California, and now offers it as an option.

We’ve been in an unrequited ramen mood for weeks. We’d heard that a new spinoff in Boulder of the great Amu (our current fave Japanese restaurant and itself a spinoff of Sushi Zanmai next door) called Bento Zanmai on the University Hill served ramen during certain hours. But we tried twice to go there and the place was closed. I checked a short list of area Japanese restaurants that serve ramen, and the only two candidates I found were in Longmont, a small town northeast of Boulder. The one place in the area thar’s known for noodles, Oshima Ramen in southeast Denver, had fallen off our list over the years for being expensive, less tasty than when it opened over a decade ago, and recently, kinda dirty (never mind Westword’s surpisingly naive rave “Best of Denver 2008” award).

Hisashi Takimoto has operated his restaurant for 20 years.We’ll make it to Bento Zanmai someday — they serve ramen only from 3-6 pm weekdays, and from 11am-3 pm Saturdays (they close at 3 on Saturdays!) — but for now, I’ve been so desperate I made a package of instant ramen at home one night last week. It actually hit the spot.

So when we decided at stop at Taki’s for a bite the other night after attending a reception hosted by the Consul-General of Japan to mark the birthday (Dec. 23) of Emperor Akihito, we were jonesing. When taki came out front to greet us, we accosted him: “When are you going to start serving ramen?”

“I can make it for you,” was the reply. We almost kissed his feet. Well, not really. Have you ever looked at the shoes of anyone who works in the kitchen of a restaurant? Gross.

It turns out he’d just started serving ramen as a daily special. They’d stopped for the evening but he boiled some noodles for us anyway, and it was a real treat.
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