{"id":83755,"date":"2026-11-10T09:28:59","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T09:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/83755\/"},"modified":"2026-11-10T09:28:59","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T09:28:59","slug":"arizona-restaurants-that-are-long-gone-but-haunt-me-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/83755\/","title":{"rendered":"Arizona restaurants that are long gone but haunt me still"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 11, 2026, 5:01 a.m. MT<\/p>\n

My friends and I used to eat at a Mexican joint in Phoenix called San Carlos Bay Seafood.<\/p>\n

It was small, it was authentic (or certainly seemed to be to a hick from the mountains of Virginia) and the food was delicious. Just outstanding. The ceviche was great, but the best thing on the menu was octopus in garlic sauce. Which was pretty much what it sounds like, except that it was served with fries. Octopus doesn’t soak up a lot of sauce, but boy, fries do. By the time you were done with your octopus (I\u2019m a member of the one-food-at-a-time club), the fries were swollen with the garlic sauce, and eating one was like a little heavenly explosion of flavor.<\/p>\n

I am probably downplaying it when I say we loved this dish. Because once my friend Abe Kwok \u2014 truly, one of my best friends and the most selfless person I\u2019ve ever known \u2014 kept stealing the garlic-sauce-soaked fries off my plate. I finally grabbed my fork and held it like an ice pick or something and said, if you take one more fry from my plate I\u2019m going to stab you in the hand.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I really would have stabbed him over a french fry. But Abe and I both had covered the police beat, and knew that dumber crimes have been committed for less. He didn\u2019t take any more.<\/p>\n

San Carlos, as we called it (\u201cLet\u2019s eat at San Carlos\u201d), is gone now. So is Abe. I miss them both, though not in equal measure. They\u2019re ghosts, you might say, alive only in memory.<\/p>\n

Love crosswords? Explore the Crossword page and play the new MidGrid Crossword.\"\"Restaurants, like people, can become ghosts<\/p>\n

That french fry story makes me sound like a lunatic, but I tell it because it\u2019s my most vivid memory of a restaurant that is now gone. (I have more vivid memories of Abe, in which I am not the villain.) It\u2019s always struck me how a place that we loved, that we frequented, that we could always count on for a great meal, one day just disappears.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s life, I guess. You assume something or someone will be around forever, and it never turns out to be the case. But in the moments you spend together, you have to make yourself think that it is. Anything else is too dismal to contemplate.<\/p>\n

A lot of the restaurants where I used to eat are gone. It\u2019s been so long since I\u2019ve eaten in some of them that it\u2019s possible the food wasn\u2019t as good as I remember it being. The nice part is, there\u2019s no way to prove it, one way or the other. The food was great because I remember it being great, and it always will be.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, I ate at a lot of those places with Abe \u2014 like the Long Wong\u2019s in downtown Tempe, where bands like the Gin Blossoms cut their teeth, and was home to the greatest buffalo wings on the planet.<\/p>\n

At least that\u2019s how I remember them. Abe ate a boatload of wings in a contest we had there one time, winning easily.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not surprising. Thin as a rail, Abe was still, in the parlance of the part of the country I grew up in, a good eater. Our mutual friend Jon Sidener \u2014 we met so long ago we were considered the young reporters at the paper \u2014 wrote movingly about Abe\u2019s love of food, and its importance in his life.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/You assume relationships with restaurants, and with people, will last forever<\/p>\n

OK, this next story makes me sound not like a villain but the village idiot. Not long after we became friends, Abe and I were talking about our childhoods. Abe was born in Hong Kong and lived there a few years before his family moved to the United States. Wait a second, I asked him \u2014 did your family eat Chinese food every night?<\/p>\n

Yes, he said. I was floored. Every night? He laughed. Yes. I mean, we are Chinese, he said.<\/p>\n

Somehow, he put up with me.<\/p>\n

You assume a permanence with meaningful relationships, and a meaningful relationship is certainly what you develop with a restaurant you like. Szechuan Garden was a Chinese restaurant a block from my house. Their food was brilliant and authentic \u2014 I know the latter was true because Abe gave it his seal of approval, something he didn\u2019t bestow very often. My family ate there every Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n

And one day it just up and closed. There\u2019s another restaurant there now. I haven\u2019t tried it yet, and I don\u2019t much think I will. Again, though, that\u2019s how it goes, right? Here one day, gone the next. It\u2019s a reminder to enjoy it while you can.<\/p>\n

The ghost that haunts me most is a different Chinese restaurant, the restaurant Abe\u2019s parents owned and ran in Tucson.<\/p>\n

\"\"Some ghosts you want to haunt you forever<\/p>\n

Abe’s dad was a printer, his mom a nurse, but when they came to the United States, they couldn\u2019t find work and so they opened a restaurant. Whenever I was in Tucson, I stopped by. It was great, of course.<\/p>\n

But the real memories are from Chinese New Year. Every year, whenever it occurred based on the lunar calendar, Abe\u2019s parents closed the restaurant to customers at 8 p.m. and opened it to Abe\u2019s friends. Then they cooked up a feast that was, to my palate, beyond exotic. Ever had brain soup?<\/p>\n

Abe\u2019s parents are gone. So, of course, is the restaurant. But the memories of the caravan that drove down from Phoenix every year to learn about a culture foreign to us and to hang around with friends and eat delicious food that we never would have an opportunity to eat any other time remain.<\/p>\n

Probably some other restaurant is there now. Someone is making their own memories there, memories that one day, too, will become ghosts. What\u2019s the saying, don\u2019t cry because it\u2019s over, smile because it happened? I suppose. But I want it to happen again. I want to eat another meal, not in whatever\u2019s there now, but in Abe\u2019s parents\u2019 place.<\/p>\n

And I want to eat it with Abe, and talk about the places we ate that are gone, the places that haunt us \u2014 places I hope will forever.<\/p>\n

Taste test: It was the best chicken I ever had. But was it really? I had to find out<\/p>\n

Reach Goodykoontz at\u00a0bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook:\u00a0facebook.com\/GoodyOnFilm.\u00a0Media commentary with a side of snark? Sign up for\u00a0The Watchlist newsletter\u00a0with Bill Goodykoontz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 11, 2026, 5:01 a.m. MT My friends and I used to eat at a Mexican joint in Phoenix called San Carlos Bay Seafood. It was small, it was authentic (or certainly seemed to be to a hick from the mountains of Virginia) and the food was delicious. Just outstanding. The ceviche was great, but<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[494,3323,3321,3319,3322,3320,1867,747,3330,3339,1061,4725,511,3862,790,508,510,498],"class_list":["post-83755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arizona","tag-accessmetered","tag-arizona","tag-arizona-dining","tag-arizona-food","tag-arizona-grocery-stores","tag-arizona-restaurants","tag-sourcearizona-republic","tag-sstsentertainmentdining","tag-sstsnfood-dining","tag-tagarizona","tag-tagdining","tag-taghistory","tag-taglocal-affiliate-food","tag-tagnew-visitors-az","tag-tagoverall-neutral","tag-tagrestaurant-reviews-reservations","tag-tagrestaurants","tag-typestory"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dc\/117591445530270694","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}