“I keep telling people that Yakamein is one of New Orleans’ best kept secrets,” says Linda Green, a New Orleans chef known around the city as Ms. Linda, the Yakamein Lady. Green began selling Yakamein, a richly hearty, meaty Chinese and African American noodle soup conflicting origin storiesin second-line parades after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Also known as “old sober,” the salty broth is popular as a high-sodium beverage Cure for a hangover.
Green keeps her recipe for yakamein a secret, but the main ingredients are always the same: broth or “juice” (classically beef, infused with soy sauce and spices), wheat noodles (usually spaghetti), a hard-boiled egg, and some other kind of protein (anything from chicken and oysters to alligator and duck, but shrimp and beef are the most popular). The bowl is usually topped off with a drizzle of hot sauce and a sprinkling of fresh scallions — and sometimes additional packets of soy sauce.
Green had lost her job as a cafeteria attendant in the New Orleans public school system when schools closed in the aftermath of the disaster, and she needed to find a new way to support herself and her family. She explained that her mother and grandmother made yakamein for years and passed her recipe on to them. “A lot of people died from this recipe,” she said. “We didn’t let my mother and grandma die from it.”
Chef Linda Green
Yakamein won’t be a secret for much longer outside of New Orleans. It is star rises, along with Ms. Lindas. In 2022, Green was featured in an episode of Netflix Street Food: United States that focused on the iconic foods from New Orleans. Some New Orleans staples have a much higher profile outside of the city than Yakamein: gumbo, jambalaya, po’ boys, beignets, bananas foster. These foods are preserved and sometimes reinterpreted throughout New Orleans—and exported around the world by people who love the city and its culture. But Yakamein was harder for visitors to find until recently.
“It’s a Chinese dish. And it’s also an African-American dish,” says Green. “It was a poor man’s dish. . . and we kept it in our kitchens, and we kept it in our African American bars. The oft-repeated theory holds that Yakamein has its origins in Chinatown in New Orleans, in the immigrant restaurants that opened there in the 19th century. Eventually it was adopted by black chefs and restaurateurs and incorporated into soul food. “Back in the slave days, [Chinese and African Americans] were in the same kitchen and cooked together,” says Green. “We took it, but we put our own spices and herbs in it.”
Winston Ho, an independent historian in New Orleans its research has focused on the history of Yakamein, explaining that the dish has had many lives and has been adapted over time to the culture of the people who prepare it. “It’s something that started in New Orleans Chinatown and sort of spilled over into African American soul food, and then yakamein died out on those old Chinese restaurant menus, maybe in the 1970s, around the same time chop suey went out of fashion. he says. “It has been preserved in restaurants that serve it to African Americans, and African Americans have created their own version of Yakamein.”
“Back in the slave days, [Chinese and African Americans] were in the same kitchen and cooked together.”
I tried Greens Yakamein at the Luna Fete arts and lights festival in December 2022. It was an unusually cold night in New Orleans, and their booth was the only one with a line of people waiting to buy the food. I watched as she scooped broth into a Styrofoam cup overflowing with spaghetti and beef. She then poured out the broth, using her giant ladle to hold back the ingredients and refilled them, repeating this process one, two, three times before serving the bowl of noodle soup, garnished with scallions and topped with a splash Louisiana Crystal Hot was topped off with sauce. “The reason I do it this way is so I want the bottom of the pasta to be hot, too,” she explains. “I want the whole cup to be hot.”
Before she started filling my cup with broth, she scooped a few drops into her granddaughter’s palm. Her young assistant tasted it, paused and nodded sagely, approving of the taste. Green told me that her 16-year-old granddaughter, who is learning the trade, has been cooking yakamein since she was three years old. “It’s her legacy,” she says. “My mom used to say, ‘If you cook to taste, they’ll keep coming back because they like what you get.’ And I tell that to my grandchildren.”
Green’s granddaughter is training in the family tradition, but the next Yakamein generation will take many forms. “Lots of grocery stores [in New Orleans] are run by Vietnamese,” Ho explains. “Just like the Chinese immigrants, their customers tell them what Yakamein is. So the Vietnamese create their own version of Yakamein, something they [themselves] want to eat,” he says. “So now we have Chinese yakamein, Creole yakamein, and Vietnamese yakamein, and all three of those versions bear very little resemblance to the original yakamein that was ubiquitous in Chinatown [in the early 1900s]. . . . That version of Yakamein doesn’t really exist anymore.”
On one of my last days in New Orleans, I tried Yakamein from John and Mary Food Store in Fifth Ward. Cuong Tran, the owner, came to Louisiana from Vietnam in 1987. He opened his shop in 2009 and learned to cook yakamein from the people here in New Orleans. Tran serves a large bowl of yakamein with Chinese-style BBQ pork, and the clear broth — much lighter in color and flavor than Green’s soy sauce-infused juice — has been tinted red by char.
Yakamein’s many iterations tell a story about how a city has changed over time – a city that has always been defined by its diversity and blending of cultures. The origins of the dish date back to a time when black and Chinese residents of New Orleans lived, ate, and adapted each other’s cuisines side-by-side. Today, a new wave of immigrants, many from Vietnam and Southeast Asia, are joining the process of change. Yakamein’s future has yet to be written. But one thing is unlikely: that it will go away.