The granddaughter of Jimmy’s Kitchen founder recalls Hollywood A-listers and baked Alaska as restaurant closes after 92 years
‘Not every Hong Kong schoolgirl wakes up to find a Hollywood movie star asleep on the living room sofa,’ says Barbara Harding, who remembers finding a certain William Holden staying in the family home.
In the 1870s, many Jewish refugees left Europe for New York. But Mordechai Landau boarded a ship in Odessa, Imperial Russia, and headed east, arriving in British Singapore with a wife, five children, few contacts, little money and speaking only Yiddish and Russian.
Aaron married Amelia in 1901 and years later her recipes would become the basis for Jimmy’s Kitchen staples such as the amuse-bouche pickled onions and the mainstay chicken madras. In the early 1920s, while living in Shanghai, Aaron teamed up with American entrepreneur Jimmy James to open a bar-restaurant that became the humble forerunner of the Hong Kong establishment (the menu at Shanghai Jimmy’s featured such delicacies as Campbell’s canned tomato soup).
When James returned to the United States, and with the situation in China unstable, Aaron moved both family and business to Hong Kong. And, in 1928, Jimmy’s Kitchen opened on Lockhart Road, Wan Chai. Six years later, he relocated it to the China Building, Theatre Lane, in Central.
In the late 30s, with Hong Kong under increasing threat from an expansionist Japan, my father, Leo Landau, joined the family business. Although he was not British, Leo volunteered for army service and was captured by the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941.