My dad hails from a large, Irish Catholic family out of New Jersey. He is the oldest of seven kids —five boys, two girls—and everyone still lives in the tri-state area, which makes for a totally insane but absolutely perfect holiday season.
At the helm of the Hibbs family is my Mom Mom Pat. She isn’t your typical grandmother… she doesn’t cook or knit, but she does host a weekly poker game and dates a much-younger man. Yep, she was a cougar before cougars were cool.
While I am lucky enough to have the means to go out to eat at restaurants, that wasn’t always the case for my Mom Mom. By my age (25) she already had four kids—and raising them on my grandfather’s plumber’s salary was no easy task.
Despite the sometimes-dire financial situation, Mom Mom always insisted on doing something nice at Christmas with the whole family. Starting when my dad was a toddler, she packed up the family and headed to Chinatown for a family meal — a tradition that the Hibbs, now exponentially larger thanks to 15 grandkids, still partake in to this day.
For the past decade, we have dined at Chinatown’s Sang Kee Peking Duck House (238 N 9th St, Philadelphia). With an average of 30+ people in our party, it is easy to taste a wide variety of food from the menu, and we’ve never been disappointed.
This year we started with the house special soup and crispy shrimp rolls. The soup was loaded with wontons, pork, chicken, shrimp, mushrooms, carrots, snap peas and bok choy. Sounds like a lot, but it was the perfect solution to the cold weather. Our waiter individually poured each bowl so no one got jipped. He’s obviously served us before and realized that uneven wonton distribution is grounds for a family feud.
Next we tried the signature Peking duck with green vegetables. The duck skin was crispy and the meat tender, though the “green vegetables” department was lacking since bok choy was the only veggie in sight. However, it was seasoned with ginger so I wasn’t complaining. In fact, I ate the majority of the side before offering to share with anyone else. Whoops.
We also got the seafood ho-fun, which was large flat noodles topped with shrimp, squid and scallops. It was yummy, but didn’t hold up to the duck dish. Other dishes at the table, which I was unable to photograph because we ate them too quickly, included crispy garlic green beans with shrimp and eggplant stuffed with crab (which was delicious, but not so nice to look at thanks to a dark brown sauce). Can you tell the Hibbs love seafood?
Finally, banana, mint chocolate chip and coconut ice creams were served alongside fortune cookies. My husband’s fortune revealed that he would “win a high prize or award in the near future.” The lottery, perhaps? A girl can dream, but honestly—with a crazy family like this, we’ve already hit the jackpot.
It’s no secret that food brings people together, and our Hibbs’ family Chinatown dinner is one of the greatest examples I can think of. The meal has survived snow storms, a major fire and deaths in the family, but it’s also been there to welcome new members to our clan, celebrate college graduations, weddings and babies, but most of all it reminds us of the real meaning of the holiday season—being together.
You can check out the Sang Kee Peking Duck House on Facebook here. Sang Kee Peking Duck House is located at 238 N. 9th St. in Philadelphia; reservations made at (215) 925-7532.
- Photography: Laura Hibbs McKenzie
