As Lunar New Year celebrations erupt across the valley, there is a small diner on Woodland’s Main Street that survives as a culinary testament to how Chinese immigrants helped build area’s farming heritage.

Last year, Kellie Hwang of Bay Briefing wrote that Chicago Café has been determined to be the oldest Chinese restaurant in California, if not the entire nation. Hwang’s piece detailed exactly how researchers at U.C. Davis arrived at this eye-opening revelation.

For people in Woodland, the news wasn’t too surprising. Chicago Café is nestled in a pre-Prohibition-era structure at the very terminus of where the city’s old Chinatown once stood. Local historians say that, in the mid-1880s, there were more than a hundred Chinese families living in Woodland. The corrugated-mental buildings that held this community’s homes and businesses probably looked a lot like the main streets of Locke and Isleton that are still standing in the Delta.

Sadly, the bones of Yolo’s Chinatown eventually gave way to newer development, though Chicago Café emerged as a lasting echo of its bustling memory. Today, the place has a kind of salt-of-the-earth charm. Faded newspaper clippings and dead-eyed deer trophies highlight its walls, and there’s a huge stuffed peacock with pluming tail feathers that fan over its cozy booths. The little diner effortlessly embraces the down-home feel of the farming town where it’s stood since 1903.

To say its distinguished chef is laid-back is an understatement: Whenever new customers noticed that the Chicago Café is a cash-only joint, he looks up from his steaming wok and encourages them to walk through his kitchen and use the backdoor, since it opens onto the lot of a bank. And there’s nothing to hide in that kitchen. It’s simply immaculate.

In the mornings, the café serves up a traditional western breakfast – sunrise dishes that any kid from the ranchlands would agree are a hardy flex. Visitors can park on stools a few seats down from the regulars dressed in their old flannels and hoodies, hearing how this chatty group seems to know every face walking through the door. While scarfing down big slabs of beautifully charred applewood bacon, it can dawn on a traveler that they’re eating in a café where people had done the same thing before the Great Depression, before World War I, even before the Titanic sank. That’s living history. And a testament to staying power.

Come lunchtime, the café switches over to making Chinese food. The chef lets his customers pick how they want their noodles cooked, whether it be fried, boiled or what he calls “Chinese style.” While all three options have their fans at Chicago Café, SN&R recommends starting on a first visit with Pork Chow Mein done in the café’s Chinese method. This wok-touch pulls the meat’s essence into an almost creamy sheen around the noodles, with thinly sliced pork bits decorating the top of them like cooked pink and red rose pedals. These heaps of noodles yield turning fork-fulls of flavor. It certainly doesn’t hurt to pair the Chow Mein with an order of egg rolls, which the café brings out with a perfect bronze-gold shell-crisp on the outside and pillow-soft center of shredded cabbage within. The eggrolls get dipped in a soupy, beautifully balanced sweet and source.

Whether going for lunch or breakfast, Chicago Café is a fun, low-key, totally affordable stop for great food, one that offers an insight into life in Woodland, as well as a nice window into California history. It’s located at 411 Main Street in Woodland’s historic district.  

Upcoming Lunar New Year’s celebrations: Locke hosts a festival on Feb, 22

The historic Chinese town of Locke will host an upcoming Lunar New Year celebration in the Delta, one meant to usher in 2025 as the Year of the Snake.

Locke’s weathered, century-old boardwalks are surrounded by the wood relics of Chinese laundries, gambling halls and butcher shops – a lasting tribute to those sojourners from Guangdong Province who helped plant the Delta’s patchwork of farming.

Locke’s Lunar New Year festival, which runs from noon to 4 p.m., will highlight the town’s rich cultural heritage with traditional performances, special food and vibrant decorations.