A Tattoo Will Earn a Lifetime Supply of Crab Rangoons at an Avondale Chinese Restaurant

Through Friday, April 17, Friendship Chinese restaurant in Avondale is offering customers a chance to earn free egg rolls and crab rangoon for life. The catch could be considered another perk; you have to get tattooed with the restaurant’s logo.

Any hypothetical tattoos are free, part of a promotion with neighboring Legacy Tattoo to drum up business amid continued fallout from COVID-19 and heavy construction on Milwaukee Avenue. Restaurant owners have complained about the traffic and reduced parking options from the road work along the main commerce street for Logan Square, Avondale, Wicker Park, and Bucktown.

Tattooed customers are entitled to one free appetizer per visit, says owner Alan Yuen. The list includes Angry Long Beans in a spicy kung pao sauce, Hong Kong-style egg rolls, chicken wings in a sweet and spicy sauce, salt and pepper tofu tossed with five-spice and chilis, and the aforementioned crab rangoon. The fried appetizer has been gaining recent buzz across the country. A local couple even tried their hand at being crab rangoon influencers, attempting to wax poetic about perfect wonton-to-filling ratios and other factors.

Frankie Marron, community engagement and membership director for the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, has been helping by managing social media for the promotion and responding to requests. Marron says the biggest challenge they’ve seen to businesses in Logan Square and Avondale is the ongoing construction of more bike lanes and a new park. “Last summer here on this side of Milwaukee, it was challenging. Now that it’s over, business is going back to normal, but now construction is on the other side of Milwaukee,” Marron says.

As Block Club Chicago reported, the promotion has exceeded expectations as word spreads on social media. Legacy Tattoo owner Brian Clutter says that as of Thursday, March 27, they had more than 60 people who committed to ink. One of Friendship’s employees, Bennu Ekinci, was the first. Ekinci chose the classic red and has been in love with it so far. The logo, which means “House of Friendship,” is originally in red, but you can get any color.

“I’m a graphic design student, so I liked seeing the process of it unfold,” Ekinci explains, adding that she’s planning on incorporating flowers — perhaps Japanese blossoms for a cultural fusion aesthetic. “And I’ll go back to the same guy,” she laughs, gesturing at Clutter.

Friendship Chinese has been open for 40 years with quality dim sum and hearty entrees and is located close to Logan Square and Avondale bars and vintage clothing stores. Yuen and Clutter have been friends since Clutter opened up his tattoo parlor next door in 2019. Clutter says he was inspired by the since-closed restaurant Hot Doug’s, a beloved Chicago hot dog stand, also in Avondale, where customers got free hot dogs for life if they tatted up with the restaurant’s logo.

Yuen left his New York City career in fashion marketing to help his sick father take care of the restaurant. Their original location was across the street, now home to Spicy Taco, where the owners serve food inspired by their Mexican home state of Michoacán. They also ran a location for a brief time along Chicago’s lakefront.

The middle child of five siblings, Yuen lost his father 20 years ago. The family moved to Chicago from Hong Kong in the 1970s, but their immigration story started five generations ago. It began with his great-grandfather, who he says “was one of those typical Chinese who came from China as a single man to work, make money, and send it back.”

Back in the late 1800s, boat travel was the norm, and it took up to 50 days to reach Chicago from China. His great-grandfather ended up going back to China to remarry a younger woman, whom he brought on the boat to Seattle and then the train to Chicago. In Chicago, the couple gave birth to a daughter, Yuen’s grandmother, who took the same arduous journey back to China with her parents at 7 years old with her ailing father and her young mother, who didn’t speak English. Then, after Yuen’s great-grandfather died, they made the journey from China to Chicago.

Marron — whose grandfather immigrated from China to Mexico as an engineer to work on bridges — grew up in Logan Square and Avondale all his life and has vivid memories of going to Friendship Chinese. “I was telling Alan that I’ve been coming here since I was 7 years old. And I have a picture of me drinking the tea,” he says, adding that his favorite dish now is the Hong Kong-style Sidewalk Noodles with Garlic Shrimp.

At the table, Yuen says he was thinking that when the program ends, they can do reunions for people who got the tattoo.

That sense of community might be why Clutter and Yuen say so many of the people reaching out are having their very first tattoo be the Friendship Chinese logo. “It’s nice to have things that bring people together. We’ve had lots of forces trying to divide us for a long time. So it doesn’t hurt to try and remind ourselves that we should be together,” Clutter says. Ekinci agrees. “It makes me excited when I think about some of the people that get the same tattoo. Everyone will be like, ‘We’re a match. We eat at the same place. We go to the same area. It’s like being part of a little community.”

People are looking for more ways to be together, especially after COVID-19 hit the restaurant industry hard, isolated us from each other, and greatly reduced the number of third spaces we have. It’s been over five years since the first lockdown orders were issued, and we’re still looking for ways to get closer.

Friendship Chiense

Marron adds he received a request from a married couple who had their first date at Friendship Chinese and wanted to get matching tattoos. And just as many like Ekinci are choosing the logo for their first tattoo, while others choose it for their fifth or 50th. “I had one person call and ask if they could get the tattoo a little smaller,” Yuen tells Clutter. “And when I asked him if there was a particular reason why, he said ‘Because I’m not sure if I have any more room on my body for more tattoos.”

Friendship Chinese crossed hit a major hurdle in November when the city’s health department closed them down “due to water back-up caused by an underground broken pipe,” Yuen says.

It took them about a month to reopen and complete “extremely costly” repairs, Yuen says: “Since the only way to fix the problem was to open up the floor, instead of fixing one pipe, I decided to open up the entire kitchen floor and install a new drainage system.”

But luckily, Yuen says that due to the new system, he’s worry-free for the next 20 years, open for business, and looking for new ways — like the promotion — to get customers in the door.