The Best Shrimp Garlic Noodles in America Are In This Shack¿ -- STREET FOOD ICONS.

Look how sexy, look at that. Mmm. Garlic shrimp, garlic noodles. Mama Chow's kitchen. I said, hey, Mom, I'm leaving. She's like, where are you going? I said, I'm going to Portland. She's like, why? I'm like, I want to do a food cart. I've been doing it so long that I can go by sound in a frying pan. The definition of street food is good, it's delicious, it's accessible. Fresh. Everything you want. Heard. Three W's. Chicken's working. This is some of the best street food you're going to get. in Portland at the level that he pumps it out. You're not getting this everywhere. You see a plate of food, it should be pretty sexy. I believe that food is all about pleasing the senses. Something should look good, it should smell good. Chances are it should taste good. Chances are it does. My name is Jeff Chow. I'm the owner operator of Mama Chow's Kitchen. Mama Chow's Kitchen is a food cart. We are on year 13 operating here in Portland, Oregon. It's a really small menu, but everything's handcrafted, made with love. We just do like five items really, really, really well all the time. Fried chicken, I make my version. It's a lollipop chicken wing. It's something that was taught to me when I was really young at my mom's restaurant. And then we do noodles. We have cha siu, which is a Chinese barbecue pork. We also have garlic shrimp. We do dumplings that we wrap here ourselves. I think the fried chicken garlic noodle is probably Portland's iconic. Because it was made in Portland, it was created in Portland for Portland. Hey, I'm gonna give you a number here. You're welcome. I think it's just super dialed in. Like he has what he does and he does it super well. I'm starting to speak. They're chow mein noodles, but they're fresh noodles. So that's going in the water. Dab of butter goes down. They're garden noodles. It's the base for all of our dishes, and then you go top it with different proteins. If you're allergic to garlic, I understand, but you don't like garlic, you're weird. The noodles go into those noodles, and then they go into the frying pan, and we just let it go. So a medium is usually like a level spoon. It's the same spoon all the time. The grumpy godmother, this is her, okay? And I've been using this since 2014. Slinging hot, here's your medium. Oakland, Chinatown is where I was born. My mom and dad are both from Guangdong province, southern China, and she opened a restaurant in 1984. She's a workhorse. She realized that the only way to come up in America was to work hard, you know? Being raised American, but being raised Chinese also at home, now we see life in two different perspectives. So the picture of her. On the window outside, it was Bruce Lee before because he was like my idol. But since she passed, she goes on top now and Bruce Lee goes below her because she's my idol. She said, you can't fail. If you're broke and you're hungry, eat eggs and ******* rice. You'll be fine until you succeed and don't give up. I worked at my mom's restaurant. I had my own restaurant. I failed dramatically. So I started working for new restaurants. And so I wanted to learn. Chinese barbecue pork marinade. There's no food coloring in here. It's all natural food products. There's Chinese bean paste. There's hoisin. There's soy sauce. There's sesame oil. There's fermented tofu. There's red wine, there's beet juice everybody, you don't need food coloring, you need beet juice. A lot of people use the red 40, and I don't see why you need to use food coloring. And so I'm really proud of this dish because it doesn't have like the garbage in it. And it's gonna go in. Door please! That's our barbecue pork and gardeners. Best thing about leaving home, I don't have to watch my back anymore. We're misfits, we're dysfunctional. We smoke, we drink, or we party. Those are the three vices. When you say we, what do you mean? People that work in kitchens. Thank you for your questions. But the thing is, we thrive. We could be dysfunctional, but we thrive at what we do. But unfortunately, what we do creates bad habits. If it's, you know. It's the nature of the beast, but you know, some people grow out of it. I did, you know, I caught a case possession of narcotics. Um, and in California, when you get something like that, usually they'll throw like a probationary, like claws into your punishment or restitution, whatever you want to call it. And so it was called a four-way search clause, which means that they could search you for any apparent reason. And then whoever's sitting with me also can be searched too. And so I grew up in Oakland. It's kind of rough, not hanging around with people that don't I have something going on right so I figured I gotta be alone anyway so why not just relocate. I ended up buying a plane ticket to Portland, spent my birthday here and really really explored the food cart scene and told myself we're gonna come to Portland and do a food cart. Since I've done this I've paid off restitution, I paid off student loans, I got a new car, I've traveled, I've been taking care of myself since I've been here. It's kind of a great feeling. Portland brought the best out of me. I mean, it really, really, really has. You know, and I'm so grateful for Portland. I think the cart guys have my back. Cause I think the cart guys exist, they really do. Every like fifth person is calling back and he's like, hey Jeff. And he's like, hey Carol, hey Kim, you know. He's known a lot of his customers since day one. He's watched people's kids grow. He's fed people's kids. He's seen them when they're single and after they got married, he served their family. So these are my signature wings. Like, this is like an embedded firewall, okay? I have to do this by hand. You cannot buy these this way. That's a honey soy garlic glazed, a tad spicy. You're getting five Lollipop wings. This is the Lollipop wings and garlic noodles. It's Portland iconic. So in the beginning, when I first started, it was tough. I had to struggle. You know, I tried everything. Like, I opened nights, I opened weekends. I went to two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning. I'm too new, like people, like my friend Todd Edwards. He goes, Jeff, when you open, remember one thing, no one knows you, no one knows who the **** you are. So whatever you do, my best advice I can give you is sit in the window and say hi to everyone walking back and forth. Thanks, Alex. Sure, yeah. Am I good? You're good. Thanks, man. Seeing other people's stories, you're living vicariously through other people's eyes, you know, by serving them a meal, you know, and the beauty is if you can feed mom while she's pregnant with garlic noodles, her kids will love garlic noodles too when they're born. It's so good. They're like a Portland legend. A mom had a wonton noodle restaurant growing up that had the ducks and char siu and the pork hanging. As a child, I had to go wash dishes on the weekends, you know? When I asked her for the recipe, she was like, let's do a pinch of this and a pinch of that and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And I'm like, Mom, can we weigh everything? Can we scale everything? Can we measure everything? She's like, no. I'm like, Mom, we have to. And it worked out really well, you know. I've been rapping since I was a kid. My mom used to say, rap one time. This is just our wonton soup. Portland healed me three times. First time was when I got here. I was broken. So starting new from another city, you know, it's a blank canvas, you know, I could bring the best version of me. There's a huge scar on my head. I don't know if you want to see it or not, but you look at that, that's the result of a hiking accident, you know. And Portland healed me then too. There were some friends that were visiting, John and Perry. This was in October of 2024. We went on a hike, hiked the mall in. On our way out, you know, I wanted to walk on a log. And I approached the log and I don't remember landing on the log. I remember just waking up in pain. I was in the hospital for about a week, so we had to close for four months, and luckily some friends put together a GoFundMe page, and it got funded within like a week from people all over. I mean, I was blown away. You're going to make me cry just thinking about this, but yeah, it's the people of Portland. People that you would never expect to still love you came out. My biggest fear was losing my business, not being able to cook anymore, and I'm blessed. To have the support that I got, you know, and people, yeah, yeah, thank you Portland. Thank you everybody, you know, I mean Portland brought the best out of me once again, you know, and I can't stop saying that because it has, Portland has brought the best out of me. So we're making the garlic shrimp garlic noodle now. I call it the garlic bomb because it just has a lot of garlic in it. So it's basically a brown butter garlic shrimp inspired by Hawaii. So you see that browning? That's the butter browning right there. If I turn the heat on on the pan, it's gonna keep browning and I don't want it to keep browning. So I'm just gonna just toss it with the residual heat. Oh my gosh, look at the shrimp, y'all. Wow. Wow, wow. I've always heard about these guys. I've wanted to go for... It's been a long time, and I know it's the place to go. When you go to places to eat, you can tell if it's intentionally made this way. When you read a menu, you're like, okay, how's it going to turn out? When you eat it, you're like, wow. It's awesome when you have a guy come and say, what did you do to your vegetables? I hate vegetables, but I love what you did to your vegetables. That's what I do. That's what gives me strength and energy. My mom, that's her signature. When I was coming in and out of consciousness during the fall she was like in my mind saying you're not going anywhere you're gonna stick around just trust the people around you and you'll be fine and I and I still believe that to this day. I talk about her all the time I mean like everyone knows that her picture's there for a reason her name's on my arm. Even though we didn't really get a chance to see each other the last 10 plus years of her life I think she was most happiest that I was happy. And I'm going to start crying now. It was hard, because I got that phone call, the last time I saw my mom's eyes open was through a video call. That was rough. But at the same time, the people told me that she was proud of me and she was happy that I was happy and she didn't have to worry about me anymore, so that's a good thing. Now you got me all crying. I did a count on dumplings, please. I am out. I think my mom is proud of me, I mean, you know, I'm the only one that's carried on her tradition. She's proud of me. Ew. If I could achieve half of what my mom achieved in my lifetime, if I could even achieve a quarter of what my mom achieved in her, you know, in my lifetime, I think I'm worthy. Community. Take one for a team, you know.