Shrimp Rolls - Melody Cryns

When I was a kid, I loved shrimp – I still do actually. One of my favorite dishes ever was shrimp curry, which my mom would occasionally make, or shrimp cocktails that we’d get down at Fisherman’s wharf in San Francisco in tiny cups – loads of tiny shrimp in a tangy sauce, yummy.
Then there were shrimp rolls – small egg rolls with shrimp in them. Sometimes my mom would buy frozen shrimp rolls and bake them in the oven and we’d eat them as soon as they finished cooking and they were cool enough to bite into. Sometimes, occasionally, we’d eat shrimp rolls at a Chinese restaurant – at least I would eat shrimp rolls. It never occurred to me that other people might not like shrimp rolls – like my brother and sister who thought shrimp was gross. They were truly missing out.

The first time I tried shrimp rolls, I wasn’t even sure what they were – but my mother called any sort of egg roll that had seafood in it “shrimp rolls,” so that’s what it had to be. Mom and Dad took me to a fancy Japanese restaurant in San Francisco called Mingiaya’s for my seventh birthday. We got to eat just like the Japanese people. We had to take our shoes off and wear paper slippers and sit down at low tables that required us to sit on the floor on a light-colored carpet. Dark-haired women wore their hair up and colorful kimonos and they served me a sweet-tasting drink with a paper umbrella in it. I loved the paper umbrella – I’d never seen one in a drink before.

Then the women in kimonos served us food, and the first thing we got on a plane were these small egg-roll like things that Mom called shrimp rolls. They were delicious, salty, and a little juicy. It was then that I decided that I loved shrimp After we ate a lot of good-tasting food (but the shrimp rolls were the best), the dark-haired ladies wearing kimonoas all shuttled over to our table holding a small cake with a lit candle on it, and they sang happy birthday to me in Japanese! It was an exciting moment.

And I always looked important when my Dad would take us to those fancy restaurants down at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco for our birthdays when I’d say to the waiter or waitress, “Shrimp curry please,” or “Shrimp cocktail please.” My brother and sister would make faces because they hated shrimp and the waiter or waitress always looked impressed. Then Jenny, my sister, would start eating the sugar packets, paper and all, when no one was looking. How juvenile.