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A fact from Edsel Ford Fong appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 17 September 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Chinatown, San Francisco's waiter Edsel Ford Fong is fondly remembered for calling patrons "retarded" and "fat", slamming food on tables, groping female patrons, telling patrons to "sit down and shut up" and clearing tables before diners were finished?
Latest comment: 12 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I placed the qualifier "by locals" at the end of the lede, since all of the references in this article are from San Francisco area media. Wong is unlikely to be written about, let alone called the "world's rudest waiter" in other areas of the world. If there were national or international gastronomy publications that described Wong, I'd feel differently, but as it is, I feel we should comment on it in the lede. Thoughts? Cmprince21:06, 17 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
The source simply say that he is known for being the world's rudest waiter and don't limit the scope of their comments to his being locally famous. In fact, he was internationally known even if he is a local phenomenon. The people promoting that designation - Herb Caen, Armistead Maupin (and via him the BBC), and guidebook and travelogue writers - were read and repeated worldwide. We could do a survey of sources and find the ones that are or are not local, which would be WP:OR. What would be most accurate is that he was promoted to the world by the restaurant and by widely read authors as the world's worst waiter, an idea that caught on. I don't think it's really worth it to get that detailed in the introductory sentence about the nature of his fame. Better to simply say that his tag / nickname was "world's worst waiter" and leave it to the body of the article to say what that is all about. Wikidemo23:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The recent SFGate article about Sam Wo's lamentable closure spells his name "Edsel Ford Fung" but notes that his "last name often appeared as "Fong".[1] My quick-and-dirty Google checking suggests that in GNews, "Fong" and "Fung" seem to appear with about equal frequency; in GBooks, "Fong" seems to be much more popular. I note that the ballpark food stand photo in the article shows "Fong". Thus, I lean weakly toward keeping the article at its current spelling. --Arxiloxos (talk) 18:55, 20 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
I only remember seeing the name spelled as "Fung," but a quick search of the San Francisco Chronicle's own website, sfgate.com, shows that even the newspaper that helped make EFF famous isn't consistent about using an "o" vs a "u." (Mind you, the website's copy editors are locally regarded as incompetent, including identifying parallel streets as intersecting, misstating the date of this year's Gay Pride parade, and confusing homonyms — so perhaps it's best not to rely on them.)
sfgate 2012 04 20 Includes image of Herb Caen paragraph at death. Apparently originally included facsimile images of other writings about subject, which now (for me at least) show only as the dreaded Windows Red X; one was apparently "the famous Conan skit" so probably well worth chasing down. Extensive other quotations.
