"Asian Dining Rules" -- Fat Guy's new book

[Fat Guy]

The "Asian alone or in combination" percentage for Fremont is 39.8. However, I guess it's being counted as part of the San Francisco metro statistical area.

[Fat Guy]

One issue that keeps coming up when I mention to non-Asian people that I’m working on this book is the claim that Chinese food is unhealthy. Back in 1993, and again in 2007, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) generated scores of media reports on this issue. In the September 1993 Nutrition Action Health Letter, an article titled “Chinese Food: A Wok On The Wild Side,” made three comparisons that have remained in the public consciousness to this day (I know -- they are repeated back to me, inaccurately, all the time):

- An order of House Lo Mein with as much salt as a Whole Pizza Hut Cheese Pizza

- An order of Kung Pao Chicken with almost as much fat as four Quarter Pounders

- An order of Moo Shu Pork with more than twice the cholesterol of an Egg McMuffin

The article begins, provocatively, “According to a recent report by the Food Marketing Institute and Prevention Magazine, 52 percent of all Americans say that Chinese food is ‘more healthful’ than their usual diet. If only they knew.” It then goes on to debunk this alleged myth with analyses of 15 dishes, concluding that “The average Chinese dinner we looked at contains more sodium than you should eat in an entire day. It also has 70 percent of a day's fat, 80 percent of a day's cholesterol, and almost half a day's saturated fat.”

Then, in 2007, the CSPI returned to the well and published “Wok Carefully: CSPI Takes a (Second) Look at Chinese Restaurant Food.” It begins, “Popular Chinese restaurant meals can contain an entire day’s worth of sodium and some contain two days’ worth.”

In both 1993 and 2007, the CSPI pieces were not unequivocally negative. They offered advice for reducing sodium, saturated fat, and cholesterol through better ordering and portion control. But these parts weren’t what made headlines like

“Chinese restaurant food unhealthy, study says: Menus loaded with sodium, saturated fat and calories — even the veggies” (MSNBC)

and

“Study: Chinese Restaurant Food Unhealthy: Typical Chinese Restaurant Menu Is a Sea of Nutritional No-Nos, According to Consumer Group” (USA Today)

There are, however, several fallacies underlying the CSPI’s conclusions.

The so-called study makes the assumption that an entire takeout order of kung pao chicken equals one dinner for one person. Yet there is no evidence that most people eat that way. Rather, it is common for a family to order several dishes and share them – and to have leftovers.

The CSPI also doesn’t offer any information about what dishes people actually order in a typical Chinese meal. If a family of four orders three or four dishes, are they all going to be from the “bad” list, or will some be vegetables, shrimp, and other dishes that, along with steamed white rice, balance some of the heavier dishes?

Perhaps the most glaring fallacy, especially in the 2007 report, is the emphasis on sodium. It’s astounding that the CSPI, as well as many other groups that should know better, is still railing against salt. At this point, the health claims against salt have been so thoroughly debunked that it’s hard to imagine any research-based organization being unaware that the salt-hypertension connection is a myth. At this point, the only thing that can really be said about salt and hypertension is that a small percentage of the population may be “salt sensitive,” however for healthy individuals with normally functioning kidneys there’s no reason to be concerned about salt. Worse, by steering people away from foods solely on the basis of salt content, the CSPI is discouraging the ordering of lower-fat items like soups.

The comparisons to McDonald’s and Pizza Hut are particularly disingenuous. Chinese restaurant menus are huge and they emphasize choice. No American who has turned on a television or radio, read a newspaper, or surfed the web could today be unaware that steamed broccoli has fewer calories per ounce than deep-fried pork. If people want to order healthful, wholesome, delicious meals at Chinese restaurants, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Western fast-food restaurants, on the other hand, offer only token options for the health-conscious, and they’re almost never good.

[slkinsey]

Still, Chinese food dinners are usually full of oil. I think it would be hard to think of a typical Chinese restaurant dinner that could be considered "light on the fat." Yea, you can have the steamed broccoli and scallops, but most people are ordering moo shu pork and General Tso's chicken. And clearly many of them do so thinking it's "healthy because it's Chinese food." Someting like the (delicious) "stir-fried watercress with crispy pork" I had at Sripraphai the other day sounds superficialy "light and healthy" -- but the reality is that it was full of fat.

[Fat Guy]

"Full of fat" doesn't mean anything in the abstract, though. Lots of things are full of fat such as, well, fat. It has to be attached to a quantity, and CSPI gets the quantity wrong. There's a difference between eating an entire quart container full of fried rice and sharing it with three other people and leaving leftovers, or between eating an entire quart container of kung pao chicken and eating a sixth of it with a cup of white rice, in combination with soup and bits of other dishes. The point being, CSPI doesn't give a crap about what people actually eat. They only care about making headlines. A serious study would take a bunch of people in normal family groupings, let them order from a standard Chinese menu, and see what they eat; then it would see what they eat when they don't eat Chinese food. It's quite possible that in 52% of cases the Chinese meal would indeed be healthier (assuming, for the sake of argument, that the conventional-wisdom of healthful -- low-fat, low-salt, etc. -- is actually right). I'm also not so sure there are countless morons out there who think deep-fried pork with sweet-and-sour sauce is a low-fat, low-calorie option. If anything, there may be some underestimation of how much oil there is in a typical stir-fried vegetable dish. But people underestimate the amount of fat and salt in all restaurant food.

[slkinsey]

I'm curious as to what we think constitutes a "normal" Chinese restaurant meal in America. I'd hypothesize that a typical individual eating "family style" at a Chinese restaurant has something like this:

- 2 fried pork dumplings

- 1 egg roll

- 1 wedge scallion pancake

- 1/2 cup hot and sour soup

- 1/2 cup deep fried chicken in thick sweet sauce

- 1/2 cup moo shu pork

- 1/2 cup beef with broccoli and garlic

- 1/2 cup white rice

That is a lot of fat right there.

[Fat Guy]

A typical meal for me would be more like:

- 8 fried pork dumplings

- 2 wedges scallion pancake

- 4 pork spare ribs

- All the bits of appetizers everybody else at the table doesn't eat

- 2 cups beef lo mein

- Deep fried shrimp with honey-glazed walnuts

- A small taste of steamed mixed vegetables, just to confirm I still don't like it

- Enough ten ingredient fried rice to taste each of the ten ingredients several times

- A cup of white rice

- A cup of brown rice

- Another order of fried pork dumplings

- Half a Peking duck

- A pint of Starbuck's Java Chip ice cream at home for dessert

[slkinsey]

Heh. No kidding. Me too.

A recent "light" dinner at New Green Bo:

- 1 cup of chicken broth with vegetables

- 6 fried pork dumplings

- 4 boiled pork and leek dumplings

- 1.5 wedges of scallion pancake

- 1.5 cups rice cakes with chicken

- 1 piece fish fillet in wine sauce (hold the fungus)

I feel like I must be forgetting something.

The ironic thing is that this dinner was actually fairly light compared to other forays to NGB.

[Holly Moore]

A research assignment for you. Who is the Chinese restaurant owner or chef who created the universal Chinese restaurant menu found in 93% of all U.S. Chinese restaurants?

Edited June 6, 2007 by Holly Moore (log)

[Peter Green]

A research assignment for you.  Who is the Chinese restaurant owner or chef who created the universal Chinese restaurant menu found in 93% of all U.S. Chinese restaurants?

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I believe it was David Lo Pan from Big Trouble In Little China

[Pan]

Still, Chinese food dinners are usually full of oil.  I think it would be hard to think of a typical Chinese restaurant dinner that could be considered "light on the fat."  Yea, you can have the steamed broccoli and scallops, but most people are ordering moo shu pork and General Tso's chicken.  And clearly many of them do so thinking it's "healthy because it's Chinese food."  Someting like the (delicious) "stir-fried watercress with crispy pork" I had at Sripraphai the other day sounds superficialy "light and healthy" -- but the reality is that it was full of fat.

←

I take your point, Sam.

I'd just point out that Cantonese steamed whole fish dishes are not very fatty and are a standard and delicious dish in good Cantonese restaurants. But I doubt that most people who go for Sweet and Sour Pork for takeout are ordering steamed whole fish much.

[slkinsey]

Oh, there's no doubt that in a properly "authentic" regional Chinese restaurant there are healthy things to order. But, to follow up on your example, I think it very likely that the vast majority of Chinese restaurants across America are not offering any Cantonese steamed whole fish dishes (or certainly none you'd want to have) and, for those that do, in most of them the majority of customers aren't ordering it.

[Fat Guy]

One of the big stories in Chinese food, and Asian food in general, and indeed restaurants in general, is that the rate of improvement in small-town America has been incredibly rapid over the past decade or two. My first wake-up call on this was in about 1998, when I was visiting Cave Junction, Oregon. We were going there to visit a winery, and the guy at the winery was giving us directions by phone. "When you drive through the town heading in from the highway, you'll pass the diner and then two Chinese restaurants, one on each side of the road. You want to go to the one on the right, not the one on the left. It has a much better menu."

The stereotype, especially held by large-city dwellers, is that the Chinese food everywhere else in America is inedible and generic. I hear it all the time, even from plenty of people in the food press. But it's just not the case anymore. The supply lines have been laid in at the level of medium-size cities like Cleveland and Charlotte, and in all those surrounding suburbs restaurants can get good ingredients -- including fish -- from large Asian markets and suppliers that deal with Asian-operated farms in the US, Asian seafood distributors, etc. Most people who have been talking about these restaurants but not eating at them in the past decade would be surprised at what's out there.

Now two things are still true. First, it's still true that the average run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant in a strip mall somewhere in Middle America isn't likely to have whole steamed fish or any ambitious dishes of that nature. Second, it's true that there's a generic menu that most every Chinese restaurant serves an approximation of.

However, the restaurant that has no steamed whole fish will almost definitely have a significant number of shrimp dishes, and also a selection of steamed dishes that include shrimp, tofu and vegetable selections. The slightly better restaurant in the strip mall across the road, where the average dish costs a dollar or two more, is likely to have fish fillets in various configurations -- usually basics like salmon and bass fillets that can be had frozen from commercial suppliers, and also scallops and, if it's an upscale area, possibly a live lobster tank. Of course, somebody has to be ordering this stuff, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to keep it on the menu.

In addition, that generic menu is more and more often becoming only part of the overall menu at any given restaurant. So yes, most Chinese restaurants feel obligated by the laws of supply and demand to offer the standard Chinese-American dishes from the generic menu. But a lot of those restaurants then go on to offer an array of other stuff.

Needless to say, there are many Chinese restaurants serving undifferentiated crap -- that's the case with all kinds of restaurants, and it's as true in Manhattan as it is in Mobile. But once you cut that bottom layer away -- once you cut away the Chinese-restaurant equivalents of Denny's, Applebee's and the local all-you-can-eat buffet -- you get to another level. And that level exists most everywhere in America now. At that level, you're usually dealing with family-run restaurants with chefs who have decent culinary skills, and there are likely to be at least a few Asian clients as well as American clients who have traveled in Asia. This is true even in some pretty small towns now, and it's certainly true in most actual cities even in the whitest states.

So when you're dining at that level, which isn't a very high level and isn't exactly difficult to plug into, you're all of a sudden in familiar territory (familiar, at least, if you're the type of person who's a regular reader of the eG Forums). You're in the universe where, as usual, the restaurant you're in is two restaurants: the one where the tourists eat, and the one where the in-the-know people dine. You just have to be willing to engage a manager and, of course, pay a little extra, and you can get good stuff. Maybe not on the level of the best places in Chinatown in New York, San Francisco or Vancouver, but far, far better than the stereotype would have it.

I spent about a week in the Cleveland area last year and collected a lot of information. Many of the restaurants there even have websites with menus, so we can click through to them from here. The generic stuff is well represented, but most of the menus go way beyond that, and in all different directions. For example, Garden Cafe (clearly there's some Taiwanese influence here), has dishes like "Squid with Sliced Pork," "Intestine Pig Blood with Sour Mustard," "Garden Steam Chicken with Scallion," "Garlic Grill Pomfret," and "Seafood Steamed Egg." That's in Cleveland, people.

Some more Cleveland examples: Hunan by the Falls has "Salt-Baked Fish," "Sliced Lotus Root Salad," "Ginger-Scallion China Sole (Filet of China sole with fresh tofu, steamed or sauteed in chef Chau's ginger scallion sauce)," "Seafood Fire Pot (shrimp, scallops, tsurumi, tofu, Chinese mushrooms, Napa cabbage)," and a Thai-style satay made with New Zealand green mussels. Pearl of the Orient has "Steamed Salmon (fresh fillet of salmon with asparagus, broccoli, carrots and shiitake mushrooms in a native bamboo steamer)," "Seafood Tofu Vermicelli Hot Pot," and even "Salmon with Peach and Cucumber Salsa." You get the idea. I've been finding menus like these from all over.

My most in-depth first-hand experience in Cleveland was at Sun Luck Garden, where Annie Chiu is the chef. This place looks like nothing from the outside. Like so many suburban Chinese restaurants, it's off at the end of some strip mall and the nearest landmark is a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The menu (sorry, it's not online, at least I don't think it is) looks relatively unremarkable. But if you sit with (well, run like hell chasing after) Annie Chiu for a day, you'll hear her making phone calls to all her regulars, "I'm getting mussels for tomorrow dinner, you want in?" Plenty of these regulars aren't Asian. And every night there are specials that reflect a high level of Chinese cooking, yet you'd never know it if you just coasted through a meal, didn't engage the staff, and ordered the generic standards.

You can track most of this with other types of Asian restaurants, though a lot of them haven't penetrated as deeply into the country. But in most cities, the Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Indian options are much improved of late.

[Fat Guy]

I'm going to be interviewing Betty Xie, the editor of Chinese Restaurant News, in the near future. I've already got so many questions that I may not even get to all of them, but if you all have anything you'd like me to ask her I'll see if I can squeeze it in.

[SheenaGreena]

fascinating thread. I'm almost half way done reading it, but I'd figured I would post anyway.

I think its wonderful that in Korea they have restaurants specializing in only one or two dishes. This means that if I want korean bbq, bibimbap, or something else I have to go to separate restaurants. Since these restaurants specialize in only one dish it means that the quality is very high, food comes out quickly, and is always very very good. However here in the US, korean restaurants specialize in pretty much everything and it really affects the quality of the food. I have yet to find a korean restaurant in boston or maryland that does one dish really well, unless you count the chinese-korean place in college park, md. Also these korean places that specialize in one dish here in the us (very very rarely will you find one) are only frequented by korean people. If americans had the opportunity to try this type of eating, I think they would quickly move past bibimbop and korean bbq

[SheenaGreena]

On the side: I remember driving down to Fort Lewis from Vancouver back in the '70s because the Korean restaurants and stores clustered around the base were the only ones serving kop chang to be found (it was a long drive, but I was young, and Yoonhi was with me).

what a good tip, military bases always seem to have good ethnic restaurants located nearby. I grew up as an army brat (my father is retired now) and we always found really really good korean food near the military bases- yes even in korea. These restaurants were always frequented by the military men and women mostly during lunch. I think they liked these places, because they reminded them of their posts and stays overseas.

mmmmm kopchang - I throw in extra intestines and stomach

[seisei]

Fat Guy,

I love the book idea, and those Asian stats are fascinating. Somehow I always assumed that there were more Koreans in L.A. than in New York, considering the quality of the food out there vs. NY; it's interesting to learn that they simply make up more of the population.

I agree with Sheena that too many people get hung up on bibimbap and bbq and fail to look beyond to the rest of Korean cuisine. I think this may partly have to do with the encyclopedic nature of most Korean restaurants (at least in NY) with menus that go on for nearly a hundred items for pages and pages. I've watched many a friend's eyes glaze over perusing them only to land upon bibimbap.

On the flip side, restaurants specializing in just one or two dishes seem to be a risk as well, for the uninitiated, for fear of a lack of variety or alternatives should the eater not enjoy the house dish or have some sort of "safety" (i.e. bibimbap) to fall back on.

(I think the popularity of bibimbap also is related to the ease with which it can be made vegetarian by excluding beef--not too many other Korean dishes, kimchee included, can be considered safely veggie.)

As a Korean-American, I always think of what I want to eat, and tailor my choice of restaurant to my appetite for a particular dish. In NYC's Koreatown, while the Korean "encyclopedic" menu type restaurants predominate, there is a healthy percentage of "specialized" restaurants focusing on one or two dishes--Chinese style noodles, fried chicken, tofu stew, oxtail soup, etc. If I want bbq (which is rare) or something that one of these specialized places does not provide, I go to the more generalist places. I would say that the percentage of specialized restaurants goes up in Korean neighborhoods in Queens and New Jersey.

Edited June 8, 2007 by seisei (log)

[Peter Green]

I've seen the specialty restaurants have a hard time of it. You really need a lot of people who know your product in order to support a particular niche (like the beef blood soup place up on Kingsway in Vancouver......I wonder if they survived?).

Is the problem that we, after several generations of dining, are now too comfortable with Asian food as we've been taught to enjoy it? Breaking the old dining-out prejudice of "This is my plate! Mine! Don't come near it!" and having moved to the family style approach to a meal, where a wide variety of dishes are on offer to all.

We've apostized, we've embraced this new sensibility, and we've made it part of our culture.

Now it just seems....well....sinful not to have a lot of different plates of stuff out there on the table, a panoply of flavours to snipe from.

Luckily, I can work with sin.

[Pan]

I'm going to be interviewing Betty Xie, the editor of Chinese Restaurant News, in the near future. I've already got so many questions that I may not even get to all of them, but if you all have anything you'd like me to ask her I'll see if I can squeeze it in.

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Ask her which regional Chinese cuisine(s) will be the next to take off in North America.

Ask her about the future of high-end Chinese cuisine in North America.

[Peter Green]

I'm going to be interviewing Betty Xie, the editor of Chinese Restaurant News, in the near future. I've already got so many questions that I may not even get to all of them, but if you all have anything you'd like me to ask her I'll see if I can squeeze it in.

←

Ask her about the future of high-end Chinese cuisine in North America.

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As an interesting twist, could you take her from that question, to how she compares this with the future of high-end Chinese cuisine in China?

Cheers,

Peter

[ojisan]

Steven -

I would be interested to know how many Japanese restaurants are actually owned/operated by people of Japanese descent. On the west coast, most are Korean owned.

You might consider a chapter devoted to proper etiquette at high-end sushi bars - the hows and whys one should know in order to get the best meal/service possible.

Phil

[Fat Guy]

It would be interesting to know the ethnicity of Japanese-restaurant owners, however I've found data of that level of granularity to be extremely difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to come by. If you have a source, I'd love to hear about it.

There's a section of the book called "Guerilla Sushi Tactics," which is a rough guide to how to get the most out of a sushi bar (rule number one: sit at the sushi bar). It doesn't concern itself specifically with the high-end -- that sector is so small as to be not all that central to a book with nationwide, mainstream scope. But I think the basic strategies work at most any level of sushi bar. Actually, I know they do, since I developed them over the course of several meals at Sushi Yasuda, Kuruma Zushi, Hatsuhana, et al. in New York City a few years back. One of my central theses is that strict adherence to Japanese etiquette is not necessary in American sushi restaurants. No sushi chef who has spent more than a week working in America insists on that. The important thing is to make a connection with your sushi chef and communicate that you're an interested, enthusiastic, discriminating customer.

[JanMcBaker]

I'm going to be interviewing Betty Xie, the editor of Chinese Restaurant News, in the near future. I've already got so many questions that I may not even get to all of them, but if you all have anything you'd like me to ask her I'll see if I can squeeze it in.

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Ask her how in the heck do you get a restaurant to live up to their heat designation for a given dish? I don't know how many times I've ordered a 'hot' dish but ended up with something bland enough for a newborn! Or if someone else has a suggestion, please let me know.

[Fat Guy]

I don't know how many times I've ordered a 'hot' dish but ended up with something bland enough for a newborn!  Or if someone else has a suggestion, please let me know.

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I thought I had cracked the code. "Thai spicy!" I declared to the waitress at Sripraphai, which is not only the best Thai restaurant in New York City, but also one of the very few acceptable ones (for this reason, I suggest you avoid Sripraphai unless you're willing to become jaded about all the Thai places you currently enjoy). She nodded -- clearly, this clever turn of phrase (simply saying "very spicy" won't even get you to square one) indicated an in-the-know Caucasian customer who could tolerate spicy food the way Thai people eat it.

It was spicy enough to cause perspiration and some discomfort, but as with all the best spicy Southeast Asian cuisine, the heat was not simply for its own sake but was balanced by the other flavors in the dish. Most great Southeast Asian cuisine -- to paint with a very broad brush -- is characterized by a balance of tastes, particularly between sweetness and spiciness. It also tends toward the extremely aromatic. In its Americanized incarnations, however, this cuisine can be either sickly sweet or one-dimensionally spicy -- the kind of food you eat only on a dare.

Sripraphai is one of the few restaurants in New York that strikes the right balance, and where the dishes give off the aromas of the genuine article. I ordered this same dish, "jungle curry" with one or another meat (most of the dishes on the menu are protein-interchangeable: chicken, beef, pork, tofu), on my next four visits, each time feeling exceptionally proud of myself for having reached across the great cultural divide that so often makes it impossible for non-Asians to get the best food in Asian restaurants.

And then, on visit number six, I started in on my jungle curry (with chicken this time) and, as I was blithely approaching the second bite, I realized that a dull pain was beginning to radiate outwards from the roof of my mouth, up my sinuses and all over my head, which was beginning to throb. I dropped my fork on or near the plate, instinctively drank a glass of water -- which only made it worse -- then ate my rice and my wife's rice and attempted to recover.

Eventually, the waitress noticed my distress. She apologized, "Oh, sorry, this time I forget to tell chef you're not a Thai person. That one, it's real Thai medium-spicy."

A humbling experience, to be sure, but it enabled me to ascertain the only effective way for a non-Asian to get full-strength versions of the dishes at Sripraphai: lean in conspiratorially and say to the waitress: "Don't tell the chef I'm not Thai." A Pyrrhic victory, perhaps, since my subsequent Sripraphai meals have been a blur of pain and suffering -- but a victory nonetheless.

[Toliver]

My attempt to get spicier food in a Chinese restaurant was to follow up my order with "Lao", which I was told means "spicy hot" in Chinese. It hasn't always worked. I could be saying "purple" for all I know.

[Human Bean]

Major exception to the idea that a restaurant can't specialize in a particular dish: pho.

There are several restaurants around here where pho is 75% or more of the business. Maybe this is only possible where there's a sufficient population to support them; the customers seem to be 75+% Asian, but the Caucasian customer base seems to be growing, though slowly perhaps.

The surprising thing is that most of the pho isn't even very good (the same can be said about most Chinese restaurant food too), but it seems to be Vietnamese comfort food and is somewhat time-consuming to prepare at home, so a mediocre restaurant version can suffice.

(Reminder to self: make a batch this weekend, before summer kicks in and it gets too hot to let soup simmer all day.)