Chinese restaurants outside of China

[coquus]

The real eye opener for me was when I found out that the Chinese people who worked at the best restaurant in town were Cantonese, not suprisingly their lobster sauce was awesome. Apparently Canton is where a lot of the Chinese immigrants in the business are from, at least the first generation ones. So the trick is this: if you are afraid to talk to them, understandably around here as the language barrier is so thick, find out by cruising their family style meals, then order accordingly, it's not going to be the same thing, but it's likely there are analogs.

And just printing Ma Po Tofu on the menu is no indication of anything good. I can now say that I have had bad Ma Po for the first time at the new restuarant that opened in my town, how psyched was I just to see it on the menu only to be flummoxed with generic brown sauce and a taste reminiscent of jarred thai chili sauce.

[BarbaraY]

I call it the interchangeable, plastic laminate menu. It seems that every Mexican or Chinese restaurant has the same stuff as the others

.

We have two new Chinese places here that have gone beyond the Egg Flower Soup, Chow Mein, Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Pork and serve things like Squid, Szechuan Tofu, and Chow Fun.

The problem as I see it is, as Fat Guy said, customer resistance. Last time we went for lunch I watched a mother and son scarf down some of that awful flourescent pink Sweet and Sour Shrimp. I nearly gag looking at it.

Must confess, I like fortune cookies, too. And, yes, I know they aren't authentic.

Edited April 18, 2007 by BarbaraY (log)

[Fat Guy]

It would be interesting to see the startup kits that new Chinese restaurants use. I'd love to know the name and address of the company, if there is one, that supplies generic American Chinese restaurants with their menus and, perhaps, provides for their supply lines and basic recipes.

[stephenc]

Mistake number 1:

You're looking for chinese food in Wilkes Barre. Wilkes Barre has a grand total of about 2 chinese people, and they both probably work in that restaurant.

Mistake number 2:

You're asking Cantonese people to cook Szechuan food for you.

[Kouign Aman]

The one or two winners on the menu - oh yes.

We used to live across the street from Fung Lin - they'd been in business for decades. They had one shrimp dish that was outstanding - crisp & tender shrimp, perfect broccoli and spicy thick tomatoey sauce. I have no idea if it was authentic. It was delicious and consistent. Everything else on the menu was 'ok'. After a few meals to test out a fair portion of the menu, we settled on that one winning dish and stuck with it. If that's not what we wanted, we went to a different restaurant.

[Naftal]

If you want real Chinese food, I cannot help. But, as far as I am concerned, the best, most unique Chinese-American food comes from the China Cafe in Novi, Michigan.

[Kent D]

At least in Wichita, "Chinese Food" is super-buffet-style, mostly cooked by undocumented persons from a country south of here, and SERVED by persons of Chinese descent. And it's the same thing on every buffet.

Now the Vietnamese and Thai is rather good and authentic, and there's a couple dozen Japanese table-cooking/sushi restaurants that are improving in quality, but Chinese is only what you'd expect, even in those places that feature a surly Mongolian Grill cook and his omnipresent tip jar.

Now, down at the end of my block and around the corner, there's a little take-out place, Egg Roll King, that makes a good fried rice and egg rolls. I run through their drive-through to supplement whatever I'm making at home. It's neighborhood, the family that runs it are friendly, and the food's always hot. But their menu is a mishmash of Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean, most of it passable, except for the over-reliance of onion as filler.

And I like fortune cookies.

[Kent D]

I found this rather interesting story linked from The Pitch (a Kansas City "alternative press" paper/website):

St. Louis "River Front Times" - Chinatown Confidential

It talks about a little back-alley Chiu Chow restaurant where the menu's in Chinese, the owner/cook doesn't speak English, and he doesn't WANT to change any of that. Great article, lots of entree descriptions and a history of the cuisine. Really a great piece of reporting, and educational, too.

[phaelon56]

We face the same dlimemma in my town. All of the Chinese take-out places have a white paper menu with red ink that is completely identical - right down to the occasional typo. Only the name of the restaurant changes.

The food is pretty much interchangeable as well. Some serve dishes that seem a bit oilier than others and and others use a few sliced fresh white mushrooms in their hot and sour soup instead of the dried black ones - but otherwise almost no differences.

Lately I've taken to ordering Singapore Mai Fun - one of the only dishes on these menus that doesn't have a gloppy sauce and is actually spicy. As for the sauces and some other key menu items..... I've been told that many of these take-out joints now get their sauces and certain other items pre-made from Sysco. Not sure if this is really the case but it makes sense.

We did have a Chinese family who opened a place two years ago that was far superior and had many items obviously made "from scratch". They took over a defunct restaurant that was too large and had too high a level of overhead expense. Initially they focused on offering dim sum - the first ever dim sum menu in this city. Wisely, they relied on paper placemats with picture of the items and had customers order by the item instead of having carts or tray being brought around.

But it never gained popularity. They dropped the dim sum menu after four or five months and tried to develop a lunch/dinner/takeout trade for their regular menu but it was too late to recover. A combination of bad location, high overhead and lack of a discerning/appreciative market were all factors in their demise.

It was the only Chinese joint in town where the dumplings had a thin skin and were obviously home-made. Their "cold sesame noodles" were the only ones I've ever had in this area that obviously had a home-made sauce and every noodle was perfectly coated - not just a bowl of noodles with a puddle of sauce on top.

The sad thing is that there just weren't enough people around here who cared enough or were discerning enough to notice the difference in quality and patronize them (I'm not sure which of those two was the bigger factor). I had to drive out of my way to reach them but always felt it was worthwhile.

We are fortunate to have three Vietnamese restaurants locally - all run by Vietnamese familes (rather than being run by Chinese operators as is typically the case in places like NYC). All three typically have very fresh food and sauces that are made on site - one of the three is incredibly consistent and has high quality overall. And they are all very different from one another in preparation style on certain dishes and in terms of what they offer as menu items. As one might expect - there are some commonalities such as pho, spring rolls and cafe sua da - but there are numerous items at each place that are different from the others.

[Carlovski]

It's the same in the UK. I swear I have seen completely unrelated restaurants in different parts of the country with identical menus, even down to spelling mistakes (Same with most indian restaurants too)

I can see why restaurants want to offer dishes that they know will sell, but I don't understand why they cannot offer the more authentic dishes, especially if they are actually preparing them for the Chinese clientèle anyway. The only thing I can think of is that the westernised stuff is more profitable, they would have to raise the prices of the authentic stuff to keep the same profit margins and would then lose the Chinese customers.

If you have a search in the UK forum you will see quite a few mentions of a Manchester (And Leeds) restaurant called Red Chilli where they have a single menu which everyone gets, it has all the western staples but also plenty of no hold barred Szechuan dishes. I just hope it's a trend that continues,

[MaxH]

Why must it always be this way?  I know those of you in New York and San Francisco can find some decent stuff ...

As you say, we have considerable range of Chinese food in the San Francisco area (more, it seems, than many locals explore) yet what's interesting is a tendency always to include a sort of Generic Gringo Chinese Menu (through which, drop-in diners order "lemon chicken filet" in a local place legendary for its fresh chow fun, for which the customers followed the proprietress through three different locations in 15 years).

This speaks to larger questions about how people approach new restaurants. Do they order their old favorites, or do they ask into the restaurant's favorite dishes?

Some fine small individualistic Chinese restaurants in SF area have famous specialties printed only on Chinese menus. Forewarned, you can bring in a note of the ideograph, and order (they're generally willing to take anyone's money if it comes down to that) but what may be more interesting is why. Gringos complain (in my experience) more about the prejudice "you won't like that" than about the reality behind it: that most gringos don't like it, thus teaching the restaurant to advise them so, for the bottom line.

[mcohen]

my understanding is that most of today's workers in these restaurants are from a completely different region of china and yet they're making catonese dishes. its like asking a northern italian to make regional southern italian dishes.

maybe, the cooking would end up better if they tried their own regional dishes instead of trying to make catonese dishes. let's face it, if not for a quirk of immigration pattern, i don't think catonese style dishes would have surpassed other regional styles of chinese cooking in america.

[Nathan]

well..more recent Chinese immigrants have tended to be Fujanese or from Taiwan..but, yeah, they're all making Cantonese-American food...

what I've found living across the country is that the set menu varies a little by region. my understanding is that there are large regional distributors who supply the sauces, egg rolls, etc.....and so the lineup varies a bit by U.S. region. the names of the same items change as well (often confusing my non-foodie friends when they travel because they don't realize the name they're asking for something by is made-up to begin with)

the cooks are often Mexican. (the Chinese cooks are working at the local sushi bar instead)

menus do expand over time. for example, in NY every cantonese place offers chow fun, mei fun etc....

but it's really the same question as why does almost every "Italian" restaurant in the U.S. offer bastardized Sicilian food (well, cause that's Italian-American food...which can be quite good on its own merits...)

[Dejah]

Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I wonder if we should be so adamantly critical about the kind of Chinese food served in the 60s, 70s and even today. We can rave about how wonderfully authentic a certain cuisine is today, but we shouldn't bash what it was in the past. Everything evolves.

It's wonderful that there are so many varieties of "authentic" Chinese cuisine, any cuisine, available to of us now. But, try to keep in mind, that the early dishes were based on available ingredients. The chop suey with the brown globby sauce, regardless how distasteful it may seen to some of us now, introduced a whole new way of cooking - stir-frying- to the masses. The use of brown globby sauces was to "break the foreigners" in gently, using sauces and textures most people were familiar with (at least on the prairies).

I grew up in this kind of restaurant. The day my parents decided to serve chop suey in our otherwise Canadian food restaurant was a real eye opener for the residents. They recognized most of the vegetables other than bean sprouts. They were enthralled with the "wok" and method of cooking. My Dad kept the kitchen doors opened so people could watch. When we first served chop suey, it was on a bun! THIS was our Saturday night special.

We gradually introduced new items - egg rolls, chow mein, sweet and sour ribs. There are still people reluctant to try more authentic dishes, but they see these as dishes with familiar ingredients. These dishes can be delicious if cooked properly. That can be said for any cuisine. Many still serve the heavy brown sauces, but the people who order them are people who prefer that style. I find many menus still offer both authenic and bastardized Chinese food. Why? Because some people still prefer familiarity, and this helps many small town restaurant stay in business!

My Mom, from the time she was 16, cooked food for her husband's family in China, and later, for about 30 years, cooked and served a lot of chop suey, egg foo young with the brown gravy, etc in a rural community and then in the city. Today, she still enjoys a meal with chop suey - made with cabbage, celery, onions, mushrooms and bean sprouts - just the way it used to be in the 60s.

[mizducky]

Oh, I loves me some "Westernized" Chinese food. It's a taste I grew up with from childhood. I think I may have posted about this story before somewhere on eGullet, but my very earliest childhood memory--dating from age 2 or maybe even earlier--is of being taken to an old-school Chinese restaurant near my suburban New York hometown.

Hey, when any dish is done well, it's good eating as far as I'm concerned. Westernized Chinese food is still one of my favorite forms of comfort dining. Though, like a lot of my childhood food nostalgia hits, my bod doesn't always cope with the stuff as well as it used to--just the other day, a dinner of takeout soft-noodle chicken chow mein went down really easy, but the sodium content made me retain water like a sponge for the next three days.

[sheetz]

For me, it's always been more an issue of accuracy than anything else. Whether someone likes what is being served to them in a restaurant has never been my concern. Even here at EG, I feel that many people don't really understand what Chinese food is because they never get to see what is actually served in Chinese homes as opposed to what they see in local restaurants. Hence I feel it is misleading to lump them all into the catchall phrase "Chinese food," which is the typical way of doing things.

[Fat Guy]

Dejah, I wholeheartedly agree with the "everything evolves" premise, but after stating that you slip right back into the false dichotomy of "authentic" and "inauthentic."

Everything does evolve. There were no capsicum peppers in China before that product migrated back from the New World. That doesn't make Sichuan cuisine inauthentic. It never did. It just means that as different ingredients become available, as tastes change, as circumstances warrant, cuisines change -- sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

Between America and Canada there are more than 5 million people of Chinese ancestry living in North America. Chinese cuisine is one of the most popular here: there are 3 Chinese restaurants for every McDonald's. When you have 5 million people of a given ethnicity cooking at 40,000+ restaurants, the issue of authenticity is a red herring: you're talking about a fully formed overseas extension of the parent culture.

The problem with most chop suey is not that it's inauthentic. It's an entirely legitimate adaptation of Chinese technique to available ingredients and local market demand. Rather, the problem with most chop suey is that it's badly made. That's the problem with most Chinese-North American cuisine: it isn't made well, and the ingredients are poor.

But in the hands of a skilled cook, those same dishes can be wonderful. The same is true of most every hyphenated cuisine: Italian-American, Tex-Mex, you name it. The best examples of those cuisines are actually quite superb. It's the poor-quality versions that trickle down to undiscriminating customers that give hyphenated cuisines a bad name.

[sheetz]

I wouldn't quite put "Chinese-American" cuisine, at least the way it is served in most restaurants in North America, into the same category as Tex-Mex or Italian-American because the latter two were actually invented and consumed within immigrant households. On the other hand, "Chinese-American" food is a more artificial creation of Chinese restauranteurs devising recipes by trial and error to produce dishes palatable to their mostly non-Chinese clientele.

Now, if we want to talk about actual Chinese-American food, which is based on combining traditional Chinese cooking techniques with local ingredients, then that is something different altogether.

[Fat Guy]

The Italian-American rendition of pizza doesn't come from the home. It's a restaurant product. It would have been unusual to see pizza made in an Italian-American immigrant home. There are plenty of other examples like that: Italian beef sandwich, muffuletta, etc. Italian-American restaurant menus include a mix of dishes made in immigrant homes and dishes that restaurants developed for success in the marketplace. I don't know as much about Tex-Mex cuisine, but my limited understanding is that it has very much been adapted to appeal to American (Texan) palates. Otherwise, why would there be a different Tex-Mex cuisine when Texas borders Mexico, you have a zillion Mexicans living and working in Texas, and you can get all the same ingredients?

[sheetz]

I don't think pizza is a particularly good example, because nowadays it's become a purely American food. As for Tex-Mex, considering that the Southwest US used to actually be part of Mexico, you definitely could argue that it was just a type of regional Mexican cuisine.

But it's really different with Chinese American food served in restaurants. In many cases it is very far removed from what Chinese themselves consider Chinese food. And it's not due to a scarcity of ingredients because many have separate menus for their Chinese patrons that do contain more typically Chinese dishes. In fact, when I look at photos taken by some other EG members from around the world, some of their home cooked dishes prepared halfway around the world more closely resemble what I cook in my own Chinese American household here in Indiana than what is served in the Chinese restaurant down the street.

Edited October 28, 2007 by sheetz (log)

[Fat Guy]

But my understanding is that one reason Tex-Mex cuisine is the way it is is that many dishes have been adapted to appeal to American palates, not because Texas is a region of Mexico. And pizza is the most popular Italian-American dish in existence; the fact that it has become American simply demonstrates how effectively is has penetrated the mainstream. (Incidentally, the National Restaurant Association's studies indicate that Americans consider Mexican and Chinese food to be part of mainstream American cuisine too, just as the British now consider curry to be a traditional British food.)

I don't think it's possible to substantiate the blanket claim that Italian-American and Tex-Mex cuisines are real immigrant cuisines while Chinese-American cuisine isn't. Maybe it's possible to argue that Chinese-American cuisine is more heavily adapted to consumer preferences than Italian-American or Tex-Mex, but I'm not even sure about that. I also know Chinese-American and other Asian-American families who cook entirely recognizable versions of Chinese-American restaurant food at home: "barbecued" spare ribs, fried rice, cold noodles with sesame sauce, etc. And I know a couple of formally trained Chinese chefs who take Chinese-American cuisine very seriously and cook it at a high level.

More importantly, so what if a cuisine is adapted to please local palates? It's still either good or not good. Well-made Chinese-American food is delicious, as is well-made American pizza. The question of authenticity is a red herring that distracts from real discussion of quality.

[sheetz]

More importantly, so what if a cuisine is adapted to please local palates? It's still either good or not good. Well-made Chinese-American food is delicious, as is well-made American pizza. The question of authenticity is a red herring that distracts from real discussion of quality.

←

If you look back at my earlier posts, my concern has never been about authenticity. It's been about clarity. My contention is that Chinese and Chinese American cuisines should be considered separate cuisines, much the way that Mexican and Tex-Mex are considered different styles of cuisine.

[Ce'nedra]

Now, if we want to talk about actual Chinese-American food, which is based on combining traditional Chinese cooking techniques with local ingredients, then that is something different altogether.

←

If that was the case, then I prefer 'Chinese-Australian' cuisine because the local ingredients here are much more fresh and likely to be free of overloaded chemicals and whatnot compared to China. Also, because of all the health freak-ness in this country, the amount of fats and oils are much more suited to my palate. So long as the cooking techniques are the same, I prefer the so called 'Westernised' version of my Chinese food.

However, if you're talking about the Western-FLAVOURED Chinese cuisine (which is the point of the original post) then hell yeah, I prefer authentic Chinese.

[Fat Guy]

More importantly, so what if a cuisine is adapted to please local palates? It's still either good or not good. Well-made Chinese-American food is delicious, as is well-made American pizza. The question of authenticity is a red herring that distracts from real discussion of quality.

←

If you look back at my earlier posts, my concern has never been about authenticity. It's been about clarity. My contention is that Chinese and Chinese American cuisines should be considered separate cuisines, much the way that Mexican and Tex-Mex are considered different styles of cuisine.

←

I don't think one should draw a line and put Chinese cuisine on one side of the line and Chinese-American cuisine on the other side. I think it's more a question of there being many types of Chinese cuisine: Shanghai, Sichuan, Hunan, Bombay Chinese, Chinese-American, etc.

[Dejah]

More importantly, so what if a cuisine is adapted to please local palates? It's still either good or not good. Well-made Chinese-American food is delicious, as is well-made American pizza. The question of authenticity is a red herring that distracts from real discussion of quality.

←

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "authentic" even in quotation marks.

It's not about authenticity or quality that I was posting about. It was the fact that people grip about restaurant still serving chop suey as opposed to Sechuan, Hunan, Shanghai, etc. I just wanted to remind people that it was chop suey that introduced many people to Chinese food.

As Steven said, if it's well prepared, why not? There must still be enough demand for chop suey to warrant keeping it on the menu in many Chinese restaurants. It can still be a good dish, so don't bash it!

Grrrr...am I making myself any clearer? My brain is a bit rattled from a blues jam.