Chinese Mexican Food

[jhlurie]

One of the odder (but perhaps logical) developments in New York City in the past twenty years or so is the growth of cheap mexican fast food... sold by Chinese people.

I'm not sure if this has penetrated to other parts of the country (although I know they exist in New Jersey, since I just ate in one). I was tempted to put this topic in the New York forum, but figured it might qualify as "Adventurous" enough for wider distribution.

I'm hardly an expert in evaluating Chinese-made Mexican food. I've only eaten at a handful of them and had mixed reactions--ranging from slightly dismayed to mildly enthusiastic. But you can notice a trend:

-The emphasis is on mass quantities and cheap prices

-Its not nearly as bad as you'd think it is

-No starch. This must seem bizarre to some of the chinese grill cooks, but for the most part they seem to be pretty good about this.

-They haven't really figured out how to use the cheese correctly (and probably won't ever).

-Its often located EXACTLY two doors down from a fast-food Chinese take-out restaurant. Why the distance is usually exactly two stores down, I don't know. But it is.

-The fajitas aren't very authentic, but they are usally the best thing at these places

-They often feature oddball items which are neither Mexican or Chinese. The one I ate at today (probably one of the better ones I've ever been to) had "Jambalaua Chicken" (their spelling), "Parmagiana Chicken" (their spelling), "Chicken Finger", "Thin Louis sandwich", "Curry Chicken" and much more in this vein. And... as Eric Cartman says "tacos and burritos", as well as the rest of the usual assortment of fast foodish mexican items.

-The items are "fresh", at least to the extent that nothing comes out of a steam tray, like at a mall. 80% of it is grilled.

-You are offered roughly a million options. Every possible combination of meat/fish, cheese, wrapper, black beans, guacamole, etc. has its own menu entry.

-The customer base is often hispanic, although not often Mexican. But that's probably because there aren't terribly many Mexicans in the areas I've seen these places. Also: remember that Mexican food--of any caliber--is much rarer in the Northeast than elsewhere in the country.

The one exception I'll make in my analysis here is that I HAVE seen Chinese owned "Cajun" booths at shopping malls (and they are consistently horrible), so I suspect there might be Chinese owned Mexican mall booths too. And I'm not sure the ones at the malls will necessarily follow these patterns, since they all use steam trays and produce mans tons of gloppy results.

The one other thing I'll say about Chinese Mexican is that at least, in small ways, I wonder if its carving out its own identity. Even though the results have varied between places I've been, I've noticed some basic similarities throughout. Are these just inevitable results of Chinese cooking adapted to Mexican food or is there more to it?

So what do you think of Chinese Mexican? As an idea, or as a reality, depending on your exposure.

[alacarte]

Yes!! I've seen these too, and I thought it was just a weird aberration.

could it be an extension of the "Chino-Latino" connection?

[fresco]

It does sound better than the Chinese food prepared by Chinese that I have tried in a couple of upscale places in Mexico City. It wasn't horrible. Just weird. And definitely an improvement over the Cuban Chinese food places that at one time infested the Upper West Side. They were horrible.

[Stone]

La Caridad!

"How much flan can a person eat?"

I ate there a bunch of times and never saw what the big deal was.

Edited June 19, 2003 by Stone (log)

[Jason Perlow]

Jon, where the hell is this place in Jersey?

[KNorthrup]

I know we have the Chinese-Cajun places in Portland mall food courts but haven't seen Chinese-Mexican. Then again, I never go to malls anymore. And we have a lot of real Mexicans running food carts. Someone told me once that the absolute worse combination they'd ever had -- and they'd had a lot -- was Chinese food in Germany, tailored accordingly.

[jhlurie]

Let me point out that I'm not talking about places in a mall. The Chinese-Cajun mall places are an abomination. And I'm assuming that a Chinese-Mexican place in a mall would be too.

The key element in the horror: steam trays and gloppy sauces. Its not even the fact that they cut up and season the Cajun food like Chinese food--I could accept that if it tasted good. That's why I think the better Chinese Mexican is at least interesting, if not excellent. There still seem to be "Chinese" things about it, but at least not always the worst of it, like in ANY of those mall booths.

Jason: I was getting my car looked at in Fairview, NJ. It's a place across Fairview Ave. from that big diner. White Castle is also... like 50 feet away. "New Taco Bank" is the name of it. An older set of menus reveal it used to be called "Taco Bank". Who would have thunk?

I'm more interested in the idea of them than the actuality.

[fifi]

No starch??? How do they do that. The foundation of Mexican food is the corn tortilla, corn masa (tamales) and flour tortillas (a northern thing). No beans?... black, red, refried, charro.

Here in Houston we have a reverse English on this one. You go into a Chinese, or other Asian, restaurant and see a lot of Latin Americans in the kitchen. And damn fine cooks they are, too. And you see the reverse situation. I don't see a lot of mixing of the cuisines though. We have large Asian and Latin American populations with well defined cuisines so maybe it is a lot easier to get it right no matter where you came from.

Some of the fusions are interesting, though. There is a theory (not necessarily bunk) that the Chinese reached the Americas long before Columbus. I had a long discussion with a distinguished anthropologist in Mexico City (wife of a friend) and she is just about a believer. She was looking into some of traditional, pre-Columbian, cooking techniques and their similarity to some Indonesian and Chinese techniques of the era. Maybe a fusion of those two is not as nuts as it might sound. Look at how quickly the Asians adopted the chile pepper.

edit: added new thought

Edited June 20, 2003 by fifi (log)

[jhlurie]

No starch??? How do they do that. The foundation of Mexican food is the corn tortilla, corn masa (tamales) and flour tortillas (a northern thing). No beans?... black, red, refried, charro.

You misunderstand. I'm talking about dumping additional starch into the food. Not naturally starchy items. With chinese food sometimes they "thicken" it by dumping starch into it (a hallmark of the "bad" stuff is that it always comes out gloppy). The chinese who run the "cajun" places in the malls do this to the food there too, and it makes it suck even worse.

The chinese mexican places don't seem to do this. Then again, most of the food isn't condusive to it.

And yes, most cultures have dishes with sauce they add thickener to. Its just that the cheap chinese takeout places do it for no apparent reason. In recent years, I think I've seen this a lot less. But until a few years ago I saw it everywhere.

So there is plenty of starch. Just not glop.

Edited June 20, 2003 by jhlurie (log)

[fifi]

Aaaaahhh... Chinese starch glop. I get your point. Fluorescent red sweet and sour starch glop... GAG!

[jhlurie]

Aaaaahhh... Chinese starch glop. I get your point. Fluorescent red sweet and sour starch glop... GAG!

Also present in most vaguely named "in Brown Sauce" entries.

[Bux]

I'm a guy who avoids all the usual fast food, with the exception of pizza by the slice, which I have consumed in great quantity over the years, but I have staved off hunger pains in a few of those places in Manhattan. I have yet to see the bizzaro stuff you report. Generally it's just been chicken, beans or beef rolled in a flour tortilla, or some combination with perhaps guacamole and of course, hot sauce. Only in America, as they say.

[jhlurie]

No "Jambalaua Chicken"?

[Bux]

No "Jambalaua Chicken"? 

Nope, and when you come right down to it, I'm kind of a purist and would tend to avoid any Chinese Taco joint that didn't seem authentic to me. I'm a New Yorker and I know what a Chinese Taco joint should look like.

[malachi]

Here in Bishop there is a (local) favorite restaurant called "The Western Kitchen" which is a sort of "down-home, country-western diner/Thai restaurant." The two cooks are an elderly thai woman and a meth-freak mexican with a fu-manchu mustache.

Seriously.

Chicken-fried steak, Chef's Salad, Meatloaf plate, Indian frybread tacos, Pad Thai and Tom Kai Gai.

Grin.

[jhlurie]

Here in Bishop there is a (local) favorite restaurant called "The Western Kitchen" which is a sort of "down-home, country-western diner/Thai restaurant." The two cooks are an elderly thai woman and a meth-freak mexican with a fu-manchu mustache.

Seriously.

Chicken-fried steak, Chef's Salad, Meatloaf plate, Indian frybread tacos, Pad Thai and Tom Kai Gai.

Grin.

Well, that's all well and good...

...but do they have "Jambalaua Chicken"?

BTW: to clear this up... Jambalaua is NOT a typo or printing mistake on their part. It was not only on multiple generations of menus, but also on a handwritten sign on the wall.

Hmmm... "Chinese Taco" is a funny combination of words. I may wind up using it next time I need a user name or email account somewhere.

Edited June 20, 2003 by jhlurie (log)

[coolranch]

When I last visited my friend who lives in Hell's Kitchen, she had just picked up a burrito from the mexican food restaurant in her neighborhood--run by a Korean family. She satisfies her Tex-Mex fix there and says it's not bad.

On a related note, there used to be a restaurant in Austin called Cafe Chino--a Mexican/Chinese restaurant. Very bizarre. All dishes came with a choice of fried or Spanish rice. Chips and hot sauce along with fried wontons and hot mustard sauce. Didn't last very long.

[fresco]

Chinese cooks and chefs manage to produce very credible versions of all kinds of cooking, but has a non-Chinese ever operated a successful Chinese restaurant?

[Suzanne F]

It's my understanding -- possibly apocryphal -- that the progenitor of all such places, original "Fresco Tortilla" on Lexington between 23rd and 24th, was started by a Chinese couple in the early 1990s, when they were delivered a tortilla-making machine instead of the dumpling maker they had ordered. So they decided to go with it.

When I worked nearby, I used to love their quesadilla with chorizo: tasty, greasy, junky. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Then again, "Chino-Latino" cuisine was long a mainstay in Chelsea, and is still available on the Upper West Side. A lot of it was Cuban-Chinese, from the Chinese workers brought to Cuba to build railroads (just like here).

[KNorthrup]

Chinese cooks and chefs manage to produce very credible versions of all kinds of cooking, but has a non-Chinese ever operated a successful Chinese restaurant?

Barbara Tropp's China Moon was very successful. No idea whether it was considered authentic.

[Suzanne F]

And then there's J-G V's 66.

[Rachel Perlow]

Here's one for Jon to try that's near him:

Fresco Tortilles, 42 W Palisade Ave, Englewood, NJ (it's about 10 doors up from the Chinese take out place next to Saigon Republic)

I got a quesadilla there once, it was OK. I was getting lunch for some guys working at our house. When I called and offered them Mexican they had no idea what to order, but when I mentioned there was a McD's across the street, that they were familiar with.

[jhlurie]

I was getting lunch for some guys working at our house. When I called and offered them Mexican they had no idea what to order, but when I mentioned there was a McD's across the street, that they were familiar with.

Well, duh! They weren't Chinese!

[cook foo masta]

If its not from mexico, or TEXAS its not worth it

[Flocko]

I know we have the Chinese-Cajun places in Portland mall food courts but haven't seen Chinese-Mexican.  Then again, I never go to malls anymore.  And we have a lot of real Mexicans running food carts.  Someone told me once that the absolute worse combination they'd ever had -- and they'd had a lot -- was Chinese food in Germany, tailored accordingly.

In my college days at Berkeley in the '60s, I frequented a little place on Telegraph Ave, named "Robbie's Chinese Hofbrau"...................kind of a buffet with buffet pans full of sausages, saurkraut, red cabbage, hot potato salad, chow mein, fried rice, etc..................very strange, but very cheap...................Lunch for about $.75 (or $1.00 including a beer).