My dad's a Chinese immigrant, and I've been to China and had Chinese food there.
There are two types of Chinese food you can get in America (well, more given all the regional variations, but I'm making a point...). If you went to a strip mall, walked into a P.F. Chang's, and had General Tso's Chicken, that's not Chinese food. But if you walked into an unmarked doorway in Chinatown, walked down a flight of stairs to a very dingy basement, held up a few fingers to tell the hostess how many people were in your party, and then ordered off a menu where nothing was in English and everything either had tendons or organ meat - you're probably getting something pretty close to what you would get in China.
You can get the latter experience in most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, but you have to know where to look. Restaurants like that don't send out coupons with the normal advertising circular - basically anything that advertises in an English-language publication is American Chinese food.
We eat meat too, primarily pork. FWIW, the PF Chang's menu has a couple of dishes reminiscent of actual Chinese food, even if the execution is slightly different - salt & pepper prawns, pepper steak, fried chicken wings, pretty much all of the soups...
The problem is that "Chinese food" as a category is really an enormous oversimplification, and even in China you can go to a place and be disappointed ordering something they don't know how to make. Furthermore, Chinese dish names are essentially the ingredients + main method of preparation, which while unambiguous in Chinese, sound quite mysterious and unappealing when literally translated (e.g, one of my favorite dishes, 'boiled fish'). So ordering in english is kind of a crapshoot.
Therefore, I always feel an obligation to defend the PF Chang's and Panda Expresses of the world when this topic comes up. To someone outside of China, what is Chinese food, other than something Chinese people like to eat? Perhaps it's illustrative to point out that in China, you go to "Western food" restaurants to eat anything perceived as coming from that general direction...
Oh, and there are "nice" restaurants that aren't in the basement too. Chinese immigrants are overall much wealthier than they used to be, and the restaurants that cater to them have gotten more upscale as well. The dingy basement thing has kind of become a second niche in big cities, for adventurous Americans in search of authenticity.
That's a common theme about regional flavors: they need to be adapted to local tastes.
Just ask autochthonous Italians eating abroad - every single Italian restaurant serve plates that are too greasy, too flavored, too spicy or whatever. And you can't get a good cup of coffee almost anywhere around the world, because outside of Italy the burnt flavor is often praised as a brew having 'character'.
But that's fine, because Italian flavors are not really to the liking of Englishmen and vice versa. Carbonara being made with cream instead of egg is often done not because the places can't look a recipe off internet, but because that's what locals expect in term of flavor and consistency.
Likewise for the absurdly loaded pizzas with three dozen ingredients: it tastes great both ways and I'm not gonna tell the One Italian Way is superior, but Italians are more used to a single strong flavor per plate, while abroad that'd be just plain and boring. So everything adapts.
I dab in international dishes at home, but if a Mexican would eat my chili he'd have a stroke - but for other Italians? They all say it's super, because it's modulated to our taste.
The trouble is that if you actually traveled to some of these places and really liked the food, most of the "adapted" stuff just tastes bland. Some adjustments due to availability of ingredients I can live with, but most of the time the adapted version is just a slightly worse version of the original.
In part, this is also a problem of not having enough names for things. I guess there would be much less arguments over pizza if the Italian and American versions just had completely different names.
In the end, if I order an "Italian" pizza I actually do expect it to be made according to the One Italian Way, and would be disappointed if it's not.
I don't think anyone could accuse for example American Italian food of being a "bland" copy of the original. Italian food tends to be more subtle in flavour and with more focus on accentuating a single ingredient. American Italian is much bigger bolder flavors often mixing several strong flavours. You can argue that it's simplistic, boring and perhaps even unrefined if you're in that sort of mood, but hardly bland.
I actually do expect it to be made according to the One Italian Way
Except I've had fair amount of pizza in Italy and there is no One Italian Way.
I agree. When I say bland I don't literally mean bland as in non-spicy/tastes-like-nothing, but rather a bland experience. In the sense of uninteresting, dull, unexciting. I'd say that often happens exactly because of overpowering flavours.
Also agree on the pizza, of course there is no single Italian way. But you would hardly expect e.g. a deep-dish pizza when there.
Kung Pao chicken in Beijing is the perennial sichuan dish that you can barely find in chengdu (and even then, it's just for the eastern tourists).
Most of the authentic Chinese resteraunts in the San Gabriel Valley are not in basements, but in strip malls. Heck, these days china town isn't the best place for Chinese food in most cities (seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Vancouver), rather some suburb they has a large rich Chinese population is. Most of the authentic food you get in American china towns are very old school Cantonese, while Chinese food is much more diverse than that.
Yeah, English is "blessed" with roots in most languages over 100k speakers; so unlike most other languages, even local food names are indecipherable. Indian food names are straightforward in a similar way to chinese food names: dal (split, referring to split lentils) tadka (a.k.a tarka, a.k.a chaunk, referring to tempered spices), Saag (leafy greens like spinach, mustard leaf, collard greens) paneer (unaged acid-set cheese), aloo (potato) gobi (cauliflower).
> walked into a P.F. Chang's, and had General Tso's Chicken
To be a touch contrarian, I'd even argue that the kind of food served in some of the newer chain restaurants isn't even proper traditional American-Chinese food (which seems to have shown up sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century). One of the things I've come to appreciate after lots of travel and lots of <insertcountry>-Chinese food is how well developed and embedded American-Chinese food is as an American cuisine.
There's rough variants of it in Western Europe when you can find it, but it's a little different. But you can find an American-Chinese restaurant in almost every po-dunk country town across the entirety of America. I've been to places where the only places around to get prepared foods was a local gas station and a Chinese takeout. And the menu is both incredibly standardized, but quintessentially American.
P.F. Chang, Ka Pao, and a couple other of the new food places seem to be putting an effort to "de-ethnic" the food and make the preparation and presentation of it shift a bit more into familiar American diets. It's actually kind of hard to talk about without ending up confused with the words, but the nearest I can think of is a spectrum from:
<food somebody from China would recognize> - to - <food an American would routinely make for themselves>
These new Chinese dining places seem to shift a bit more to the American side, and lose some of that scrappy mom&pop Chinese takeout joint charm and replace it with fresh faced, often Caucasian college kids serving healthy optioned brown rice and not too spicy or oily (and not too tasty) variants of American-Chinese favorites.
America has a lot of very interesting quasi-ethnic cuisines that are no longer recognizable by the people from their origins, but also don't really exist outside of the U.S. in any meaningful way.
Some day, perhaps, we'll just think of it as "food" and it'll be solidly on the right of that weird spectrum, much in the way Ramen is thought of as "food" in Japan even though it's also Chinese-Japanese cuisine. P.F. Chang's is a step towards Ramenizing American-Chinese food, but it still makes me feel a bit sad.
My only hope is the more recent trend of more "authentic" regional and modern Chinese cuisine finally starting to show up as a new wave in the U.S. Non-scary (for Americans), high quality, and tasty Chinese foods are starting to appear in American cities, often with an American-Chinese section on the menu.
From what I understand(I believe there's a documentary out there) there is a company that helps Chinese immigrants get on their feet in the US by helping them start an American Chinese restaurant. They give them menus, recipes, and to your point above...help find places that don't have a lot of Chinese restaurants around. It's something similar to a franchise model. But it explains why you can find nearly identical yet seemingly unrelated Chinese restaurants in every podunk town.
"But you can find an American-Chinese restaurant in almost every po-dunk country town across the entirety of America."
This is a relatively recent development, BTW. I grew up in small town Michigan. In the 70s, when we wanted Chinese food, we actually drove 30 minutes to Sarnia, Canada. (Or cooked it ourselves.) In the 80s, a place finally opened in town. As late as the early 90s we were still occasionally going for Chinese in Canada because they were still marginally better than the local places. But in the last 20 years only nostalgia would get me going to Sarnia primarily for Chinese food. (The dim sum place in Windsor is a different matter!)
I had plenty of meals at Chino-Latino places growing up. In my neighborhood, they were the only Chinese food places that offered a sit-down dining experience. Every standard Chinese place was all takeout and even then, all transactions took place through some bulletproof plexiglass.
At the Chino-Latino places, you would get toasted slices of italian bread and butter instead of fried noodles and duck sauce and you could get you favorite sides like mofongo or tostones.
I miss the experience. My mom would treat us to it when she could.
> …but I was very surprised to find a Chinese-Mexican restaurant in Florida…
Here in AZ there's Chino Bandido that attempts this fusion, and many seem to like it. Personally I, a mexican, was not particularly impressed. On the other hand I thoroughly enjoy the Jap-Mex Sushirrito. Then again the whole of Mexican food here in the US is at least somewhat americanized too.
It doesn't take such arcane rituals to find more "authentic" Chinese food in major US cities. Many Chinese restaurants serve both the Americanized dishes and traditional Chinese dishes. You just have to know what to order.
I live in an area in Toronto that is very chinese (chinese supermarkets, chinese mall, even chinese doctor offices - you can pretty much live normally here without speaking a word of english) and my impression of restaurants in the area has been that rather than it being a dichotomy in terms of "american" vs "chinese" chinese food, the dichotomy is that chinese cuisine is extremely diverse compared to north american fare. You can go to a west chinese restaurant and get food that looks like afghan food, or go to a northern china place and get a mind-bogglingly spicy fish stew. There's dim sum, hong kong style cafeterias, szechuan, shanghai-style, and the list goes on and on and on. And a lot of it is quite accessible food without organs or chicken feet.
My wife tells that me that in china, you get diversity even in north american chains: pizza hut there is apparently considered "fancy food" and you can get all sorts of interesting things from KFC or mcdonalds.
North American food is surprisingly diverse, too. That isn't to take anything from Chinese food, which is amazingly diverse. However, compare the food of Tucson, San Francisco, Santa Fe, San Antonio, New Orleans, Atlanta, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver. (I'm not even comparing to other North American countries such as Mexico, Cuba, and Panama, each with microregions of their own.)
Off topic, I wish there was more Uighur food around the US - that stuff is fantastic.
Yeah, I wasn't saying that american food consists solely of burgers and hot dogs, there's definitely lively food scenes in north american big cities. My impression, though, is that the food diversity in US/Canada has more to do with multiculturalism than with tradition, i.e. you get to pick between indian, thai, mexican, italian, greek, etc and a lot of the twists and novelties are fusions of two or more cultures (e.g. at one festival, I saw a food stand that made tacos... with vietnamese banh-mi ingredients)
Chinese food can also have fusion twists (e.g. there's a chinese indian restaurant a few miles away from where I live), but each regional cuisine also has rich local culturalism, and in addition, chinese cuisine can be surprisingly technical. It's downright impressive the number of different ways you can have beef noodles, for example.
The US has a lot of international cuisines. And as a country of immigrants, there's not much of a "native" culinary tradition. But there are distinct variations in local cuisines. For instance,
Maybe people don't view it as fancy, but it is still fancy. I went to one a year ago, sit down restaurant with leather style book menu. Cost enough - 130 RMB for a small pizza!
More accurately "exotic" food. For most native Chinese, if you ask them to have western food a few days in a row they'll be desperate to find Chinese food again
Not disagreeing with you but I think it's important to point out that the whole notion of "Chinese food" is a very western idea. China is a huge country with very different cuisines depending on where you are in the country. Referring to all of that as "Chinese food" doesn't do justice to the complexity and history of the phenomenon.
Nah we use the word "Chinese food" in China too when we need to distinguish from other cuisines. We also use "western food" a lot when we talk about any European or American food.
If you want to distinguish food from within China from food from outside China, then the term "Chinese food" is of course perfectly fine -- no disagreement about that. But I never hear my Chinese friends in the US or Europe say "I had Chinese food the other day". They are always more specific unless they are talking to non-Chinese people who are not familiar with Chinese cuisines (which lends further support to the idea that it's mainly a western concept). Compared to that it's not strange at all to hear a person from Bulgaria say "I had Bulgarian food the other day". Why? Because Bulgaria is a small country and "Bulgarian food" is reasonably specific whereas "Chinese food" tends not to be.
It comes down to a few things: availability of ingredients, experienced cooks and expectations of clientele.
In China you can find pretty authentic[1] Italian, Japanese and Thai food, even bread, but also very localized versions [Americans would say they are not authentic]
What you describe is something I've seen with semi-indentured hands, people who paid lots of money to get here and have to work off their journey. They don't have a lot of spare money left and they go to these joints --it's cheap, it's fulfilling meal.
Is authentic Chinese the buffet served Richard Nixon, or is it the stall food? Is it what rich Chinese eat, or what your average low-skilled worker eats?
[1]by authentic I mean you can easily find these varieties in their home country although people in the home country can debate what the authentic version is (ex. ala Bolognese and spaghetti or tagliatelle)
It isn't nearly that hard to find authentic Chinese food. It probably isn't on the menu because it doesn't sell, but most non chain Chinese restaurants are pretty capable of putting together a nice authentic meal.
You can also get the Chinese menu at many of the nice, American style, small town chinease restaurants.
However, China has a wide range of food stiles. And, there is plenty of back and forth. Much like how Pitza is not really Italian you can still find it in Italy.
> walked into an unmarked doorway in Chinatown, walked down a flight of stairs to a very dingy basement, held up a few fingers to tell the hostess how many people were in your party, and then ordered off a menu where nothing was in English and everything either had tendons or organ meat
Pretty effective recipe for food poisoning you got there.
This is exactly the same with Italian food: even though the US is full of people of Italian descent, that doesn't change the fact that the Olive Garden menu baffles Italians.
Italian-American is a different kitchen. Just like British-Indian food. Or Tex-Mex.
Sometimes these adaptations are pretty good (the British Indian food, which is what everyone outside india thinks of as "Indian food" is pretty good!) but for some reason the US-chinese, US-Italian and US-Mexican (Tex-Mex) cuisine is an embarrassment to the originals.
This is exactly the same with all food, everywhere. Cultures appropriate and modify stuff they get from other cultures, continually. Americans did it with Chinese, sure. And also Italian as you point out. And Mexican. And Japanese (the modern conception of "fancy maki rolls" is mostly an American export). And the Italians did it too! And the Mexicans! And the Chinese!
The confusion of "authenticity" with "quality" in the comments here is really embarassing. Find good food. Eat it. Sometimes that's a traditional recipe and sometimes it's a recent synthesis.
> The confusion of "authenticity" with "quality" in the comments here is really embarassing. Find good food. Eat it. Sometimes that's a traditional recipe and sometimes it's a recent synthesis.
Agreed: maybe the problem though is that the most famous appropriation of international cuisine in the US is done by large chains of restaurants (Olive Garden, Taco Bell, ...) which is both not authentic and low quality - but that correlation is accidental.
As you point out there is tons of very good food in the US of all origins - and to be fair there are likely at least as meny very good (both excellen quality and "authentic", whatever that means) Italian Restaurants in New York than in Rome.
> The confusion of "authenticity" with "quality" in the comments here is really embarassing.
I don't necessarily disagree, but a lot of the time "authentic" can be a decent indicator of quality. In my experience, the best food comes from people who actually eat the food themselves and people who are making the food for motivations other than simple monetary motivations. That's the issue with a lot of "inauthentic" food - the people who make it don't necessarily like it or enjoy eating it, but and are often making it to appeal to what they view as the norm for the surrounding culture in an attempt to make more money.
It's not that non-authentic food can't be great, it's just that often times it's more of a cheap cash-grab. It's the same reason you wouldn't expect food at a movie theater or sports stadium to be great (though there are exceptions).
I don't think it's even about what country you're in. You have similar situations with American food in downtown Manhattan, Italian food in downtown Rome, Chinese food in Shanghai, etc., leading to a lot of low quality food in those places. I actually had more luck finding good, authentic Chinese food when I was traveling through the tourist areas of Italy than I did finding good authentic Italian food.
> the best food comes from people who actually eat the food themselves
The linked article is literally about two american expats in china who started a restaurant to recreate the chinese-american comfort food of their youth.
...and people right here in this thread are smearing the whole concept of "chinese-american comfort food" with this crazy authenticity frame.
I mean, come on folks: orange chicken and chow mein are pretty decent food on occasion. Lots of people like them. Their existence has in some small way advanced the way people (not even just americans) think about food. Don't eat it if you don't like it, but don't dismiss it as a "cheap cash grab" either.
There is another confounding variable, especially but not exclusively in the US, which is the industrialization of food production. In some ways quality is thus traded off against convenience and cost, but it has nothing to do with the specific origins of the dishes and techniques.
100% agree - there is both good and bad adaptations of foreign cuisine - in the US as well as elsewhere. The US is just (in)famous because of the megachains like Olive Garden, Taco Bell.
A Taco Bell taco is no farther from the original conception of the food than a Big Mac is to the original notion of a hamburger, frankly. People are all bent out of shape in this thread because they're applying odd notions of "morality" to something (food) where it doesn't apply.
Cultures appropriate food, they always have and they always will. It's a good thing, not a bad thing, even if sometimes you personally don't like to eat the specific items. We should be celebrating the chalupa, not smearing it.
Indian food in Malaysia/Indonesia/Singapore is Southern Indian, mostly Tamil, not Bengali but spicier like British Indian food. Japanese Indian food is Bengali by way of Britain with no hint of spiciness. Tex-Mex for food snobs is called Southwest cuisine. American pizza is very different from Italian and good enough to have a small niche in Italy itself.
I'm not really familiar with US-Chinese but you're wrong about Tex-Mex and at least one kind of Italian-American food. I'd be surprised if you were wrong about US-Chinese food because UK, DE and IE Chinese food are all awful.
In English an ethnie's way of cooking is a cuisine not a kitchen.
"Tall" NY-style pizza can be found in Italy as a kind of fast food, especially around Milan, but it developed independently.
Cuisine in Italy is extremely regionalized. Pizza has only been a "national" food for perhaps 50 years. At home we cook pizza perhaps once every week or two, but when my grandparents were young, it wasn't even a word here in the North. 30 years ago pizza was never in my school's menu, while nowadays they have it.
On the other hand, I have never tried Chicago-style pizza, because it's just not a thing here. I am actually really curious about it, and would like to taste it---perhaps unlike most of my fellow countrymen.
Something that I found tremendously exciting was Japanese-American food. The menu at Japanese Denny's is incredible. Nothing really "Japanese", but yet everything is.
It amuses me to see "Western" Japanese food (youshoku). E.g. hamburger steak, Napoloitan pasta (totally disgusting to me) or even omurice. Dishes that we vaguely recognize, but are really Japanese creations or Japanese versions in the case of hamburger steak. I imagine an American in Denny's probably feels like a Chinese person in an American Chinese food restaurant or a Japanese person in an American Japanese restaurant.
Also, all the weird sorts of things you can get on pizza in Japan that are utterly foreign to Americans (and even more so to Italians).
Yeah, American Chinese food is mostly Cantonese, which is only one of the eight major cuisines in China. Even if it were exactly the same as Cantonese food in China (it is not, apparently), it would still be unfamiliar to most Chinese people
In the reverse, this is what I got when I ordered a burger at a basketball game in China. I think of this burger when I try and empathize with how other cultures feel when America adapts their cuisine:
That burger to me looks like it's actually a 肉夹馍 (rou jia mo) - which is often mistranslated as a burger or a "Chinese Burger" if done right they are really tasty... unfortunately this particular example looks a little stomach churning
Edit: wife has corrected me, it's a 馅饼 (xian bing) - roughly translated as a minced meat pancake/pie!
That "burger" actually looks pretty good though. I think that was just a case of lost in translation. Chinese people know what Western hamburgers look like. There are McDonalds all over China.
Indo-Chinese is barely derived from/a changed version of traditional Chinese.
As an Indian who eats traditional Chinese food from various parts of China regularly, I can confirm that there literally isn't any sauce that tastes like Indo-Chinese cuisine's sauces. Indo-Chinese seems like Indian food with ingredients from Chinese food added which makes it a changed version of traditional Indian food rather than a changed version of traditional Chinese food.
One of my life's goals is to get one of my friend from NE China to eat Manchurian food in Mumbai. Results will be interesting.
The cuisine is called Indo-Chinese food...it's a fusion of Chinese dishes with Indian spices and vis-versa. It has come about because "close" border between China and India (in the north east)
I've seen Gobi Manchurian a couple of times (I'm American), really delicious. Also check out Mauritian food if you can, it has those influences and more.
In LA, Bollywood Bites, an Indian resteraunt, has an ethnic menu where you can order various food transplanted to Indian transplanted to the USA, so things like Manchurian Chicken are there.
I'm married to a first-generation offspring of Chinese parents, a source of regular and scathing remarks on how what is served in the US as "Chinese food" is often a many-generations-removed facsimile thereof.
Three items in particular (Chop Suey, Chow Mein and General Tso Chicken) receive very special ridicule and their appearance on a menu can effectively disqualify any restaurant from further consideration. As the spouse of the above-mentioned I consider it essential that I can avert any incipient noodle deficiency crisis; there are a very few joints - so few I can count them on two fingers - between SFO and San Jose that have received grudging consent and pre-approval for takeout.
(It probably doesn't help that we generally reach SFO or LAX via a layover in HKG or SIN)
There is a lot of ego around food when it gets tied to identity. Your spouse is probably rejecting many restaurants that are run by immigrants cooking recepies brought over.
Seriously, though. California, and the Bay Area specifically, is one of the best places in the US to find authentic Chinese food. OP's spouse is just a snob. Sure, a lot of restaurants feel the need to put some "standard" dishes like General Tso's Chicken on the menu, just in case. You don't have to order those. Outside of tourist traps like SF Chinatown, Chinese restaurants mainly serve Chinese food to a predominantly Chinese clientele.
uhhh, I disagree with your assessment of him/her as a snob. I go to San Gabriel Valley every weekend for dinner and lunch, and I've never seen any of those things on the menu anywhere. Chinese food in SF is abysmal. I'm not a snob, I'm not even Chinese.
Actually she did turn to me after I had been complaining about my cultural equivalent (that is, the quality of American coffee) in the car yesterday and say "darling we are both terrible snobs". So I think you are right. We're picky, we have selective high expectations, and we're not afraid to grumble when those expectations aren't met.
What's the difference between a snob and a connoisseur? You should taste the terrible coffee I make myself.
Yeah, SF is crap and overpriced, but the surrounding cities have pretty good food. Like every other metropolitan area, you have to get out of the city center to the suburbs where Chinese immigrants actually live.
Sichuan cuisine in the Bay Area is atrocious compared to the real deal. Maybe Cantonese or Hunan fare better but unfortunately I don't like these cuisines nearly as much.
BTW, I'm neither American nor Chinese, so I don't have any national pride involved either way. I just happen to have spent multiple years in both countries.
I think the issue is not that most westernised cuisines are different from the original, but that they end up tasting all the same. Here in Germany most people only care about the mandatory piece of meat/fish in each meal, so it's hard to find delicious side dishes that may exist in the "original" cuisine.
Yeah. All that matters is whether it tastes good, and stuff the rest. You can't taste a story you tell yourself. Or perhaps more to the point, you shouldn't be able to.
Considering how big the Chinese population is in Fremont, Cupertino, San Mateo, and Daly City, I'm surprised there aren't more approved restaurants on your list.
But then again, rents are outrageous, so maybe it's just impossible to open a restaurant as an immigrant who is good at cooking.
You left out Millbrae. I don't think the grandposter tried very hard. There's definitely a number of proper Chinese places in that corridor, but the average ones do suck. That or the in-laws are looking for a specific region in China that isn't well represented in the bay.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley in LA is better than in China, since you can find a large number of regional cuisines all in one place, and the raw ingredient quality is higher when compared to mainland China.
You can find every major Chinese cuisine in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and possibly Shenzhen and Guangdong, with great quality. That said the selection of Yunnan, Tibetan, Mongolian and Xinjiang may not be great but they're all there. That said Vancouver, New York and Tokyo are all in the top ten cities in the world for Chinese food.
The Ranch 99 near the Cisco'campus in Milpitas featured a half dozen Chinese restaurants nearby with no English on the menu the last time I worked near there five years ago.
I actually really like general tsaos chicken and often seeek it out as it's a dish you can't get in China. It only appeals to more people more from the south though or have sweeter cuisines like Shanghai.
Many chinese people in the bay area who can't stand it don't like sweet dishes in general. If they're more from the west, they often complain about not being to find authentically spicy food.
I never understood this fascination with food-authenticity. When it comes to food, there are only 2 things that matter:
- Is it healthy?
- Does it taste good to me?
If something is healthy and delights your taste buds, then why bother trying to find out whether it's authentic? Conversely, why force yourself to eat something you enjoy less, just because it happens to be "authentic" or because "other people like it"? Who cares if the stuff you're eating is highly evolved/bastardized from the original, as long as you like it?
Maybe it's the inner Frenchman in me talking (food is very important here), but food doesn't have to just be fuel for your body, it's also a door to the local culture and a social ritual. Tasting different things and eating in an authentic setting can help open your mind, much like learning a foreign language or living abroad in a different culture.
And besides, by educating your palate with tastes that do not exist in your country you can discover things that you would never have thought you would like.
I agree completely with trying out different cuisines and recipes. You'd have to be a very boring/close-minded person if you refuse to try new dishes. But that doesn't mean that you should force yourself to eat dishes that you've tried and disliked, just because it's "authentic". Or that you should stop eating something you enjoy just because it isn't "authentic".
Ironically enough, this very obsession with authenticity stunts the evolution, innovation and diversity of cuisines. As a foodie, I consider this to be the real tragedy.
Some dishes deserve to be insisted upon and revisited multiple times in my opinion, but it's a case by case basis. Some tastes can grow on you (in my case some organ meat tasted quite bad at first), and often your tastes change and mature with time, but I agree that obsessing over a particular dish is not a healthy relationship to have with food.
There is also a degree related to it: while you can develop a taste for say, for example, some dish you found originally bland (it was the case for an Indian friend of mine who came to Europe from a place where spicy is the norm), I doubt it would happen for something you found utterly revolting.
I am personally all for fusion food and experimenting as long as the original meals are preserved. I am for enriching, but against replacing.
Surely this is worth making exceptions for when the situation demands it? I'm all in favour of eating healthily in general but you're missing out on some amazing experiences if you're sticking to this rule all the time.
food is an expression of culture. your post makes sense in a purely utilitarian context but fails to factor in the history and cultural associations behind authentic regional cuisine. there's nothing wrong with new combinations and styles as food continues to evolve, but you're marginalizing an entire facet of culture by trying to distill food down to just taste and nutrition.
Not really a surprise. It's the same story elsewhere around the world. They had to adapt to survive. They firstly adapted local ingredients with techniques and flavours of home to cater to their fellow migrants, then they'd start adding some new dishes based on what they perceived as local tastes to try to attract the "native" population when just catering to their fellow migrants wasn't enough to survive.
How close a restaurants' dishes are to "authentic" ones depends largely on how many generations removed the chef is from their homeland.
Anyway, I'm of Chinese descent. First generation in my family born in Australia, but several more removed from China. So while the food that my family cooks retains Chineseness it also contains influences from the countries that my parents grew up in mixed in with ingredients that were sourceble in Melbourne, Australia in the 80s. That said, due to the relative distance of Australia to Asia during the mid to late 90s, more ingredients came in as the post-Vietnam war migrants settled here and had become further established in the community (so had capital to spend on luxuries like imported ingredients).
I think most countries are blown away by America's portions. They are just insanely huge some times. They are so big, even some places that do "small plates" or tapas are still too big.
Funny thing about international food. It's not very international at all.
French food is great ... except in France it's very different (and outside of the center of Paris sucks pretty bad)
Turkish fast food, specifically Kebab, is as far as I know a German invention taken up by Turks, rather than something that historically existed in Turkey. Now you might say shaved roasted meat existed there, and you'd be right, but that existed pretty much anywhere, and was prepared very differently. Shish kabob are sticks with goat meat. Sucks that I can't find the typical bread they serve Kebab in in Western Europe anywhere here in Asia.
Chinese food in Asia is SO much better than Chinese food in Europe. Cheap Chinese food in Hong Kong is edible to great (esp. the vegetarian stuff is nice). Cheap Chinese food in Paris ... you'll be sick for days.
But there's very little French about French cuisine in SE Asia. Their idea of traditional French cooking: a steak, with a fat edge attached to it, medium rare, with "edges" (really thick fries thickly covered in spices). No sauce. Great French food in France: a clean steak (no fat or nerves or sinews), one of a few sauces made with cream, meat juice and pepper, bearnaise. Thinly cut (not mcdonalds thin, but still far thinner) fries, a good portion of mixed salad, and some cooked vegetable preparation.
> French food is great ... except in France it's very different (and outside of the center of Paris sucks pretty bad)
Can't tell if you're trolling, have never been to France, or just went to all the wrong places. The center of Paris would be the worst place to eat any great French food, unless you only care for pretentious, overpriced restaurants which get featured in tourist magazines. Go spend some time in small restaurants in Bretagne, Lyon, Alsace, Marseille, ...
> Cheap Chinese food in Paris ... you'll be sick for days.
Paris' immigrant Chinese population has been growing pretty wildly recently, and I've been to many Chinese restaurants with Chinese friends who are studying in France who find them pretty legit. Again, sounds like you need a better guide for when you're spending time in France :)
> Turkish fast food, specifically Kebab, is as far as I know a German invention taken up by Turks, rather than something that historically existed in Turkey.
Wikipedia disagrees with you:
"With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape. It was not until a century later, that döner kebab was introduced and popularized in Istanbul, most famously by Beyti Güler. His restaurant, first opened in 1945, was soon discovered by journalists and began serving döner and other kebab dishes to kings, prime ministers, film stars and celebrities. [...]
In Germany the döner kebab was popularized by Turkish guest workers in the early 1970s with a center in Berlin."
I think they meant the part about the invention of the Döner Kebap in it's currently popular form: "The dish developed there [in Berlin] from its original form into a distinctive style [...] that would soon become one of the top-selling fast food and street food dishes in Germany and much of Europe, and popular around the world.[14]"
My favorite example of this is Japanese sushi. In Japan, where totally fresh fish is abundant and easy to purchase, the focus is entirely on the fish and rice. Most every dish is just raw fish and rice.
There are simple rolls which wrap, fish and rice in seaweed. Sometimes wa few, sparse other ingredients like shallots or cucumbers make there way into the roll.
Then, Sushi gets taken to America, and what I can only assume was a creative solution to the problem of limited access to fresh fish, sushi was transformed into the decadent "maki" rolls that dominate sushi menus in the US. Cheese, fruits, vegetables, fish, meats. US maki rolls that have nearly a dozen ingredients are not uncommon.
Both styles of sushi are amazing, though very different. More like cousins than the same type of cuisine.
Reminds me of how cocktails were invented during prohibition to mask the bad taste of moonshine. Japanese shushi is to American maki what wine is to martinis.
I think when cuisines get transported to foreign counties, they get changed to adapt to their new environment.
Actually rice is the main focus in Japanese Sushi - it needs to be treated perfectly - soft and grained, yet sticky enough to just hold together, with salt and vinegar added to a point, pressed and eaten very quickly. Fish is just there to round off the rice. That's why Sushi chefs train for years just preparing the rice - cutting fish is the last step to learn.
I am pretty sure parent is "right" from my limited understanding. That being having watched some interviews etc with sushi "masters" I have heard some of them say same thing. If I remember where I will respond again and apply link.
I stand by my comment. Any trained Sushi chef knows how to cut the fish properly, all they need is access to a good wholesale fish market like Tsukiji or one of its resellers to offer you some very nice fish - but the way they treat the rice is where you see the biggest difference between a trained sushi chef and a master. No matter where you go in Japan it's still way beyond what you'd get in expensive places abroad with a high likelihood though.
> Any trained Sushi chef knows how to cut the fish properly, all they need is access to a good wholesale fish market like Tsukiji
This isn't a convincing argument at all, I could just as easily say "any trained sushi chef knows how to cook rice properly, all they need is Amazon and access to a good rice cooker like Zojirushi".
For what it's worth, I don't believe the idea that rice is the main focus -- it just sounds like the sushi chefs are fucking with people when they say something like that.
There's an easy Test you can do: Go to Japan and do a few taste tests. Try 7-11 sushi, kaiten-sushi (big chains that serve on turnstiles), a small neighborhood sushi restaurant that serves lunch for 1000 yen and a master's sushi restaurant (usually 10000 yen up to 25000 yen, but you may be able to get a better deal through a Japanese contact). Then report back on what you find. All I can tell you is from my experience, and that is, for most fish the difference starts diminishing at the 1000 yen mark, but the texture of the rice and the care going into the condiments is what you pay for when going to a master. I'm not trying to have a debate, just sharing my experience from living in Japan for years.
I guess that makes sense. The value-add of a sushi chef to good fish is almost nothing, they just have to cut it and make sure to serve it fresh. The variability the chef introduces to rice is a lot bigger (i.e. rice can be really shit if you cook it wrong), so in order for sushi to rise from its piece-of-fish-on-rice street food beginnings to cult cuisine status of today, they had to pick some part to idolize and ritualize (in typical Japanese style), and rice was it.
You could at it this way, yes - Sushi is a bit like Pizza in that
a) it was born a few hundred years ago (Edo period) as a take-away food / fast food
b) some forms of it have become a high craft or even art that you can spend a lot of money on (compare to high status Pizzerias in Napoli)
Now whether that's legitimate or not is of course up for discussion - in my opinion it's a legitimate and fulfilling experience that you can have by going to a Sushi master if you can appreciate this kind of craft.
Good comparison. They both are delicious, simple, affordable foods widely enjoyed by the "peasant" class, which nonetheless have a rarified purist/snobbish following as well. I enjoy both, hope I can one day afford to judge for myself whether the high falutin varieties are worth it :)
I've done all this, I felt there was a (marginally decreasing) increase in quality at all levels of that chain you described. Maybe the marginal increase in quality of the fish was less than that of the rice; I don't know. I certainly couldn't tell -- they both seemed to taste better and better to me.
>It is a common Japanese legend that the truly great itamae-san ("san" is an honorific suffix) should be able to create nigirizushi in which all of the rice grains face the same direction.
While that's definitely an exaggeration, it gives you an idea of the importance of rice in Japanese sushi. Basically, it's taking something that's naturally chaotic (like cooked rice grains that just stick together in whatever fashion), and bring their entropy down to become something ordered by using the most efficient motions possible. For that purpose they use hand fans and wood to control the moisture as well as very finely trained hand motions to control the shape of the nigiri as well as the alignments of the grains.
All of that, just so the guest can pick it up with his/her chopsticks, and have it effortlessly fall apart in the mouth, in an explosion of flavour, like a two stage guided cluster bomb targeting your taste buds ;-).
So, yes, you could probably just use an automatic cooker for the cooking process (although the masters sneeze at that of course, but it sure is standard in Japan nowadays up to a certain price level) - but cooking is the easy part, the fun starts after that.
> French food is great ... except in France it's very different (and outside of the center of Paris sucks pretty bad)
Others said it already you but you must be trolling; there is such incredible food to eat outside of Paris that we never get to Paris anymore. If you are not trolling you must've had really bad luck as in many places in France but outside Paris you'll trip over lovely food.
For the cuisine I cannot say (but I know it's a popular opinion to love it) I find Hong Kong very impressive; I went to all Michelin stars there (they change rapidly over the years and lose stars as easily as they get them) and it's just ok food. I find far better food in Shanghai and for some dishes (mushroom auntie dumplings) I would even say that I had better luck in Suzhou. Hong Kong seems to have far too many tourists/immigrants to sustain any authentic flavours (anecdote: we had lunch a few days ago and someone from the UK was barking at the waiter that his food was too spicy). There are some good Indian/Nepalese places in HKG but often you have to tell you are used to Indian food, otherwise you get the bland version (and that does not only mean not spicy as in chilis which is a matter of taste, but other spices are left out as well).
Ofcourse everything is a matter of taste when it comes to food, so not arguing, just hoping people will try more stuff open minded.
I think you are generally correct but there are also some exceptions. You can get authentic "international" food if you know where to go.
The most authentic and best tasting Vietnamese restaurant in my area is also incidentally the least successful one because they don't know how to cater effectively American tastes.
There is a menu for the Americans and a secret one for Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese one has the really authentic stuff (coagulated pork blood, pork and chicken with bones, REALLY spicy dishes) etc.
The other two Vietnamese restaurants in town do a lot more business (nice decor, lighting, menu, everything is somewhat Americanized etc.) but they get lazy and put the wrong kind of broths in different soups because only Vietnamese people will notice.
Anyway, the best way I've found to get "authentic" food in the US is to try to find an urban center with a LOT of one kind of ethnic population and then just go wherever they go.
> French food is great ... except in France it's very different (and outside of the center of Paris sucks pretty bad
Hah! Lyon is the stomach of France, and it is very, very outside of Paris. There are many regions with amazing food in France. You're probably trying to make a point, but what you wrote makes no sense.
As Portuguese living across multiple European countries, including two years in France, my only complaint about french restaurants is the average price they cost, making going out an event instead of "I don't feel like cooking".
The reason for this is people's palate and availability of the raw ingredients and spices. In most cases people replace raw ingredients and spices need to be homemade or replaced. The end result is nothing which is going to be authentic.
Sure there will always be places where someone native wants his home food and does all the hard work to put it together. But those are very few.
> Turkish fast food, specifically Kebab, is as far as I know a German invention taken up by Turks
That is not quite correct. The Kebab ("grilled meat") is genuinely Turkish. To put it into flatbread was the invention of a Turkish immigrant to Germany, in Berlin in the 1970's [1]. From there it rose to prominence as fastfood all over Germany, and subsequently internationally.
You are spot on. Chinese food in china is good and different from what you get in Chinese restaurants in US/Europe - you really have to look for restaurants there to get real Chinese food. Also the Turkish food, your writing is spot on. The same can be said for Italian, Austrian, German, French, etc food. An "Oktoberfest" copy-cat in another country is usually a lot different to the original. To really cook local food on another continent you need a cook, receipts, species and ingredients from the original country.
I don't think I've ever had chop suey. I used to see canned "chop suey" in NY supermarkets. Never seen them in SF bay area --granted I have not sought it out.
I may just have to try it out some day and see what the fuss is all about. Maybe it's the east coast version of Kung Pao chicken (i.e. a quintessential dish)
Speaking of east coast dishes I don't see in the SF bay area are NY style calzones or knishes.
Chop Suey is not a dish. It is basically "Cantonese people that were not very experienced cooks, trying to cook to North Americans". It means very different things in each state of US and province in Canada.
What doesn't add up to me is the idea that American Chinese food evolved from the 1800s, yet every legit Chinese restaurant has owners who have a heavy Chinese accent, clearly from China themselves. Did they come here and so quickly adapt to what was expected from "Chinese" food?
Basically yes. They're here to make a buck, not to do haute cuisine, and it's much safer to serve food that your customers already know rather than something totally foreign.
Restaurants change hands frequently in cities. Actual family owned restaurants that have passed through generations are a small minority.
Having never eaten at two Chinese restaurants with even remotely the same food, I find that hard to swallow. At least in my part of the eastern US, Chinese food quality varies wildly.
Easiest to tell with the chicken dishes, and even with the same food source the quality varies wildly. Chefs, amounts of ingredients, freshness and other things still influence things, similar to fast food.
Distribution still doesn't have the greatest online presence, but here's one of the east coast distributors.
http://nywtc.com
I'm curious as to why American-Chinese food changed between the 1970s and 1990s. In my area, I started noticing the change in the late 1980s. Egg foo young largely disappeared and egg rolls were replaced by spring rolls. My impression of the newer style dishes was that they had less meat, were greasier, and were generally more well-done. The last time I had good egg foo young or egg rolls was almost 30 years ago.
I had assumed the change was due to a massive wave of immigration in the 1980s. But if all of the food was a deliberate creation for the American market, why didn't they stick with what was already popular?
Although her TED talk is linked, there is no mention of Jennifer8. Lee's book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles." The point of the book is that American-Chinese food and Chinese food in China are different. (The book was published the same year as her talk, 2008; which is six years before this article originally appeared.)
What's the process of starting a company in China as a foreigner? Is it something the government there encourages? Are visas for those easy to get? What about incorporating?
Vice is owned by News Corp, which also brings us Fox News. To me, it looks like a generational hedge against declining cable viewership by a company that is very much opposed to what Vice supposedly represents.
Also, I've met a ton of people that say that the pay is terrible, work conditions are awful, and everyone just accepts it because it's a good resume builder. It's also declined in quality a lot since the acquisition - compare old "Vice Kills" episodes with the dreck on HBO.
Vice tells amazing stories, but not everything in those stories is factual and there is often significant embellishment. This is not obvious at all until they report on a topic you're very familiar with.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
There are two types of Chinese food you can get in America (well, more given all the regional variations, but I'm making a point...). If you went to a strip mall, walked into a P.F. Chang's, and had General Tso's Chicken, that's not Chinese food. But if you walked into an unmarked doorway in Chinatown, walked down a flight of stairs to a very dingy basement, held up a few fingers to tell the hostess how many people were in your party, and then ordered off a menu where nothing was in English and everything either had tendons or organ meat - you're probably getting something pretty close to what you would get in China.
You can get the latter experience in most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, but you have to know where to look. Restaurants like that don't send out coupons with the normal advertising circular - basically anything that advertises in an English-language publication is American Chinese food.