Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

Until fairly recently, the mere suggestion that Americanized Chinese food items like chop suey, egg drop soup, moo goo gai pan, egg rolls, General Tso's chicken, orange chicken and all of its cousins were authentic Chinese food would have been laughable.  Certainly, few residents of China would have identified any of these items as being Chinese in origin.  And likewise, Chinese Americans themselves recognize that Americanized Chinese food and authentic Chinese food are poles apart, and that members of the American public eating such items and believing they were eating real Chinese food were deluding themselves.  Indeed, I myself chuckle when reading many Yelp reviewers praise a Chinese restaurant for serving “authentic” Chinese food like broccoli beef or orange chicken.  However within the last decade, something has happened which spotlights why Americanized Chinese food may in fact be its own genre of authentic Chinese food.  Historically, Chinese restauran...

  In talking with many of my Asian-American friends and family in my age group, I have found that a significant portion of them are diabetic or pre-diabetic and have to alter their diets accordingly.  And for people who live most of their lives eating meals centered around rice, and to a lesser extent, noodles, this is a very painful experience, since Chinese cuisine really isn't Chinese food without these carb loaded foods.   Indeed it is widely known that instead of greeting someone with the words "How are you?"  Cantonese say "Sihk faan mei?" which literally is "Have you eaten?"  Perhaps not as well known is that the word "faan" means rice.  But on the glycemic index, where a rating of 100 means ingesting a particular food is equivalent to eating pure sugar, with some white rice varieities having a glycemic index approaching 90,  eating rice is an unaffordable luxury for many of us.  Thus, over a decade ago I was exiled into a...

Chinese food in Los Angeles and throughout the United States in the 1940s was a far cry from what it's like today.  That's because the only Chinese in America at the time were rooted in the rural villages outside the city formerly known as Canton, as these were the only migrants to arrive in the United States before the Chinese Exclusion Laws were enacted by the United States in 1882.  Those exclusion laws were not practically repealed until after World War II, and not fully repealed until the 1960s.  Consequently what Americans believed to be Chinese food was from an unrepresentative local cuisine, further altered by available local ingredients, as well as the tastes of the American public.  Looking at menus of the day shows they were peppered with dishes such as chop suey, chow mein, won ton soup, egg foo young, stir fried beef, chicken, pork, shrimp and vegetable dishes and egg rolls.  On top of this, while Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City have fa...

As you may have read, the reason why anybody knows who I am goes back to the fact that I have eaten (now) at over 8,300 different Chinese restaurants, which are laid out in an Excel schedule showing the name and address of the restaurant, where it falls in the numerical sequence, and the year I first ate there.  My list goes all the way back to 1951 when I was 3 years old, but of course it's not like I started a contemporaneous listing at that point in time.  The list itself was first created in 1988, at a time where new Chinese restaurants were opening up so quickly in the San Gabriel Valley that I needed a list just to make sure I didn't inadvertently eat at a restaurant that I had already tried.  Of course, that meant I needed to populate my list with the Chinese restaurants I had eaten at in the past.  Fortunately I had saved business cards, takeout menus, and even credit card slips from many restaurants.  But there were also many other restaurants where I h...

Though I began writing on Chinese American history topics back in 1969, it wasn't until almost 10 years later in early 1979 that I wrote my first article on anything to do with Chinese food, which sort of was a restaurant review, though even back then I was talking about food in a greater context. “A Chinese Restaurant in Sioux City, Iowa" appeared in the January 31, 1979 issue of the weekly Chinese American newspaper out of San Francisco, East West Chinese-American Journal, and obviously there are no available online copies of this item until now.   HONG KONG RESTAURANT, 3105 N. Highway 75, Sioux City, Iowa It seems that virtually any American city of any size has at least one Chinese restaurant.  However, once one leaves the major Chinese population centers, the quality of the Chinese restaurant food becomes quite marginal, the sophistication of the customers (insofar as Chinese food is concerned) becomes lower, and the available ingredients become limited. Sioux City, Iowa ...

Who knows how many Chinese restaurants there are in the San Gabriel Valley (99% of which serve authentic Chinese food)?   That topic came up over a decade ago when Frank Shyong wrote his front page, Column One Los Angeles Times profile of me.   At that time we settled on a number ranging from 600 to 800 Chinese restaurants.  This was based on the fact that there were about 600 San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant members of a Chinese restaurant trade group, and about 600 Chinese restaurants listed in the San Gabriel Valley Chinese Yellow Pages.  Taking into account that there would be Chinese restaurants which were part of both listings, just one listing, or neither of the listings, we settled on an upper limit of 800 restaurants.  In the decade plus since then, the number of Chinese restaurants has increased as Chinese have moved into parts of the San Gabriel Valley which originally had few Chinese, so a number of 1,000 or more Chinese restaurants in the ...