Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

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  Those exclusion laws were not practically repealed until after World War II, and not fully repealed until the 1960s.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 ...

As I had written numerous times for the old Menuism site, as well as in other articles and speeches, after the beginnings of a Chinese community in Monterey Park in the 1960s, there was a decades long, eastward march of an expanded Chinese community coupled, of course, with a corresponding, though lagging establishment of authentic Chinese restaurants.  As described in that article, the eastward march centered between the San Bernardino Freeway (Interstate 10) and the Pomona Freeway (Highway 60), though extending to adjacent territory to the north and south of these boundaries, following the path of new residential housing community developments, often in hillside areas, that are so beloved by Chinese Americans.  Around the turn of the 21st Century, the eastward march advanced beyond the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles County, and veered down Highway 71 into Chino Hills and then Corona, and then ultimately up Interstate 15 to Eastvale, as new residential community developm...

As many of you have read before, I ate very little Chinese food growing up.  That’s because mid-20th century familial Chinese America was largely American born with Grandpa and Grandma often the only family members from China.  Indeed my primary exposure to Chinese food was at Chinese wedding and birthday banquets, where many of you may have read that I only ate soy sauce and rice and passed on all of the entrees (except for bird’s nest soup if it was on the menu).  And believe me those banquets were commonplace events.  

Once upon a time, authentic Chinese food could only be found in American locales where there was a large Chinese population, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.  Because of the accident of the patterns in the earliest Chinese immigration to the United State, being a large city did not ensure the presence of real Chinese food.  Until 50 years ago, you could not find authentic Chinese food in cities like Dallas or Atlanta, but you could in Augusta, Georgia, Clarksdale, Mississippi or Butte, Montana.     After changes in American immigration laws in 1965 ended an eighty year period of near Chinese exclusion from migrating to the United States, large numbers of Chinese came to the United States from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and eventually Mainland China, as well as other Asian countries.  Unlike the original Chinese migrants from the 19th century who were almost exclusively migrating from rural areas, the new wave of Chinese migration was almost enti...