Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

  2026 is a milestone year for Chinese food in the United States, as it marks the 50 th anniversary of the appearance of authentic Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley.   In 1976, the Hong Kong style Kin Kwok Restaurant opened up in Monterey Park.   A lot of Chinese restaurants have since operated in the San Gabriel Valley in the past half century, and I’m proud to say that I’ve eaten at most of them.    While that may sound a bit far fetched, I will explain to you that this has in fact been a manageable task.   Now the fact that real Chinese food has only been available in Monterey Park for 50 years may come as a shock to some people who assume that Monterey Park and the San Gabriel Valley has always been an area of Chinese concentration and full of Chinese food.   So a little bit of background history is necessary before getting into my adventures in eating at thousands of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley.     The fact...

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...