Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

As far as the younger generation and more recent immigrants are concerned, the gigantic Chinatown that is the San Gabriel Valley is something that has always existed.   I remember a comment on one of my interviews about the San Gabriel Valley was along the lines of "I always thought that my family used to live in East Los Angeles because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park at the time."  But indeed, I remember a time when there were very few Chinese or other Asians living in the San Gabriel Valley, and in fact at one time that the San Gabriel Valley was the most racist, lily white areas in Los Angeles County. So naturally, the subject which intrigued me over the years is how such a gigantic Chinese dining mecca and Chinese community in terms of both population and geographic area could have developed in the San Gabriel Valley, and not anywhere else in the Los Angeles area or somewhere else in the United States.   Now it’s not that I didn’t have a clue, as some o

  As I have often said, few among the American public realize that from the time of the arrival of the first Chinese in America during the gold rush, well into the mid-20th century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese population in the United States was rooted in the villages in or near the rural agricultural area of south China called Toisan, also known as Hoisan, and now referred to in the 21st century as Taishan.    (Note that in this article I will switch between references to Toisan and Taishan, depending on the time period being discussed.) So with Toisanese migrants being in California since the Gold Rush, how can the first Taishanese restaurants be just be opening now, some 170 years later?   Weren't there Toisanese style restaurants all over the United States in 1800s and the 1900s, since most of the Chinese were Toisanese and they opened restaurants to serve both their compatriots and outsiders?    Not really.  Historically there were never any restaurants in the U

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that there would be an internet meme about Yelp Chinese restaurant ratings.  But that's exactly what happened when my son's friend, filmmaker Freddie Wong, posted on Tik Tok the highly inventive proposition that only Chinese restaurants with 3.5 Yelp stars are worth eating at, garnering almost 20 million views.  His premise is that more highly rated Chinese restaurants are those patronized by too many non-Chinese diners, whose opinions are counter productive.  When Wong asked me for my assessment of the 3.5 star rule, I told him indeed that many great, authentic Chinese restaurants have 3.5 star ratings.  However the overhanging fact which prevents the rule from being the gospel truth is that Yelp ratings of Chinese restaurants are categorically unreliable (though not to say individual ratings may well be on point), as I explained in my article from L A Weekly. Why Yelp's Chinese Restaurant Ratings Don't Compute - L. A.

  A year and half ago I wrote an article for Menuism called  "Solving The Broccoli Beef Mystery" which explained the origins of this dish which did not fall neatly into the timeline of the evolution of Chinese American food.  Imagine my surprise a few months later when much of that article showed up on the internet under the title “Fixing the Broccoli Beef Thriller “ by some dude named Sanghi.   It was actually one of several articles I wrote for the Menuism website that were been pirated by a fake news site called Newspaper 11, operating on the softgst.com domain. In turn, several other websites picked up that article verbatim.  Most of them have since fallen off the internet, but at this writing there is  this one remaining online with that article.   Over time, I've discovered fake newspaper sites are common and typically reproduce copyrighted content from top newspapers and magazines, but deleting any reference to the source and changing the name of the author.