Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

  When the pandemic hit in 2020, it appeared that it would be an all out disaster for Chinese food eateries of all stripes, from the fanciest large restaurants to the smallest mom and pop restaurants and boba parlors.  As I wrote in Menuism, the hit was expected to be disproportionately hard on Chinese restaurants due to the large concentration of family owned businesses.  Indeed celebrity chef Ming Tsai sadly predicted that nearly half of family owned Chinese restaurants would end up shuttering.  And indeed, this seemed to be a fair assessment as probably a majority of all Chinese eateries closed down for at least a period of time during 2020, and certainly all Chinese restaurants that were operating at any point of time did so on a much smaller scale.   Things looked particularly bleak for the boba parlors. Many observers felt that the boba market seemed oversaturated, and was ready for a shakeout anyway.  People not so jokingly were s...

  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...