Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

Forgotten Pioneers of Non-Cantonese Food in America - Menuism Dining Blog, November 22, 2021   As I have detailed in past articles, there have been two distinct eras of Chinese food in the United States. The  first era covered the period from the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century, to the enactment of immigration reform by the United States in the late 1960s. During this period, the only significant immigration from China to the United States were rural immigrants from the area outside of the city formerly known as Canton, now known as Guangzhou. Most of these immigrants came from an area known as Toisan, or nearby adjacent districts. As such, the Chinese population in the United States during this time period was largely homogenous and not representative of the whole of China. Likewise, Chinese food in the United States strictly reflected the nearly homogenous Toisanese population, rather than truly depicting Chinese food. ...

Solving the Broccoli Beef Mystery - Menuism Dining Blog, November 16, 2021   For years I’ve been puzzled about one of the most iconic Chinese American dishes, broccoli beef. Its appearance doesn’t fit into the otherwise neat evolution of Chinese food in the United States.  As I have explained in the past, there were two separate and distinct sources of today’s Americanized Chinese food. The first category of food was rooted in the Toisanese immigration to the United States , from the time of the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century until the late 1960s repeal of discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws in the United States. Basically, rural Cantonese food was adapted to ingredients available in the United States, as well as to the taste buds of the American public. In this category, one finds classics such as chop suey, egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and wor won ton soup, which most of America erroneously believed representat...

  Can Chinese cooking survive new environmental codes? - Menuism Dining Blog, June 28, 2021   Over the past two centuries, the Chinese community and its cuisine have endured several forms of discrimination . The Chinese exclusion laws of the late 1880s left Chinese food in America exclusively Cantonese for over a century.  Housing discrimination restricted Chinese Americans to a limited number of neighborhoods, affecting the geographic distribution of authentic Chinese restaurants to this date. And twentieth-century protests by  labor unions threatened the very existence of Chinese food in the U.S. Now, a new threat to Chinese restaurants and cuisine is unfolding. San Francisco, San Jose, Berkeley, and three dozen smaller California cities have banned natural gas hookups in most newly constructed buildings. While these building codes may seem a reasonable approach to limit carbon emissions and curb climate change, they also endanger a revered ele...

Rediscovering Classic Cantonese Almond Duck - Menuism Dining Blog, February 28, 2021   As bad as the pandemic has been, we’ve all needed to look for small silver linings along the way. In my case, it’s been the rediscovery of the mid-20th century Toishanese/Cantonese favorite, pressed almond duck.  20th-century Chinese dishes such as chop suey have been described as Americanized and inauthentic. But many dishes from this era, including chow mein, fried rice, and wonton soup, certainly are authentic, as they were enjoyed by the Toishanese who constituted most of the Chinese immigrants living in the United States. As a young child in the midcentury, one of my favorite Chinese dishes was war sui opp, or pressed almond duck. If you’ve never eaten it, it consists of deep fried shredded duck meat cubes in a gloppy brown sauce and garnished with lettuce and crushed almonds. To steal a tagline from this era, it was indescribably delicious. I’m not sure exact...

  Los Angeles Chinese Restaurants Battle Through the Pandemic - Menuism Dining Blog, October 12, 2020     In May, I painted a rather pessimistic picture of the early effect of the coronavirus pandemic on Chinese restaurants in the United States. A combination of xenophobia, prescient caution in the Chinese-American community about dining out, as well as a high concentration of mom-and-pop enterprises, the Chinese restaurant industry seemed to be perilously close to wide-scale collapse.   Los Angeles Chinatown looked particularly stark. In April, a good two-thirds of the Chinese restaurants had shuttered. The restaurants that remained opened for take-out only significantly pared their food offerings.  For example, only a handful of dim sum varieties were available at the two remaining eateries, Tian’s Dim Sum and Keung Kee. These establishments were likely the least-known in Chinatown, until Ocean Seafood and Golden Dragon closed, eventually...

  Pandemic Hits Chinese Restaurants Especially Hard - Menuism Dining Blog, May 18, 2020 Even in good times, a restaurant operation can expect a net profit of about 3% on sales. Employee wages are often 25 percent or more of restaurant costs, so it doesn’t take much of a decline in restaurant revenue in such a low-margin industry to trigger labor cutbacks. But Chinese restaurants have been hit by a triple whammy during this pandemic. Not only have they been buffeted by the general economic disaster, but they have suffered additionally for serving Chinese food. COVID-19 originated in China, and from the beginning has been associated with unfortunate terms such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” Immediately as the virus spread through China, business at Chinese restaurants in the United States, and indeed throughout the world, began to sink — even before the rest of the world economy and other types of restaurants became impacted. Startled by this unwelcome ris...

5 Ways Dim Sum Is Changing in America - Menuism Dining Blog, February 3, 2020 A few years ago, I discussed the merits of ordering dim sum from a menu versus serving dim sum from heated carts. I argued that menu-driven dim sum is more conducive to creating new and better dishes, because offerings would not have to wheel around the dining room. Carts have been dishing out longtime favorites like steamed barbecue pork buns, har gow, siu mai, cheung fun (rice noodle rolls), pineapple buns, turnip cake squares, lotus leaf sticky rice, and many others since arriving on the dim sum scene in the 1960s and 70s. But America’s dim sum palaces are innovating all kinds of new, non-traditional dim sum items. Here are five ways they’re changing our expectations of Chinese brunch. 1. Adding or substituting ingredients of a traditional dim sum item Chefs are dressing up basic dim sum items with gourmet ingredients. Siu mai with truffles and foie gras har gow are two examp...

  Is it Chinese Fusion or Authentic Chinese Cuisine? - Menuism Dining Blog, December 8, 2019   Since my first article for Menuism in 2012, I always wanted to discuss the difference between Chinese fusion and authentic Chinese food. I’ve heard traditionalists say they hate Chinese fusion since it means messing with a revered cuisine. But as I’ve often said, Chinese food in the United States continues to evolve into new and better forms. So, what’s fusion and what’s evolution? A common definition of fusion cuisine is the introduction of nontraditional ingredients into a particular cuisine. On its face, this definition seems to be relatively straightforward to determine when a particular dish should be classified as Chinese fusion. Adding truffles to siu mai or foie gras to har gow would seemingly be classified as Chinese fusion. But when you see well-established dim sum restaurants serving these dishes, isn’t this just part of the continuous evolution of Chin...

  The Arrival of Guangzhou-Style Cantonese Food - Menuism Dining Blog, October 28, 2019   In the past decade, Chinese dining in the United States popularized “Mainlander food,” or non-Cantonese regional cuisines. The Mainland moniker distinguished it from food from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But Mainland food largely excluded Cantonese cuisine, even though Canton (now known as Guangzhou) sits squarely on the Chinese mainland.   Why Mainland food excluded Cantonese Chinese have lived in the United States since the mid-19th-century. However, these immigrants did not come from the whole of China. Rather, they mostly came from rural villages around Toisan (now called Taishan), some eighty miles outside Canton. For over a hundred years, the majority of Chinese residents in America were of Toisanese origin. The dishes that these rural villagers brought with them where  what came to be known as Chinese food in America. The cuisine was adapted to ...

  How My Favorite Chinese Dishes Evolved Over the Years - Menuism Dining Blog, September 23, 2019 When my thoughts turn to my favorite Chinese dishes over the decades, my tastes seem to evolve just as Chinese food in America has. The early years I did not eat much Chinese food as a little boy growing up in 1950s Los Angeles.  Chinese cuisine available at that time exclusively comprised rural Toishanese dishes imported by immigrants from southern China. Plus, it wasn’t particularly good. As a 6-year old, I was disgusted by steamed eggs, preserved turnip strips with ground pork, oxtail stew, pig feet in tomato sauce, or the worst: bean thread in a horrid milky sauce. The thought alone made me sick.  The only Chinese dish that I enjoyed was rice with soy sauce .   The late 1950s and ’60s Contrary to a recent article , rice with soy sauce is no longer among my favorites, nor has it been for many decades.  In the late 1950s, I found new favo...

Does My “20-Year Rule” for Chinese Restaurants Still Stand? - Menuism Dining Blog, August 19, 2019   Five years ago, I wrote a Menuism article about why I generally did not eat at Chinese restaurants in the United States that were more than 20 years old . My reason for this 20-year rule was that Chinese food in America was evolving at a surprisingly rapid rate, with diners and chefs endlessly looking for that next more delicious, more innovative Chinese food creation. Because innovation is more likely to come from new players, and because existing successful Chinese restaurants are likely to stick with what works, I decided that after 20 years, most Chinese restaurants are behind the curve. Shocking closures in the San Gabriel Valley That article recently jolted back into my consciousness with a Sunday Los Angeles Times article entitled “ The Vanishing Old School Chinese Restaurants of the San Gabriel Valley .” The back-to-back closures of two of the ...