How Chinese Food In Los Angeles Emerged As The Best In The Nation

How Chinese Food In Los Angeles Emerged As The Best In The Nation - Menuism Dining Blog, November 19, 2018

Chinese food in Los Angeles is the best you will find in the country.  And yes that means that Chinese food is better here than in San Francisco.

Let's take a short journey through the history of Chinese food in America, and see how that history has been reflected in my own personal experiences.  The two intertwined stories will illuminate how my home city of Los Angeles has become the center of Chinese food in America, and why it's not so outlandish for me to proclaim it so.

 

A brief timeline of Chinese food in America

For much of the 20^th century, Chinese food in America was something unrecognizable to 95 percent of the people living to China.  Because what was passed off as Chinese food in America was a historical accident molded by immigration patterns, US immigration laws and demographic factors.

The Chinese started to come to America in the mid-19^th century during the California gold rush.  But these Chinese fortune seekers did not come from all over China.  Rather they came primarily from seven rural districts in Toisan county, 60 miles outside of the city formerly known as Canton in southern China.  Three reasons explain this narrowly concentrated migration.  

 

1. Economic conditions in Toisan were the worst, making people more desperate to do something radical like migrate abroad.   
2. Canton was an international seaport, providing the means to go to America not available to other Chinese.   
3. While it was illegal to immigrate from China, that restriction was unenforceable in Canton, being so far away from China’s capital in Beijing.

For three decades, rural Cantonese from Toisan county and nearby areas immigrated in large numbers to America in search of a better economic life, building the railroads and developing California’s natural resources.  It was said that in some Toisanese villages, every adult male was in California. 

 

As their numbers grew, and because these migrants were mostly adult males,  resentment against the Chinese festered, especially among European immigrant workers, such that in 1882 the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Law, which until its repeal in 1943 prohibited most residents of China from migrating to the United States.   Now the Chinese Exclusion act did not completely shut off immigration from China.  Much of this continued immigration was illegal, and virtually all of it involved family and friends of Chinese already in the United States.  The product of this is that for a century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese community in the United States consisted of rural Toisanese migrants and their progeny.  Or to use a reverse analogy, it would be as if all of the Americans living in China came from someplace like the Salinas Valley.   

 

With this background it’s easy to how 20th-century Chinese food was hardly Chinese.  Chop suey,  sweet and sour pork, wor won ton, moo goo gai pan and egg foo yung were not the national dishes of China.  These dishes have had some roots in rural Toisan, but were adapted for the local ingredients found in the United States, and ultimately to suit the tastes of non-Chinese diners in the United States.

 

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How my personal story fits into this framework 

 

 

 

My paternal grandfather came to the US in 1880 from Toisan, prior to the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws.  He brought his concubine into this country in the early 1900s, in violation of the Chinese exclusion laws since only his wife could legally enter the US.  

 

Around 1915, my maternal grandfather immigrated illegally from Toisan. He brought his wife (illegally) to Los Angeles around 1920.   

 

I am the grandson of three illegal aliens.  

 

As I grew up in Los Angeles, the local Chinese population was about 10,000 to 20,000, almost entirely all of Toisanese background.  In comparison, of the 600,000 Chinese in LA today, few are Toisanese.  As a little boy I didn’t eat much Chinese food because  it wasn’t particularly good.

 

Los Angeles was a relatively minor Chinese community with inferior Chinese food compared to the big dog of San Francisco.  Indeed the Toisanese name for San Francisco was literally “big city.”   (And to show LA’s spot in the pecking order, in Toisanese the term “second city” referred to Sacramento, not Los Angeles.)  Back then San Francisco’s Chinese population was probably 75,000, though official census figures show less than half that amount, attributable to the sizable number of illegal aliens in the community who didn’t want to be counted.    

 

 

From third-rate city to leader of the pack

 

So how did we go from the point where Chinese food in America was this bastardized mutation that I refused to eat to today’s Chinese food scene which fully represents the wonderful varieties of regional cuisines in China that we have today?   Well not surprisingly, again it all goes back to the immigration laws.  

 

As I indicated, Chinese Exclusion was repealed in 1943, but since the US operated on a national origins immigration quota system, and there were very few Chinese living in the US, the Chinese were given a whopping annual quota of 105 immigrants so the 1943 repeal itself didn’t do it.  Rather we must forward to the late 1960s, where the national origins quota system was abandoned for a system that gave the same quota to all countries.  Suddenly, just as many Chinese immigrants could enter the US under quota as could immigrants from Great Britain.  

Keep in mind that the US and Mainland China were not on speaking terms at the time. So, originally the entire Chinese immigration quota was originally filled by migrants from Hong Kong (then still a British colony)  and Taiwan. Their effect on Chinese food in America was immediate.  Cantonese speaking immigrants from Hong Kong  rejuvenated America’s Cantonese Chinatowns, bringing a new, different, and delicious form of Cantonese cuisine.  Old-time rural Toisanese-Cantonese dishes that I hated as a kid were supplanted by the urban flavors of Hong Kong.

 

Los Angeles Chinatown was especially transformed by this Hong Kong migration.  LA’s original Chinatown was torn down in the early 1930s to make way for the Union Station. Yes there was a replacement New Chinatown built, but was not a complete community because while there were Chinese restaurants, gift shops and wishing wells, it was largely devoid of Chinese residents, which effectively made New Chinatown an ethnic theme park.  But when the new Hong Kong immigrants arrived they actually moved into New Chinatown, turning an ethnic tourist trap into a true Chinese American community.  

 

Meanwhile, Mandarin speaking Taiwanese did not gravitate to Chinatowns, which were all Cantonese speaking, and ended up in alternative locations.  One notable landing point was Manhattan, where Taiwanese chefs opened up dozens, if not hundreds of Chinese restaurants in New York offering newfangled Sichuan and Hunan regional cuisines, never seen before on these shores. 

 

These Taiwanese chefs had themselves fled from Mainland China two decades previously, removing the cuisine once from the original.  Then they opened up their restaurants in New York, which had no residents from Hunan or Sichuan, making their target clientele local New Yorkers.  In adapting their dishes to American tastes, this created a second degree of separation from real Hunan and Sichuan food.  Nevertheless, these quasi Hunan and Sichuan cuisines swept the country with new dishes such as hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, General Tso’s chicken, mushu pork and kung pao chicken, now added to the pantheon of Chinese American dishes. 

 

 

How my personal story fits into this framework

 

 

While changes in immigration laws were taking effect, I was attending UCLA. Reflecting the late '60s era ethnic studies movement, the university offered its first ever class on Asian American studies.    The class opened my eyes to the experience of Chinese people in the United States.  Learning that Chinese people in America indeed had their own history helped to trigger my lifetime study of Chinese food here.

 

More intervening factors grew my fascination with American Chinese food.   When I entered the work force, I met colleagues from Hong Kong with a passion for food that I had never encountered before.   My Hong Kong friends had been the vanguard of the late 1960s immigration of Chinese from Hong Kong to the United States and they showed me where to go to find this new and exciting brand of Chinese food. This upgrade in Chinese food sparked an interest in me, as this Chinese food was so much better than what I was used to.  As I started to travel around the United States, I made it a point to eat at Chinese restaurants to the extent possible, as part of a greater interest in seeing what Chinese residents and communities were like throughout the United States. 

 

Even as Los Angeles began to grow as a center of Chinese community and cuisine, San Francisco retained its lead as new food trends from Hong Kong, such as Chinese seafood restaurant and dim sum palaces spread to the United States.  While the gap between San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinese food clearly narrowed in the 1980s, Angelinos still talked among themselves about heading up to the Bay Area to try the latest Bay Area openings. My friends and I would talk about the latest Chinese restaurant openings in San Francisco, when we would travel up north, and what we would eat.    Little did we know that the old order of San Francisco’s culinary dominance that spanned 135 years was about to end.  In the mid to late 1980s, for some reason the conversation among Los Angeles Chinese food lovers turned from talking about finding better Chinese restaurants in San Francisco to finding better Chinese restaurants in Manhattan.  I actually have no idea how New York supplanted San Francisco as #1, and New York’s time in first place was relatively brief.  But clearly San Francisco’s reign was over.

 

The takeover of Hong Kong by China

 

Any jockeying for Chinese food supremacy between San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York quickly became irrelevant due to one major event--the planned takeover of Hong Kong by China in 1997.  Suddenly, anyone in Hong Kong with the means to relocate decided to do so.  And starting in the late 1980s, the primary destination for these Hong Kong expatriates was not San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York.  Instead it was Vancouver, British Columbia, which became the near culinary equivalent of Hong Kong itself.  Suddenly nobody in the United States talked about visiting anywhere in the US for better Chinese.  All the talk among Chinese food enthusiasts was when could we plan our next trip to Vancouver, and what restaurants should we try.  The differential was so great that whenever I went to Vancouver to eat Chinese food, I didn’t bother to eat Chinese food back home for a month.

 

Of course, not every great Hong Kong chef landed in Vancouver, and a few did make their way to San Francisco and even more making their way to Los Angeles, such that Los Angeles’ Chinese food passed that of San Francisco in the early-1990s.  But another major immigration related factor came into play to reshape Chinese food in America. eventually surpassing even Vancouver.

 

The whole of China gets represented

When the US finally established diplomatic relations with China, the first migration of non-Cantonese Chinese from the more developed areas such as Shanghai and Beijing,began to arrive.  By the mid to late 1980s, Shanghai and Beijing style restaurants started showing up in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent, San Francisco.  This arrival of authentic non-Cantonese food in Los Angeles is what has led Los Angeles to become the clear leader in Chinese food in the US, particularly in the past decade, as the depth and breadth of these regional cuisines in Los Angeles has been unmatched. 

 

After a century a half where Chinese food in America was largely synonymous with Cantonese food, the full range of Chinese food, from Sichuan to Hunan, from Fujian to Shandong, and even the rare Wuhan and Lizhou, may be appreciated in Southern California.  Chinese restaurant chains such as Meizhou  Dongpo opened their first American locations in or near L.A. because they determined this is the place to be.  A food writer I know was stunned to find that China Taste, which opened in early 2017, offered Anhui style cuisine to Angelinos before it had reached Hong Kong.  Meanwhile, in barely five years, Los Angeles pioneers Chengdu Taste and Sichuan Impression  have turned Sichuan style food in America on its head with their modern new take on their cuisine. And the presence of the "626 generation" millennial Chinese American tastemakers, continually ups the ante.

 

I'll add some anecdotal evidence.    This past Chinese New Year, the San Francisco Chronicle put out a special Chinese food section, including an article on how San Francisco now lags behind in the Chinese food scene.  Yours truly is quoted as saying ”The San Francisco Bay area is still five years behind Los Angeles when it comes to Chinese food.”  So maybe that isn’t objective proof but the article goes on to quote two food writers who cover Chinese food in LA and SF as being in agreement.  And most importantly, there is agreement from a San Francisco Chinese restauranteur, who in referring to the flood of Mainland China based restaurants opening in Los Angeles says that “Los Angeles is a testing ground for a lot of Chinese restauranteurs.  If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. 

 

One last point. Occasionally I like to take a group vacation tour designed to attract Chinese from across the US and Canada, as it provides an interesting mix of traveling companions.  Quickly the discussion turns to Chinese food, and when talking to Bay Area tour members, I frequently hear the same comments.  “Chinese food in LA is better than the Bay Area, and I like to drive down to LA occasionally on weekends for Chinese food.”  Strangely, sometimes the particular LA destination mentioned will be puzzling to me—sometimes it’s a place I wouldn’t bother go to, but that probably just reflects the depth of Los Angeles Chinese food.  Meanwhile, it’s probably been 20 years since anybody I knew in LA has said they’re driving to the Bay Area just to get better Chinese food. 

 

Mind you I’m not saying San Francisco Chinese food is bad.  The dim sum there is substantially better than LA (though L.A. keeps getting better).  I have a few other favorite Bay Area restaurants that my family loves to visit.   But right now, across the board, there is no question in my mind who is number 1.  The home team wins across the board.