Is Montana’s Chinese food outpacing L.A.? In at least one way, yes.

 

Is Montana’s Chinese food outpacing L.A.? In at least one way, yes. - Menuism Dining Blog, June 17, 2019

West Yellowstone, Montana offers authentic Chinese food options that Los Angeles Chinatown doesn’t. Let me say that again: You can eat Chinese dishes in Montana that you can’t eat in downtown L.A.

I am in no way suggesting that Montana is any kind of Chinese dining destination. However, this improbable but true statement combines two recurring topics I have addressed: the Mainland Chinese cuisine and the effect of Chinese nationals across the United States.

Los Angeles Chinatown still serves predominantly Cantonese food

In most Chinese-American communities, Mainland Chinese regional cuisines are the current face of the restaurant food scene. In all of Los Angeles Chinatown, however, the only Mainland restaurant you’ll find is Qin West. This paucity of Mainland regional cuisines sets Los Angeles Chinatown apart from every other Chinese community in the United States. The nearby San Gabriel Valley, for example, is heavily Mainland-oriented.

Other American Chinatowns, such as Flushing, New York, demonstrate the emergence of Mainland cuisine. And even where Cantonese restaurants remain plentiful, such as San Francisco Chinatown, you’ll still find a good number of Mainland Chinese eateries. Manhattan’s Chinatown also enjoys a significant Cantonese food presence. But immigrants from Fujian province, a Mainland group whose cuisine is uncommon outside of New York, have eclipsed it.

Los Angeles Chinatown remains a conspicuous anomaly, due in good part to its heavy concentration of Hispanic diners. They continue to crave the older-style Cantonese L.A. offers, helping to perpetuate what might otherwise be a dying cuisine.

Chinese nationals have also shaped the Chinese food scene in America

In past articles, I’ve discussed the effect of  mainland Chinese students at American universities. These students have helped proliferate authentic Mainland Chinese restaurants and food trucks in and around dozens, if not hundreds, of university towns. Cities like Fayetteville, Arkansas, Ithaca, New York, Iowa City, had never been exposed to authentic Chinese food of any kind.

I have also mentioned the effect of Mainland Chinese tourists in triggering the first-time establishment of authentic Chinese food options. For example, Chinese tourists heavily patronize regional shopping malls in and around Los Angeles, including Hollywood’s City Walk at Universal Studios, Glendale’s Americana, and Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza.

Authentic Mainland cuisine also appears in more general U.S. tourist attractions, such as California’s Monterey Peninsula and Maine’s Bar Harbor. Of course, Monterey and Bar Harbor are also within hailing distance of San Francisco and Boston, respectively. Each of these major cities has large Asian populations. 

So how did West Yellowstone make this list?

At first blush, it seems improbable that remote West Yellowstone could offer authentic Chinese food, so far from Chinese communities and even sources of ingredients like Sichuan peppercorns.

But given the strong attraction of Yellowstone National Park, it becomes less surprising that an enterprising restaurateur would appeal to Chinese visitors in the vicinity. Red Lotus, a mostly Americanized Chinese restaurant, added salt and pepper pork chops, hot bean paste tofu, lobster with ginger and green onion, and Chinese-style braised elk to its menu. Of course, except for the elk, Red Lotus probably didn’t offer anything that you couldn’t find in Los Angeles Chinatown.

What is perhaps more surprising is that authentic Chinese food in West Yellowstone didn’t stop with Red Lotus. At China Fun, you can enjoy Mainland favorites like pig intestines, hot boiled pork, and stir-fried potato slices, none of which you’d find in Los Angeles Chinatown. China Panda serves cumin chicken. Chinatown Restaurant serves a Sichuan-style menu with a separate section of five-spice bean curd dishes, both nonexistent in Los Angeles Chinatown.

With so many Chinese tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, Golden Dragon in Flagstaff, Arizona offers dozens of Sichuan and other Mainland dishes nowhere to be found in Los Angeles Chinatown. Meanwhile, Chinese visitors to Yosemite National Park can get their food fix in restaurants like China Delight in Oakhurst and China Station in Mariposa.

The fact that a town as isolated as West Yellowstone could be included in this list demonstrates a dramatic contrast. On one hand, you’ve got 150 years of Cantonese food in America that is still going strong in Los Angeles. On the other, the recent reversal of Mainland Chinese cuisines across the rest of Chinese America today.

 

 

 

 


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Thoughts On the 3.5 Yelp Star Rule For Chinese Restaurants

Image
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.
Read more

After 170 Years, Taishan Style Chinese Restaurants Are Opening Up In The United States

Image
  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
Read more

How The San Gabriel Valley Became A Mecca For Chinese Dining

Image
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
Read more