The Chinese Buffet Mysteries, Solved

The Chinese Buffet Mysteries, Solved - Menuism Dining Blog, September 10, 2018

 

With a few high end exceptions, no self-respecting foodie would be caught dead in a buffet.  And with Chinese buffets in the United States largely associated with “cheap” Chinese food, culinary interest in these establishments is even lower.  

 

 

How I Came To Love Chinese Buffets 

 

Even though I don’t classify myself as a foodie, I used to disdain Chinese buffets for a different reason as stuffing yourself at a Chinese buffet would mean a lost opportunity to eat at two more deserving venues.  But then in the early 2000s, some really outstanding Chinese buffets opened up in the Los Angeles area, such as the pricey weekend buffets at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Universal City and in the San Gabriel Hilton, followed by the freestanding West Coast Seafood buffet in Hacienda Heights.   Suddenly you could get great Chinese food and stuff yourself at the same time.  While all these venues pretty much eventually closed down leaving the field to lower quality providers, I was hooked on the concept and somehow became somewhat associated with Chinese buffets as a discussion topic.  Indeed, when the late Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathon Gold was asked on Twitter about Chinese buffets, he deferred and specifically told the questioner to contact me.

 

The Chinese buffet mysteries

 

 

About three years ago I wrote my initial Menuism article on Chinese buffets, which focused in part on the practice of most Chinese buffets in the Los Angeles area giving themselves Japanese names, and pondering why on a per capita basis Chinese buffets were dozens, if not hundreds of times more common east of the Mississippi River than they were in California.  While I came up with some potential reasons about why Chinese buffets were comparatively scarce in Los Angeles as well as the rest of California, there was nothing close to a definitive conclusion.  

 

Meanwhile, around the same time, Charlotte Magazine writer Greg Lacour  became fixated on Chinese buffets in the United States, even more so when he could not find any solid information on how many there were, (though subsequent estimates put the number of Chinese buffets in the United States in the thousands), why they seemed most prevalent in the South, and why they appeared to be so much more commonly seen than twenty years previously.  When he contacted me for help, I was of little assistance in answering his specific questions.   I could tell him that my first Chinese buffet encounter was around 1980 at The Golden Shark in Monterey Park, California, and that during a visit to Atlanta in 2000, I had been stunned to pick up a hotel room tourist magazine to find it peppered with Chinese buffet ads.  So at least I had a rough timeline for the spread of this genre.

 

Lacour's article quoted Smithsonian Institution curator Cedric Yeh, whom I had previously dealt with in connection with his Smithsonian exhibit on Chinese restaurants in America, that Chinese buffets were a good business model for Chinese immigrant restaurant owners because of the lower labor costs.  This cost savings arose from Chinese buffets not requiring as many servers, and particularly servers having significant English language skills.  This lower labor cost more than offset the higher cost of a higher rate of food consumption by the customers.  Lacour also interviewed the owners of a local Chinese buffet, a husband and wife team who immigrated from Fujian province in the mid-1990s.  The wife, Linda Shi, first settled in New York, while her husband Jimmy Lam first settled in Philadelphia.

 

 

The a-ha moment 

 

By happenstance I recently picked up Greg Lacour’s Charlotte Magazine article again and as I read it, all the blanks from both Chinese buffet articles started filling themselves in.    

 

• Where would non-English speaking Chinese buffet workers most likely originate from?  Well, from Fujian province.  Like almost all Fujianese immigrants they would come via Manhattan Chinatown.    
• What Chinese restaurant owners would be most attracted to a low cost operating model?  Why, these very same people from Fujian province who started out as workers dispatched out of Manhattan Chinatown in a Fujianese owned Chinese restaurant and who worked their way up to managerial and ownership positions.    
• Where are Fujianese restaurants most greatly concentrated?  East of the Mississippi River, and certainly not at all in California which is too far away from the Fujianese bus lines in Manhattan's Little Fuzhou.  

• When did Chinese buffets start to proliferate in the eastern United States?  Well nobody knows exactly when, but it was most likely in the 1990s when the migration of Fujianese workers to Manhattan Chinatown shifted into overdrive, and which fits neatly into my previously noted timeline.

So now, we have the complete picture.  As the Fujianese migrated to Manhattan Chinatown and radiated out to all of the communities in the East, Midwest and South that connected by bus into the Fujianese section of Manhattan Chinatown, they came to dominate the Chinese restaurant industry in cities and towns east of the Mississippi River.  And in so doing, they discovered that the Chinese buffet was an excellent business model, leading to an explosion of this Chinese restaurant genre, particularly in the South. 

So as it turns out, mysteries about Monday night wedding banquets in Manhattan Chinatown, the Hilary Clinton/New York Chinatown connection, the rise of restaurants named “Fuleen” in the eastern United States, and the proliferation of Chinese buffets in the South, all have the same ending. It’s all about Fujianese restaurant owners and workers who started coming to the eastern United States in the 1990s and dominate the Chinese restaurant industry there today.