Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

  One of the first articles I ever wrote for Menuism was entitled "Why Do Some Chinese Restaurants Change Their Names So Often" .  In that article, one of the reasons cited why Chinese restaurants seemingly changed their names for no reason at all was a sales tax dodging scheme.  In this scam, after not reporting all of your sales, you then dissolve the corporation operating the restaurant, then open up a similar or identical restaurant at the same location, but in a new corporation and operating under a new restaurant name.   Practically speaking, this reduces the period of time that the government has to catch up with you for sales tax evasion.    Who knows how many Chinese restaurants stiffed the local authorities of how much sales tax over the years?  No documented cases of this scheme exist, either because the restaurants got away with it, or there was no publicity involved if they were apprehended.  However a longtime Chinatown CPA...

  There's Been Half a Century of Iconic Chinese Restaurant Openings in Los Angeles David Chan | October 10, 2017 | 7:51am   Chinese food in the United States was almost exclusively of the rural Toishanese/Cantonese variety from the time it came here after the Gold Rush until the 1960s. It wasn’t until the change in American immigration laws in the late ’60s that large numbers of Chinese people with other backgrounds came to the United States and ushered in the modern era of Chinese-American dining. Yet even before the effect of the new immigration laws took hold in the late 1960s, there were watershed Chinese restaurant openings in Los Angeles that signaled subtle changes in local Chinese cuisine: While Chinese immigrants were not assigned an expanded quota until the late ’60s, there was an intermediate period of increased non-quota immigration of Chinese people after World War II. In 1962, Twin Dragon opened on Pi...

  Chinese Restaurant Chains Continue Their Rush to L.A. David R. Chan | October 30, 2017 | 10:01am Sometime in the 1990s, Los Angeles bested New York's reputation for having the best Chinese food in the United States. Of course, even as recently as five years ago most New Yorkers thought the idea preposterous, despite the broader range of regional Chinese cuisines, the inventive new restaurants and the panoply of wonderful new dishes that could be found in Los Angeles but not in New York. New York semi-officially surrendered on whose Chinese food was better two years ago when Mark Bittman of The New York Times admitted that there was no Chinese food better in the United States than Southern California's. (There are undoubtedly still uninformed New York holdouts still out there, just as there are still members of the Flat Earth Society.) Perhaps the most telling indication of the Chinese food...

  Fine Chinese Dining Has Arrived in Los Angeles David R. Chan | June 1, 2017 | 6:10am     Despite the fact that Los Angeles is the undisputed leader in Chinese cuisine in the United States, it has historically been lacking in one area: upscale Chinese restaurants serving food that would just as easily be found in China. Restaurants such as WP24, Chinois on Main and Mr. Chow may be upscale, but few critics (or Chinese diners) would consider them authentic. Our one true experience with such upscale authentic Chinese dining, the Beverly Hills branch of Hakkasan, folded ignominiously after a relatively short period of time, as did Chi Lin (on the Sunset Strip), which was possibly borderline authentic.     Of course, there is a lot of expensive, authentic Chinese food to be found in Los Angeles, given the large number of well-heeled Chinese residents here. However, these rich Chinese in the San Ga...

  Finding Hidden Chinese Food Around USC Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 6:19 a.m. By David R. Chan       One of the most significant trends in Chinese dining in the United States in the past decade is the appearance of "authentic" Chinese food near college campuses all over the country; restaurants that serve the culinary needs of the 300,000 students from mainland China studying at U.S. universities. The current generation of international Chinese students is different from past generations due to their wealth and high likelihood of returning to China when school is over. Authentic non-Cantonese Chinese restaurants have popped up anywhere there's a university with any concentration of students from China. Even where two years ago there was a paucity of Chinese options near UCLA, as my L.A. Weekly article described , suddenly there are a plethora of choices there. But even though the University of S...