Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

One of my earliest articles for Menuism was about how unique Chinese dishes evolved in specific cities in the United States, such as cashew chicken in Springfield, MO, the St. Paul sandwich in St. Louis, and war shu gai in Detroit.  While in New Orleans last year, I posted a picture from a Chinese restaurant there on Instagram, and I received a couple of replies suggesting that I try a unique New Orleans dish called Yakamein.  Unfortunately I was only in New Orleans for a short period and didn't get a chance to search for the dish.   But Yakamein did sound intriguing since it seemed to be another unique regional Chinese American dish like the others I had written about in the original Menuism article.     Wikipedia  describes it as a stewed beef noodle soup, often served in Creole restaurants with creole spices and seasonings, half a hard boiled egg, green onions and chili seasoning.  More interestingly, Yakamein is more often served at non-...

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...