Chinese food - what do you like?

http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2003/111303/resto.html

HA

the Americans are so unsophisticated with their terrible hamburgers and hot dogs

I kinda think Tex Mex, as much as I love it, is way less sophisticated. I've been to some FANCY chinese places.

there are many different types of chinese cooking styles, off the top of my head:

cantonese
hunan
nan king
shanghai
peking
szechuan
taiwanese

i'm sure if you type a few of these into google you could find a good breakdown on the variations between the many regions.

i definitely prefer the authentic places (ie, i'm the only gwai lo in the place), but every once in a while I'll try some fusion or watered down american style place.

Milk Tea - Classic or Dud?

Plain steamed rice is beyond classic, though.

Crap Americanized Chinese food is teh suck, but occasionally I get cravings for the grease and MSG. My favorite more-or-less Chinese dish is Singapore rice noodles.

One of the places nearby makes a really good salmon & ginger dish. So I recommend that, if you are ever here.

And another vote for fried chilli beef

search: Turnip cake (a dim sum); Choi Sum in oyster sauce; Lotus root soup; Fried Dough Cheung Fun; Century Egg and Lean Pork Congee; Char Siu pastry; Stewed Sea Cucumber; Drunken Chicken; Hainanese Chicken Rice.

Anyway, in no particular order:

Szechaun Pepper & Five Spice Roasted Pork Belly (ultra yum, recipe given on request)
Stir Fried Pak Choy
Deep Fried Salt and Pepper Squid
Steamed Rice
Noodle Broths
Peking Crispy Duck with Pancakes
Egg Fried Rice
Mongolian Minced Lamb with Lettuce
Toffee Apples

Lunch anyone?

PHWOAR. I love congee soooo much, it's the best comfort food ever. Also, ho fun roll dim sum things: lovely and slimy and full of tasty things. As part of (restaurant) dinner on Saturday we had king prawns fried in the most lovely garlicky chilli sauce with little crunchy bits of celery in it. Also the egg fried rice had more prawns in it. I'm going back to that place and soon.

:-X

there is a thread in the archives that details my displeasure for this particular dish (aka "hundred year old egg").

Liz, which restaurant was that?

there's this new restaurant in chinatown (london) called Cafe de Hong Kong, which is my new favourite for an authentic Hong Kong fast food experience. they have these totally MSGd western-type food (spaghetti/steaks etc) but done in a HK way, plus it's the only place in london with nice bubble drinks. it's nearly always packed with HK kids.

Haha, I know exactly what you mean! There are a few of these in SF... S&E on 19th/Taraval is the first that comes to mind. Much more popular after 1am than before.

London needs a good Hunan in Chinatown or Queensway.

Here's what I like:

Crab and coriander steamed dumpling
Shrimp shumai in spicy broth
DEEP FRIED SOFT SHELL CRAB IN SALT AND CHILI

yes that place is great! it's inspired by the "Cafe de Coral" chain in Hong Kong i think

hoisin green beans

tommy's wok in sausalito

I also like guo tie/grilled dumplings and iced red bean drink!

or for the truly lazy person, buy frozen wontons and just boil'em. add msg flavouring to the boiled water and you have yummy wonton soup.

ACK! that still has to be one of the wrongest things ever to appear on ilx.

aw i need to find that instant noodles thread.. but this stuff is the staple diet of hongkongnians (although the food is japanese)

http://www.mountfuji.co.uk/acatalog/5083.gif

*which I like as I have no delusions of grandeur when it comes to food.

Posted on Wed, Apr. 12, 2006

An all-American: The Chinese restaurant

The popular and abundant eateries have always been about more than food, as a museum show points out.
By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer

Today you can find a Chinese restaurant in practically every American city and town, from Absecon to Anchorage and everywhere in between.

About 36,000 dot the landscape - more than the number of McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger Kings combined.

"The Chinese restaurant," says Cynthia Little, director of interpretive programming at the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia, "has really become as American as apple pie."

How that happened, what it means, and why it matters is the focus of a flavorful new exhibition at the museum that examines the Chinese restaurant and its multiple roles, only one of which is the preparation and serving of food.

The show, "Have You Eaten Yet? The Chinese Restaurant in America," reveals the humble eatery as family hub, child's playground, employment center, immigration conduit, and, perhaps most of all, intersection of white and Asian America, each one influencing the other.

On loan from the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York, "Have You Eaten Yet?" tells its story through oral histories, menus and other memorabilia, showing how local restaurants such as the legendary Cathay Tea Garden on Chestnut Street helped introduce Chinese cuisine to the country.

"It adapted to American tastes and American desires," says cocurator Cynthia Lee, MoCA's deputy director of programs. The people who ran the restaurants were savvy businesspeople who "understood what people wanted, and how to play up certain ideas about Chinese culture."

•

Most of the Chinese who immigrated to the United States during the mid-1800s knew little about the restaurant business, but they quickly became acquainted with the discrimination that confined them to the jobs that white workers didn't want, laboring as launderers and cooks. By the turn of the century, entrepreneurial immigrants had parlayed those beginnings into a business niche.

Opening a restaurant required little in the way of start-up costs, and prices could be kept down through the free or low-wage labor of family members, says Grace Kao, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, she says, owning a business created a means of upward mobility.

A portrait of Henry Tinchin Loo hangs at the exhibition's entrance, and in it he looks every bit the prosperous Western businessman, dressed in white shirt, tie and cufflinks. Loo opened the Little Paris in New York, started the Shangri-La in Beverly, N.J., and, by the mid-1960s, was running the Orient at 264 S. 11th St. in Philadelphia.

Loo and his contemporaries knew that to survive, they needed to appeal to their American clientele.

First, they altered traditional Chinese recipes to cater to American palates, avoiding unusual meats and adding sweeteners. Second, knowing that customers wanted more than food - they wanted an experience - proprietors designed their restaurants to promote an exoticized vision of Chinese people and culture.

It was a delicate balance, the exhibition shows. If the unusual strayed into the strange, customers would be put off. A restaurant had to simultaneously offer mystique and accessibility.

Restaurant owners set out chopsticks - along with diagrams showing how to use them. Placemats became small billboards to explain Chinese family traditions.

Menus became more than lists of meals and prices - they became communications documents, the artwork reinforcing the idea of the exotic, the text a way for the owners to introduce themselves. Some businessmen even included their own photos and autobiographies. And some, the exhibition shows, pursued that presentation into self-parody.

Some wrote menus in pidgin English, praising their chef as a "numba one China cook" and pleading, "Please you no bling liquor to my place." One named his eatery the "Led Looster Lestaurant." The China Doll, a New York nightclub and restaurant, sought to lure patrons with a production called Slant Eyed Scandals.

"Not everyone played that game, but some did," Lee says. "It was playing up on what they perceived as the public, mainstream view of Chinese: 'This is a touristic experience for you, and you're going to get it.' "

•

For the people who worked there, the restaurants were simultaneously places of toil and joy.

As a child, Florence Trinh says, she loved being in her father's restaurant, Happy Paradise, at 10th and Race. That's where she got to see her parents, who worked six- and seven-day weeks.

Her father started out working at a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, then at another on City Avenue, saving enough money to open the Happy Paradise in the late 1960s. Several years later, he opened a bigger place a block away, Happy Garden, and the family moved into an apartment upstairs.

Trinh could operate a cash register by the time she was 6, and she worked at Happy Garden until she graduated from high school.

"I look back at it and I think it did me good, because it gave me a good work ethic," says Trinh, who now lives in Marlton. "I saw how hard my parents had to work for what we got." Josephine Park had a similar experience. In the 1980s, when she was growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., she and her sister worked in their mother's restaurant, the Fu Shou. They did everything from washing dishes to waiting tables.

The Fu Shou had eight tables, and they were usually full.

"It was a real success," says Park, who now teaches Asian American studies at Penn. "We only stopped out of fatigue."

That was the time when Chinese restaurants began to see something new: Chinese customers. They arrived from across China, part of a new wave of immigration that followed President Richard Nixon's trip to China.

As customers, these newcomers wanted authentic cuisines. As businesspeople, they began opening their own restaurants, often specializing in regional dishes. Today there's no such thing as a typical Chinese restaurant. They range from small, take-out counters in city neighborhoods to upscale restaurants that proffer Shanghai cuisine.

"Now the whole issue is 'authentic' - and what exactly is 'authentic'? And really who cares, if it's good?" says the Atwater Kent's Little.

"It's a bittersweet story. I would like for people to really see this as part of the American journey."

This is possible. I remember reading an article about Korean immigrants to Philadelphia being set up with their own grocery stores, carrying the same things (not exclusively Korean or even Asian foods, but some of that). I vaguely remember that they kind of got shuffled around according to the needs of the organizataion, so that they might be managing a store at some point, but then they'd have to move on to make way for someone else.

This was peapod leaf, as it turns out. I found another restaurant that makes it and theirs is fresher and better. I wonder if what I was hearing as "pidi" was really "pea leaf"?

i think they all just have the same suppliers. they set them up with all the same stuff. it's a lot easier that way.

i always get really angry when i read this quote!

Nobody outside L.A. may ever have heard of the stuff, but pork pump -- basically 2 pounds of Chinese braised hog lard with a fist-size lump of soft meat at the core -- is the quintessence of sweet, heavy Shanghainese cooking, perfumed with garlic and star anise, flavored with rock sugar, and approximately the molecular weight of plutonium. The term pork "pump" supposedly originated as a typo on the original menu of Chinatown's Mon Kee (pork rump was the intention, one guesses), but the dish, and the name, soon spread to serious Chinese restaurants all over the San Gabriel Valley. The definitive version, served on a bed of snow-pea leaves at the splendid modern-style Shanghainese restaurant Lake Spring Cuisine in Monterey Park, is as luscious as the finest foie gras, and though it feeds 10 people, you may be tempted to polish it off by yourself.

1) rice porridge, dried beef stuff that tastes like corned beef a bit.

2) a duck head and two duck necks, with a thin clear duck broth to sip along with them.

3) mixed up beef bones braised in a thick sweet sauce that tasted a bit like root beer.

4) a plate of steamed crawfish, cold salted duck, and steamed rice.

dunno if they'd be up to your standards, but they're on the menu at Noodles 28 down the street from me

This is the shape I'm looking for, but I don't like this thick, bubbly pastry. It reminds me of toad skin, for one thing, and for another it seems to hold a lot of grease...? Is there a thinner, smoother alternative?

that sounds like a variation on hainanese chicken rice, which is chinese/singaporean (i think) and often found at malaysian restaurants.

there are several desi style chinese restaurants in vancouver. not sure if they've been adressed yet here; it's a fantastic north indian/mongolian cuisine. the best pakoras i've had!

hot pepper chicken i mean DAMN

I found a Chinese restaurant in Kenya that has excellent mapo dofu!!!!!!

XLB

so uh I dunno how many ILXors are in the Philly area but me and my family just found this really amazing & authentic sichuan restaurant:

http://njyangzi.com/

they're located in a really shitty area though & have high prices in the outback steakhouse etc. range but are definitely worth it. I dunno if they pull the whole "chinese food for chinese people, american chinese food for americans" thing so you should maybe try to tell them that you want the Real Deal but man oh man this place is awesome.

they're not doing so well so thought I'd put a word out for them, I've talked to the owners and they are from Sichuan and they are really nice people and it would be a shame if they went out of business.

I mean look at that bowl of water cooked fish on the frontpage!!

http://pic.ahradio.com.cn/0/00/04/04/40453_278465.jpg

this isn't the 蒜泥白肉 from the restaurant it's a picture I found on the internet but it's pretty close to what you would get if you ordered 蒜泥白肉 from them LOOK AT ALL THAT SPICY GARLIC

that is like whoa

this is my favorite thing to order from the joint near me: sichuan cold noodles
http://static.flickr.com/48/162189227_f1e72ab8d0_o.jpg

you can tell that those are some house-made, fresh n toothsome noodles

what's the name of that jellyfish dish that usually comes in the first several courses of a wedding buffet?

i've been getting some absurd cravings for it lately, there's this place in berkeley that's known for it. can't remember the name of it though.

halp.

Are you supposed to eat the broth in the water cooked fish or not? There's a place here that makes it and the broth is like pure oil.

post a pic SS? this one?

http://food.tank.tw/userfiles/image/SeaFood/chili_seaSkin.jpg

eephus - nope! it's supposed to be all oil. it's not really a broth.

yup!!! sometimes has beef or pork?

*cravings*

the chinese name is 海蜇皮 which means, uh, jelly fish skin

eephus - nope! it's supposed to be all oil. it's not really a broth.

So you DON'T eat it, right?

dont think so, you would be crazy to

dyao, thank you for 4am droolz.

thanks dyao!

gotta get my ass to chinatown this week, tbrr.

Thanks, dyao, I left a bowl full of oil and was wondering whether everybody in the restaurant was like "why didn't that guy finish his dinner?"

I went to my old college town the other week and did NOT have time to go to Best Americanized Chinese Restaurant Ever for their specialty crab rangoons. ;_;

always heard that you werent meant to eat the oil

<3 good chinese food so much

I took some pics when I went last week

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4887027714_d8d4225155_z.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4141/4887027586_2bfd9af8b0_z.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/4887027438_5214ef2057_z.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4887027276_48bab4246e_z.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4078/4887027014_9fb72a2b10.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4101/4887026716_4829f70a6f_z.jpg

oh fuck you!!!!!!!

Is anyone else madly in love with those $0.75/ea sesame pancakes you can get on Eldridge St. in Chinatown NYC (and seemingly nowhere else)? Because they are sort of my life right now.

Just found a place that serves a patty of egg foo yong on top of a burger, super authentic and delicious.

daaaaaaamn that looks good

srsly dyao that is some perfect lookin food

That looks delicious!

Most Americanized Chinese food is so awful that it's sort of put me off eating Chinese for a while now. Bad cockroach experience in NYC chinatown also doesn't help the way I feel about it in general. The place SS sent the Boston ILX group was great though - will definitely go back there.

My favorite crappy but oh so good "Chinese" food dish I can only get in England. Noodles and chips with curry sauce. OMG. WANT SOME NOW.

thanks dudes! don't mean to be That Guy who takes pictures of everything he eats but I want to get the word out that there's this really good chinese restaurant in south jersey and I'd be super bummed to see them close down.

Very nice dyao. I took this thread with me to read when I went to get lunch but accidentally left your photos on the printer and found them dumped at the top of the 'unclaimed work' pile when I got back, so word is out round these parts too.

The place SS sent the Boston ILX group was great though - will definitely go back there.

haha i was back there last weekend (super wasted at 3 am)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH_as-ohrkE

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/11/wcco_dog_meat_chinatown_market_story_new_york_post.php

my favourite youtubers chronicling their lives in east asia are probably serpentza and laowhy86 and i always forget to post their stuff on here

they have a joint channel and now they're looking for the best chinese food in the usa (hint: they're all on the west coast)

first episode: great wow in san diego for jiaozi and baozi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFAejbtB5W0

looks like it'll be a great series

episode 2 (3 is also up)

still in southern california!

shancheng lameizi in rowland heights and a tiny bit of history on the chinese hot pot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSYOW-2eg2k

also lamb fetussss

peking duck in rowland heights! (los angeles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUjQSPgkwLA

Love this account

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTa_T2pVwuk

My favorite food youtube channel. It’s my only patreon donation.