Have you ever noticed that the menus of the vast majority of small Mom-and-Pop Chinese carry-out restaurants are 90 - 99% identical? I realize there are certainly places that do not conform to this, but I’ve been all over the country and in every city or town I’ve ever visited I could easily find that exact same menu of standard American-Cantonese fare from a half-dozen different establishments. Even the “Chef’s Specialties” are always the same. You know what I’m talking about. And not only are the menu choices identical, for the most part the food is roughly the same as well-- and yes, there are definitely places where the overall quality can be wildly better/worse than others, but for the most part the food looks and tastes the same.
Can someone explain this? There’s more variety even in sandwich shops.
I’m not looking for a restaurant-by-restaurant comparison or examples of GREAT Chinese carryout in your city, I’m looking for an explanation of how different, totally unrelated restaurants in cities/towns across the country can have identical menus and food.
They all buy from the same supplier: Chang’s Restaurant Depot. That’s where they get the decor as well.
That is only semi-facetious. Most deal with the same major suppliers, which stock items from the same importers. The cooks all are trained in previous restaurants, so there is a continuity of dishes.
They are practically franchises, or at least in the same network.
Same distributor, business model, backers, etc. The best way to think of them as part of a franchise, but they don’t go with the same name, or organize ads.
They do use distributors that are common, common foods, ingredients, menus, menu pics… etc…
Look, the basic, strip-mall ‘Chinese take out’’ owner is a customer. Where does he, the customer looking for restaurant supplies, turn to get food, menus, supplies, pictures, art, etc? Well, for a big chunk of the USA, probably one big distributor in the North East, who has the standard menus, ingredients, calendars, wall deco and general business model to use. Right down to the soy packets and cookies.
Now, in major urban areas like Philly and NYC, you get everything from these ‘canned’ and ‘generic’ Chinese take out joints with standard/generic everything to full-blown gourmet, family owned places that roll and stuff everything themselves.
Out in suburbia, take out places are all you see, and all you see are take out places using the most basic, cost-effective, simple business model from the same distributor, who provides everything you see.
Bolding and enlarging mine. The facetious part is the (fictitious) name Chang’s Restaurant Depot – it’s a mild joke. The reason the statement is only semi-facetious is that the rest is essentially true – there are suppliers that essentially provide scads of Chinese restaurants with identical packages of menu items, photos of same, ingredients, accessories, etc.
In one, they serve large-grained yellow-colored rice cooked in some oil/salt that dries your mouth out something fierce, and their decor and signs are very white and backlit and their photos very generic. In the other, they serve smaller-grained white or brown-colored rice that is more hydrated, and their decor is more atmospheric and reminiscent of a traditional sit-down Chinese restaurant.
Occasionally, you’ll see the smaller rice in a more casual, brighter, more take-out place, but never the large yellow rice in a darker place.
Not all Chinese places are the same. There was a Wacky Wok in Marina Del Rey that not only had some unique dishes but had the old classics done in a fancier sort of way. The orange chicken, for example, was fried with a white batter, put on a plate and sprinkled with an orange glaze.
Three different restaurants come to mind, each has a different version of hot and sour soup. One had a delicious preparation for sweet and sour chicken that tasted infinitely better than the standard s&s fare. One has dishes “Governor’s Chicken” and “Lover’s Chicken” which I’ve not seen anywhere else. The third has wrinkled beans which I’ve not seen elsewhere.
I think the reason is simple…most Americans don’t know anything about, nor care anything about, actual Chinese cuisine. They want “Chinese food,” which is hugely Americanized. Americans are also, by and large, not adventurous eaters in general. We want things simple, predictable, and loaded with fat and sugar.
Note that I’m not holding myself above the rest…I love my local Chinese take-out dive, and I love my General Tso’s Chicken. But I know that I’m getting something engineered for simplicity, and I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m eating anything authentic.
My wife’s parents owned several Chinese restaurants in Chicago while she was growing up. (They are now retired.)
The food they make at home, for the family, is nothing like the food they made at the restaurants. At home they make authentic Chinese food, like what they knew growing up in China. In the restaurants they made what all the other Chinese restaurants make. Why? Because it’s what Americans expect, it’s what sells.
But there is a clear and obvious difference between burger and pizza joints. Any random person on the street would be able to tell that a burger from Five Guys and a burger from McDonalds came from different places, or a pizza from Dominoes and a pizza from Pizza Hut were not made by the same shop. OTOH get chicken lo mein from 10 different places and I guarantee you no one would be able to tell the difference.
Depends on where you live, really. If you live in a major city with a real Chinatown, there’s much more variety, because they’ve got restaurants catering to Chinese customers who want the real thing. If you live in the suburbs or large sections of the midwest, the customers are generally Americans.
I can certainly tell the difference between the products of different Chinese carryouts, and if I’ve become very familiar with a specific place, I can sometimes distinguish their primary and secondary chefs.
Local, independent Chinese carryouts are about as different from each other, and as similar, as local, independent restaurants following any other widely-recognized formula, such as pizzerias.
Five Guys and McDonalds are both chain restaurants. I guarantee you I could tell the difference between Yoshi’s, Tokyo Express and Kyoto Bowl, for example. But the only Chinese chain I can think of is Panda Express. If I go to a family-owned pizza place I’m pretty sure it’s going to be very similar to most other family-owned pizza places.
The urban/suburban divide is not nearly so stark. Many of the best Chinese restaurants are in the suburbs (see DC), maybe because the rent’s cheaper. The thing is, it’s hard to tell which is the bland Jade Pagoda stuff, and which has the good stuff; the presentation is basically the same. Itinerant chefs don’t make the job any easier.