No you cannot.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not doubting you can tell the difference between authentic cuisine at good, local restaurants. But if you’re telling me that if you sampled the chow mein from the 5 different Chinese take out places that leave menus in your mailbox everyday, then I’m guessing that means you can tell whether or not the primary or secondary chef at McDonald’s prepared your Big Mac.
Don’t remind me. I prepped a bunch of home grown serranos the other day, gloveless as usual, then forgot to wash my hands. This fact was brought home to me when I rubbed my eyes a half hour later. :smack:
Well, authenticity and goodness are subjective.
They’re certainly independent, locally-owned places, preparing their food from whole ingredients; they shell their own shrimp, cut up their own broccoli. I see them doing that kind of stuff. They get things like hoisin and chili paste and vinegar in huge bulk containers, so they must be making their own sauces. This kind of cooking is not comparable to fast food chains with rigidly standardized components and assembly procedures. Even beyond ingredients, wok work reflects the hand of a cook in a way that electronically-timed burger presses cannot. If you don’t see that, I submit that you’re probably the one who needs to find a better Chinese carryout.
After noticing some cyclic variation in a favorite dish at one place, I asked them whether they had different chefs on different days and was told, yes, the main guy is off on such-and-such days. Since then, my assumption has been that this is a typical arrangement for places that are open long hours, seven days, and have ascribed similar variation to the same cause.
Yes. Chinese carryout places may have 90-95% similar menus the same way that a bunch of local pizzerias, local diners, and local mexican places each have similar menu items within their group. The quality of the individual menu items certainly isn’t uniform though. Chicken with broccoli from 5 different chinese places isn`t going to be any more similar than a meatball parmesan sandwich from 5 pizzerias. It may be that in each case, 3 are awful, 1 is average, and 1 is great, but they won’t be indistinguishable.
I’m really just reiterating what some others have said, but I would vote for “supply and demand.” You’re going to sell a lot of General Tso chicken, Orange Chicken, Beef and Broccoli, Lo Mein, etc., to the majority of American diners. Coming to a Chinese takeout place and not NOT finding General Tso’s chicken would be like going to a Mexican restaurant in America and not finding burritos.
I don’t eat Big Macs, but there are three hole in the wall Chinese places in my community, and the dishes that I eat from each are distinct, in appearance and taste. If presented with General Tso’s Tofu from each restaurant, I could tell you which restaurant prepared each dish by appearance alone. I could distinguish between the three by taste on the General Tso’s sauce, as well as the sauce they use for cashew tofu/chicken, and there’s no similarity whatsoever between the dish that each calls “Buddha’s Delight” which is “the” signature vegetarian dish, and something I won’t eat from two of them. Chow mein is chow mein, (and the vegetable base is probably purchased prepared in large bags, I’d wager) but there are other dishes that are certainly demonstrably different.
I feel your (lack of) pain, as I adore chili peppers and no restaurant can make it hot enough; I have to do it myself to get it right.
No earwax-melting for me; I aim for ass-melting dishes. 
Curious, where in America do the posters and OP live? It is not all the same where I grew up. But I mean, I grew up in a place where the Asian population is greater than the white population.
Yes, only in Chinese. Now would be a good time to drag a friend along who can read Chinese. Or you can see what other people around you are ordering and ask the waiter to identify the dishes that look good to you. And the thing about Chinese clientele…
I wouldn’t say a large Chinese clientele is an indication of how good the food is, in terms of quality. However, it would probably tell you that the establishment in question serves stuff other than orange chicken and sweet and sour pork. Maybe it specializes in cuisine from certain regions, or certain items that can’t be found for miles around in this country
When I say Americanized Chinese food, I don’t just mean the way that the food is cooked; I also mean the average American’s conception of what Chinese food constitutes. Chinese people don’t go out to eat general tso’s chicken. It probably doesn’t even register on their minds as Chinese food. It’s what Americans eat, really.
True, adaptations can taste delicious as well, but I have yet to come across tasty Americanized Chinese food. If Chinese food does not suit your taste, I’d recommend trying the Japanese adaptation of Chinese food. It’s pretty good - refined, yet full of flavor. Most of my Chinese/Taiwanese/HK friends love it.
There are a couple things I find helps with the Thai places. Ordering “Thai spicy” is one. Another is ordering it “pet pet” (or “phet phet”, but with an aspirated “p,” not an “f” sound) or “pet ma.” I don’t speak Thai, but I’ve learned those phrases to help me convince Thai restaurants I know what I’m talking about. Usually, I just say “I want it Thai spicy – pet pet.” I’ve even said straight up, albeit in a lighthearted manner, “Pretend I’m not white–I want it Thai spicy.” All those seem to work. One of my favorite Thai dishes is gai pad grapao (Thai holy basil chicken), and I like that particular dish ungodly spicy. Ordering it with a fried egg on top (which is a common way of ordering it among Thais, although it’s usually not on the menu as such) along with “Thai spicy/pet-pet” usually gets me exactly what I want.
What exactly about the most authentic Chinese dishes would most Americans not like? Unusual ingredients like say urchin? Different ways of preparation or cooking? Or would they be acceptable to American palates, just without the name recognition of General Tso?
We know we get the same food that the large Chinese clientele get at the hole in the wall place we go to since it is all out behind the counter, It is 99% take out, with a few tables. We also know they don’t get their food from Sysco because there are large hunks of meat hanging from the walls. They sometimes have General’s chicken, but not often. They more likely have nice riblets and spicy eggplant dishes.
We have a friend originally from Hong Kong who has taken us to restaurants with Hong Kong connections in both NY and SF Chinatowns - and the food there is very different indeed. Both those are classy places, not hole in the wall ones.
Considering the homogeneity of western Chinese food, I’m amazed that their aren’t any (many?) Chinese chains. I would have thought it would be a perfect model for chains or franchising.
There was also a much more comprehensive thread than that one and more recent. I can’t find it, but it seems that the just of that thread is that for many of these restaurants they use a central supply and a sort of tried and true standardized handbook, businessplan, and recipebook. Sort of like franchising without the franchises. My big complaint and theory for the eveness of style with most of these carry-out chinese places and chinese buffets is the type and low quality of their sauce recipes. This handbook has bulk recipes for “mock” sauces that are truly substandard. Lots of basic sugar, ketchup, and soy sauce, as opposed to more classical bases of oyster sauce, and black bean sauce, and XO sauce, etc… The sauce recipes are often missing ingredients or entirely different than the classical recipe.
The sauces they use have more in common with teriyaki than anything else. I used to hate and was pissed ordering “garlic sauce” once from one of these places nd getting what amounted to a premade sauce of sugar and soy sauce, with a couple of cloves of garlic to the gallon.
Panda Express.
I’m in the UK, so I don’t know them. But just one?
There are other chains. P.F. Chang’s and Pei Wei spring to mind.
The government of China is behind this. Some high official developed a list of things Americans like to eat and dictated that all carry-outs (and buffets) in the US serve the identical dishes. I think the main plotters came from Szechuan.
But feeding the American public MSG is not the true goal. Each of these venues serves as a conduit for slave trade and importing illegal aliens to keep a watch on whether Americans are squandering their dollars. This money being spent on something other than pizza is actually due the Chinese in loan payments.
(The illegal alien part is one I’ve actually pondered while observing the dynamics in a local restaurant where all the young waitresses look absolutely wretched and if one should try to engage any of them in conversation the hostess will immediately rush over and cut the attempt short sending the girl to the kitchen. “They can’t speak English.”)
In your heart you know I’m right.
Neither of them are really fast food, though. Pei Wei is pretty close, but it’s still the kind of place I feel I should leave a tip at.
There may be other Chinese chains than Panda Express, but I can’t think of them offhand and they may be regional anyway. I know there’s a ton of Japanese chains in Phoenix, but I don’t know how widespread they are.
Yea, there’s a regional chain around this area, whose name slips me at the moment. They have several stand-alone stores with drive thrus and used to have a couple of mall food court locations. But there is also a very similar phenotype, which I believe is what the OP is referring to, little Mom and Pops/family restaurants that sort of operate out of suburban strip mall, brick and mortars- the Happy Wok, Hong Kong Village, Jade Garden, etc. Some are better than others, but there are a few that just kind of go real “white bread” LCD Chinese food depending on where they are at, and if they are following this business plan I mentioned, and I also assume where they are from in China, and whether or not they have any skills or family legacy in the culinary arts,