Does anyone else think there are some significant regional differences in Chinese food in the United States?
A friend of mine once told me, back when I was thinking I wanted to live in Connecticut, that one of the things I would miss the most would be the Chinese food. He said that the quality drops significantly as soon as you go south of Massachusetts.
I just sort of shrugged that off, even though I probably eat more of that stuff than most people. “How different could it be?” I thought. Well, sure enough, during the course of the year that I was down there, I went out for some Chinese food.
He was right! I went to several Chinese restaurants in Connecticut, but none of them seemed as good to me as the ones from back home. I did make a few trips to Massachusetts while I was there, and found a Chinese restaurant near the border of the two states. That place had the familiar, delicious Chinese food that I have loved for as long as I could remember.
So what gives? Are there a lot of different regional variations in Chinese restaurant cooking in the USA?
You have to ask about chow mein and lo mein. One gets you a delicious stir fry dish with spaghetti-like pan fried noodles and the other gets you pig slop.
Whoa. The worst Chinese restaurant I’ve ever been to was near the AT&T Merrimack Valley Works in North Andover, Mass. They served bread. :eek:
I lived down the street from Joyce Chen’s in Cambridge, which was good, but I hardly consider Massachusetts the top of Chinese food.
There is quite a lot of difference between what was served in NJ and what is served in the Bay Area and what I grew up with in NY. Some of it is from regional difference, the Chinese restaurants I went to as a kid served Cantonese style food, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. And it is all different from what you get with the proper guide.
Well, the Chinese food is significantly better in Hawaii.
And Chinese buffets are delivered to every town in America by truck so are identical.
When I moved back to the mainland (in '98) with my wife who’d lived in Hawaii for 20 years (and Japan before that), she didn’t believe me that when we went to a Chinese restaurant in Oregon that they’d operate on the assumption that everybody would order and eat their own dishes with no sharing.
It is hard for me to say if there are huge regional differences since simultaneously to me traveling around the country more I think Chinese food in general has improved as access to more authentic flavors has spread along with acceptance.
That said, the worst Chinese food I’ve ever had remains from Cameron, Missouri, on September 20, 2001*.
They charged for chopsticks. I’m pretty sure the rice was Uncle Ben’s and our order included fried shrimp that may have been made at KFC.
No, it wasn’t so bad that I remember the date, but we were traveling and chose that restaurant because it was close to our motel and were rushing to get back there to watch George Bush’s address to Congress about 9/11.
There is a core split between American Chinese food in cities and regions with active and vibrant Chinese immigrant populations (New York, San Francisco, etc.), and everywhere else, where the Chinese food is simply crappy.
I’m sure that there are regional differences in the Chinese food outside of immigrant cities, but who would want to torture themselves to check.
My friend from San Francisco said that duck sauce with egg rolls is a east coast thing and I remember someone on this board saying that in Rhode Island, Chinese food comes with bread rolls.
I suspect a lot of low end Chinese food is made with a pre-made ingredients that come from a few central distributors and that this results in a lot of the regionalism being washed out in Chinese food in the US.
The Chinese food I grew up eating in Eastern Washington state is quite different than what I get here in the Chicago area. I like the food better here, but mostly they’re just different as far as styles and types of dishes available. One of my favorite appetizers at Chinese places out west is a cold (or slightly warm) sliced BBQ pork, often served with very hot mustard and sesame seeds to dip in. I can’t find that anywhere around here.
This isn’t about the Chinese fod itself, but what accompanies it.
1.) here in the Boston metropolitan area, rice is not an automatic given. In most places, you have to order it separately. Ad they charge for it. Everyplace else in the country, rice always accompanies the meal.
2.) Bowston also doesn’t give you those crackly appetizer things with that obnoxiously sweet Duck Sauce. That’s OK – I can live without that.
3.) They don’t do it anymore, but when I first returned to Boston in 1987, many Chinese restaurants gave you little loaves of white bread instead of rice with the meal. Bread! In a Chinese restaurant!
Ny theory is that you had a lot of Italian households, especially up on the North Shore, and they were used to long white bread with their meals, dammit! So Chinese restaurants learned to adapt, or else perish. At least until a newer generation came in that was used to rice instead of bread.
American-Chinese food varies a lot by area, and if there isn’t a strong Chinese population present, it’s going to suck. Sure, there are outliers, but as a rule, the best A-C is to be found in Chinatown, wherever that may be. Not in someplace like Fort Hayes, Kansas.
Moving from San Francisco to Charlotte was a shock. Duck sauce is everywhere… FEH! What is is supposed to taste like other than bland sweetness? If I’m dipping fried wontons or whatever, I want sweet and sour sauce!
And I’ve entirely abandoned the idea of finding dim sum out here.
Can’t say that I’ve seen contradictory evidence for the truck part, but I do note that there seem to be two generic types of fried rice: the whiter, smaller, brownish rice without much flavor (a sauce and vegetable delivery system,) and a yellow, larger-grained, ascerbic rice that seems to be very salted and dries out my mouth. You can tell which one I prefer.
There also are differences between the Chinese food you’ll get in the San Gabriel Valley (L.A. County) and in Chinatown, as well as from the Chinese food in San Francisco Chinatown. I can’t really describe what the difference is, or why, but it does seem different to me.
Not true. I had a hard time finding Chinese buffets in Manhattan, but those I did find tended to be dismal. Much worse than what I affectionately refer to as the “good bad Chinese buffet” back home in Cincinnati. (I never feel particularly happy with myself after eating there, but I keep going back, and back, and back…) When I say worse, I mean, generally speaking, bland. Say what you will about the gloopy sugar-laden General Tso’s back at the good bad Chinese buffet, it did at least have quite a bit of flavour.
I’ve had Chinese-ish food in 3 countries and 3 states (and 5 cities within one of those states).
If the food is relatively authentic, it’s pretty much the same; the Chinese food I had in Oxford, Budapest, Dallas and Houston was pretty much the same because it was fairly authentic.
However, the more Americanized it gets, the more it diverges- the stuff in New Orleans was terrific, if not necessarily authentic. The stuff in Waco was pretty atrocious, and here in Dallas, I’ve had both excellent authentic stuff, and some god-awful Americanized (Mexicanized?- the place was totally filled with Hispanics speaking Spanish) garbage.
This is a key point. I’m in Seattle, which has a huge variety and generally high authenticity and quality in Chinese food. We also have our fair share of crappy cocktail lounge Chinese, crappy take out / delivery Chinese, and crappy dim sum. The places whose customers are primarily immigrant or 2nd generation usually are the best. Delivery places near the college campuses or serving the industrial lunch crowd are usually the blandest and worst.
I would agree that the larger the local Chinese community, the better the food.
When I lived in Manhattan, there were tons of great little Chinese restaurants - granted, many were not exactly pretty and chic, but damned was the food great!
Here in Vegas, it is hit or miss - we tried a few in the local China Town area and I wasn’t all that impressed.
However, by sheer coincidence, once again I drove by a place only about 1/2 mile from my house, and once again I saw an entire busload of Chinese tourists heading inside. I see these tour buses of Chinese stopping there regularly - so perhaps I should saunter over there and give it a try…I mean, if Chinese tourist operators think highly enough to schlep their bus loads all the way over to my neighborhood to eat, there has to be some reason, right?
Seeing as I’m from Vancouver and married to a Chinese woman, and have worked for years with many Chinese people, I’m a ‘bit’ picky with my Chinese restaurants.
That said, I think the variation comes from the speciic locations, rather than regions. Populations with a large number of Chinese people are going to have better quality Chinese food than some small town that has maybe one Chinese family (who run the restaurant).
All the sweet sauces etc are there to appeal to the American/Canadian cutomers who make up thier local customer base. “Real” Chinese restaurants do not have these. Also, more westernised restaurants make their dishes with cheap ingredients, hence the bland. sweet sauces like 'duck sauce(?) or sweet&sour.
Someone mentioned Chow Mein and Lo Mein. I’ve only seen Lo Mein in westernised restaurants where it appears to be noodles, where the Chow Mein is all bean sprouts and cabbage (pig slop). This is odd, since Chow Mein means fried noodles!
As for the bread, Chinese cooking does, in fact, include bread. not the Western rolls and loaves we all know, but steamed buns,. sometimes, but not necessarily, stuffed with meat. This is not uncommon, especially in restaurants specialising in Northern Chinese cuisine, where they use more wheat than their southern neighbours.
Absolutely. I haven’t had decent Asian of any kind since coming to the Bland Corner. Dishes I’ve loved all over the US are bland, gooey and tasteless here, when they aren’t actually sugar-sweet.
My wife is American-born Chinese. She says that the egg foo yung from her home town of Chicago is very different from that of where we live now, the San Francisco Bay Area. She prefers the Chicago style, I guess that’s what she’s used to.