OK, I stand corrected. But “sky rocketing” implies this is a recent fad. Is this so?
Funny you should mention bread with Chinese food. Earlier this week I went for a meal to a local Asian restaurant (it does Malaysian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and my dining partner ordered the Chicken Satay. We were both quite bemused to find this was served with one piece of white sliced bread, crusts cut off, stacked up in a row of four triangles like two empty sandwiches at a buffet. No butter. Very strange. Maybe this is so unheard of as it is that cutting edge…
I’m in NC, and have never been served bread with a Chinese meal. Eggroll? Check. Fried noodles? Check. Fortune cookie? Check. Bread? Never.
bread and rice don’t mix. you either have your food with bread or rice. either/or, not both. bread or rice. not bread and rice. wax on, wax off. never both at once. the same thing applies to rice and noodles. aren’t carbohydrates a fancy diet concern in America?
I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Southern California, and Missouri, and hubby and I love Chinese restaurants. Never encountered a place that served bread with our meal, though.
I would find it very strange to be served bread with Chinese food.
When I moved back to Massachusetts twenty years ago, it was a common thing to get Italian Bread with your Chinese food. An awful lot of the restaurants did it, which I found very weird. (At the same time, unlike elsewhhere in the US, you have to order and pay for your rice separately, which is also weird).
I thought at the time that it was because of the large Italian population, and that both they and the folks that ate at Italian restaurants were used to getting bread with their meals, and that bowls of unadormed white rice were things exotic and strange. So restaurants tried to play to their customers’ expectations, and those that served nice, familiar, Italian bread did better business. This made a self-reinforcing cycle.)
It’s finally disappearing. I haven’t been offered bread with my Chinese dinner at a Boston-area restaurant in ages. But at almost all of them, I still have to order my rice explicitly and pay for it.
I have to order (and pay additional for) rice at most Indian restaurants and some Thai/Vietnamese restaurants here in Chicago, but I can’t think of any Chinese restaurants that don’t include rice with the appropriate entrees.
I’ve never seen bread & butter in a Chinese restaurant either, but I did have those mantou things at the lunch crapeteria when I was doing business in Beijing. On an unrelated note, I just got back from Peru. All the Chinese restaurants there advertise themselves as “Chifa.” Apparently, Chifa is a corruption of the Mandarin phrase for “to eat rice.” The menus were quite different from American Chinese or authentic Chinese dishes. For instance, you could order stir-fried alpaca. Wantans were quite popular also. (I didn’t actually eat at any of the Chifa restaurants.)
CT checking in and I never have had bread with Chinese food- either here in CT or in MA.
At most Chinese Restaurants in NWO, no, bread is not served . But there are one or two Chinese Restaurants in the area that have beeen around for a very very long time and they do serve bread… (or maybe it was rolls?). It’s sn archaic thing that I believe is leftover from the 50’s, and 60’s and the restaurants are long established in suburban/ semirural areas.
Meals at Tony Cheng’s Mongolian BBQ in DC come with flaky rolls.
The only time I’ve had bread with my chinees meal was in Midland Texas and it was not a good dining experience in general. So ad NM, CA, and CO to the list of places that don’t but parts of Texas are weirder then you think.
Hm … I’ve eaten in Chinese restaurants in Ohio, New York, Virginia and North Carolina and have never seen any bread other than those buns that WhyNot referred to - and they were a menu item you ordered and paid for. There’s also a restaurant here that sells something called ‘Shanghai steamed bun,’ which are sort of like dumplings, in that they have a filling but are not the same texture as a real dumpling - they’re less dense. Wikipedia says their Chinese name is xiaolongbao. Reading the description, they sound pretty good.
The thought makes me ill. No.
Have you seen our waistlines recently? A lot of times the “diets don’t apply when you’re eating at a restaurant” rule gets invoked.
You New Englanders are silly. First, top sliced hot dog buns and now bread with Chinese food. What’s next, Chinese sausage in a top sliced hot dog bun?
Nope, I’ve never seen such a thing.
I could have used any of these posts to weigh in, but I chose this one just because 
I went to URI a zillion years ago, and the only place I ever saw bread served in Chinese restaurants was in RI. Matter of fact, I was friends with a student whose family owned a restaurant, and another friend and I decided to go there for dinner one evening, and besides the bread, we were totally flummoxed when we were asked if we wanted french fries or mashed 
Despite that, though, the meal was awesome, and yes, they served rice also. We passed on the potatoes, though 
Ugh…reminds me of restaurant out here in Waterloo where I got mashed potatoes in my burrito. I could only pretend they were refried beans for so long.
Bread? That’s screwed up. You don’t get bread at Chinese restaurants.
The takeout place I frequented in Dorchester, MA included bread when I ordered soup. I thought it was very odd, but hey - free bread. I didn’t eat it with the meal, but I did eat it.