I have to re-iterate that this isn’t and wasn’t universal in Boston. I don’t think you’d ever have gotten a roll in any of the restaurants in Boston’s Chinatown. but there’s a single Chinese restaurant in that Italian enclave that is the North End, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used to (and maybe still do) give you bread.
Mr Olive is a connoisseur of Oriental cuisine, and he said he never heard of or experienced such a heresy before. Deep fried noodles with soup? Yes! Pancakes with Mu Shu or Peking Duck? Yes! Steamed buns? Yes! Bread and butter? NFW!!!
Well, maybe. What type of cuisine does the restaurant serve? If it’s Yunnan or Tibetan, then, he supposes, there might be some crossover with India where they do serve a bread that’s usually brushed with ghee (clarified butter).
Then again, it may be just to cater to the infidels who assume all meals are to be eaten with bread and butter. His mother is descended from the Boston Brahmins, and to not have fresh bread and butter on the table with dinner is a sin ranking up there with murder and wearing white before Memorial Day.
Heh, one of my criteria for selecting a Chinese restaurant is to see if there are any Chinese customers. If not, I won’t go in unless I’m really hungry. If all the customers are white, then I look at the cooks. If none of them are Chinese, well then there is no hope.
Modern times. British introduced milk into HK 100+ years ago. Milk was available only by a prescription when my wife was a child. Yogurt has been very popular and readily available since at least the early 1980’s. So, my wag is dairy started taking off when China’s economy moved from pretty much subsistence to free market, or early 1980’s.
Tibetans and Mongolians on the other hand count dairy products as a staple since time immemorial. Um, that is if you count yak, goat or mare’s milk as a dairy product. 
Actually, yak milk, butter and cheese is quite nice.
Never anywhere I have been in the US and never anywhere I have been in Asia. It kind of makes me feel oogy.
When my brother was very small, he used to like going to Chinese food places because there he could have “Chinese bread.” Now that he’s an adult he knows that this was really French bread.
As for the OP I live in central NH and bread/rolls are readily offered in area Chinese places - if you get the buffet. I’m not sure if it comes with regular meals since I don’t think I’ve had one in years given buffets are ubiquitous.
Nope – it’s your ordinary Chinese fare. Some Hunan and Szechuan. Definitely not a “crossover” from some region of China near a bordering country with non-rice traditions. That bread was clearly Italioan-style bread there to cater to the expectations of the American (probably mainly Italian-American) customers.
I’ve never seen bread with Chinese food before, but one other thing peculiar to New England is that apparently in other regions the term “peking ravioli” is meaningless.
Being a bread lover and Chinese, I have to say that Western Style bread is certainly never served with any Chinese meal I’ve ever seen. In the places I’ve been in China, what we called “bread” is actually more like pastries, muffins, and cakes, i.e. sweetened and meant for desert. However, especially in the northern regions, wheat flour products similar in nature to bread is eaten as staples, like the aforementioned steam buns, and various types of flat breads. The closest thing would probably be shaobing, which is a leavened flat bread eaten in the northwest regions. It’s quite dense, and sometimes flavored with cumin and other types of spices. When I was in Shanghai last year, one of the rages is a (several?) chain of street stands selling a variant of the shaobing – a very pizza like crust topped with ground pork, spring onion, sesame, and various spices. The marketing even called it a “Chinese pizza”. I’ve heard it’s become less popular since then because of the lack of any real quality control, but it was certainly delicious.
As for the question of milk, I’ve guzzled milk all my life (20+ years; not so long, granted). Of course, I’m from northern China, and the situation may be different elsewhere. It’s a big country. When I was a kid in the late 80’s, I remember we’d get deliveries of milk in plastic bags, which my grandma would boil before she’d let me have it. I don’t know if it’s pasteurized, but it probably wasn’t homogenized, and tastes much thicker than the milk in the US, and would develop a thick film on top when boiled.
Lately, I’ve seen milk sold either in cartons, bags, or juice box sized containers everywhere I’ve been, including Shanghai and Guangzhou, where I would have expected the lactose intolerant population is the majority. Apparently, its being marketed as a healthy drink for kids, if I remember the ads right.
NPR (National Public Radio) ran a piece a few weeks ago about how China is being blamed by the UK for driving up the price of milk because they’re importing so much of it. It mentioned a campaign aimed at getting the milk consumption up to 1 liter of milk per child every two days, or something like that.
In the St. Louis Mo area, the only bread you’ll get with a Chinese meal is if you order a St. Paul sandwich! 
It stems from the “Polynesian version” of Chinese restaurants in the greater Boston area. Kowloon on Rt1 in Saugus would be the classic example. They serve bread. If you go to a place that focuses more on things like Sichuan style cooking, or Cantonese based menues, you likely won’t get bread. (Sit down version of the resturants). Places more suited to “take out only” may or may not have bread, depending on the local tastes. It also seems to me to be limited to the ‘less upscale’ places around here. Any high end place will give you a funny look.
I personally think it’s an abomination, but it seems to be a thing in the Irish world that surrounds Boston. All of the flavors in the food are ‘dumbed down’ and they cater to the limited palates of those folks. And god forbid that a hungry crew of blue collar irish have to wait more than a few minutes to start stuffing something in their mouths, and have to talk to each other instead! (I come from that same family described, so it’s not being mean to any of the adjectives). Some members of my family have walked out of Chinese restaurants due to the lack of bread prior to the dinner service. :smack:
Bread with Chinese is weird–almost as weird as fries, which I have seen only in the UK.
I’m a New Yorker and I’m here to tell you, bread is not Chinese food.
Oh, I’ve eaten at Chinese “buffets” that serve up French fries and pizza next to the fried wonton and sweet and sour chicken. :rolleyes:
One of these days, (sigh) I would dearly love some authentic Chinese food. (Yes, I know, that’s like wishing for authentic American food, since the cuisine varies so widely) I fear what I know as “Chinese” is about as far from the real thing as it could be.
Hmmm … I seem to have hit a nerve here.
Really … it’s not as bad as you might make it out to be.
I dunno about the Italian-American hypothesis. We aren’t exactly short on Italians around here and in New York, and…well bread with Chinese food is simply one of the oddest things I’ve ever heard of!
My neck of the woods? Definitely not! Not here and not in China itself. Never seen bread at a Chinese restaurant in the US, either, but I’ve never been to Rhode Island.
If you used this criteria for one particular gem of a chinese restaurant in my area, you would miss out. One of the best places for authentic and delicious Chinese food in my county has no typical Chinese restaurant name, and looks, for all intents and purposes, as a hole in the wall bar/sports bar and is mostly frequented by guailo, and you never see the chef. I think it’s better that way, keeps the riff raff out and the place stays a hidden gem. You can get great onion rings and bread rolls, there too.
You can play pool there, too.