Bread with your Chinese Food?

I haven’t. There are Chinese takeaways which double as fish and chip shops, but you either order fish and chips or you order Chinese. If you tried to order chips (fries) with a Chinese meal I think you’d get odd looks, to say the least.

In New York, there are several Cuban-Chinese restaurants, run by people of Chinese ancestry who had emigrated from Cuba. These usually have menus containing traditional Cuban dishes, traditional Chinese dishes and just a few crossover items. You can also have the option of getting yellow or white rice (and for some dishes, yellow or white rice and black or red beans) with your meals, whether Chinese or Cuban.

In these Cuban-Chinese restaurants, they serve a crusty bread with your meals. Otherwise, I got nothing.

What do you expect? It’s Selinsgrove. :wink:

Robin

My mom’s favorite Chinese place serves lovely large yeasty dinner rolls with butter on the side. It’s the only Chinese restaurant that serves bread around here, and it’s the single reason it was my mother’s favorite one and the one we always went to growing up.

Even though it’s been happily serving bread rolls for about thirty years, none of the other Chinese places around me do so. Just the one, but it hasn’t appeared to hurt them any.

Here in SoCal bread with Chinese food is unknown, as far as I know, but with a huge Latin population as well as a rapidly growing Asian one, I expect to see tortillas with Chinese food, or some other bizarre ethnic combinations soon.

I 've never seen combination Chinese food and doughnut places until recently, but they are becoming common here.

I’ve never had bread at a Chinese restaurant.

I’ve eaten at Chinese restaurants in Nebraska, Seattle, New York, and a few points in betwwen, and I’ve never heard of bread being served with Chinese food. Bizarre! :confused:

Of course not - no one is forcing you to eat the damn rolls.

The place I went had no Polynesian influence, and was a very suburban mediocre place. None of the waitresses were Chinese, by the way. I shudder to think about the kitchen.

Nope, no bread at chinese restaurants, either on the east coast, the deep south, the midwest, or the left coast.

I did recently have a lasagna that substituted refried beans for the ricotta cheese. No, it wasn’t advertised as ‘mexican lasagna’ nor did it have any other mexican style ingredients. Just refried beans in place of the ricotta.

Sorta icky. But it was food sent over to us by the prison kitchen.

Eutychus, I live in Massachusetts about 20 minutes from the closest RI border. It takes many people decades to get this but Rhode Island is not normal and you have to be aware of that at all times. It is beautiful in places like Newport and Providence has quite the character but who have to be careful what you say to people from normal places. Just assume that whatever it is that you do no matter how small is just plain odd to people looking in.

Let’s say that you grew up in a rural village in Ecuador. A charity organization flies you into into Boston for medical treatment and you wander into the nearest restaurant before the treatment starts. Everything seems odd and foreign. That is basically the situation you will always be in when you leave Rhode Island to go anywhere else.

At least, you *hope *that was refried beans! :smiley:

Another one of my favorite Chinese Restaurants in the area does Pizza, too. The weird thing about it is, they do superior Chinese, and great pizza. It really is unique. I loves me some of their twice cooked BBQ pork. Very traditional and old recipe. 5 spice glaze, slow cooked.

I’ve never had bread served with a Chinese meal over here in the U.K. but to be honest I was told that in the West what we are served up as oriental cuisine is somewhat different from the real thing as eaten in China.

Personally I usually eat fries with curry rather then rice,I justify this on the grounds that the hot Chilli Pepper originates from S.America as does the potato,but then I always was a bit of a hellraiser.

Even in the most highly Americanized Chinese food restaurants I’ve been to, I haven’t seen bread put out at the table. There is no “bread” in Chinese cuisine, so that goes beyond adapting the flavors/ingredients of Chinese food for an American palate to changing the menu. I’ve seen fried chicken and chicken fingers listed on the menus of these places, but that’s about as far as I’ve seen it taken.

On the other hand, these restaurants give what the customer expects/wants in order to stay in business. It may be that nearly every single person coming in the door asked for bread baskets, so what do you do as a restaurant owner? You put out the bread baskets.

My dad tells me that Chinese restaurants in France have cheese based sauces and dishes on the menu, even though there is no cheese in Chinese cuisine, for similar reasons. When in Rome/Paris/Rhode Island, sell food as the locals wish to eat it, or go out of business.

I do find it interesting though that Rhode Island, of all places in the US, has taken the extra step in going “whitebread” with “exotic” cuisine. It’s not like white rice is terribly outré, and RI is right between two major centers of Northeastern US cosmopolitanism in NYC and Boston, within 2 hours of each.

I got curious, so started to do some google searches, and found some of the following:
This link on Boston.com

There is also out there, a link from a 1996 Boston Globe article, but alas, encyclopedia.com makes you sign up to see it. I’m not that interested! :smiley:

All I know is that my extended family will leave if there is no bread before the service of the main meal.

Years ago, I knew these two guys from Harlem who shared with me that they got French Fries with Chinese food in their neighborhood. I asked why and the answer was simple, “Our people like fried food.”

This is no different I guess.

Oki Dog has a pretty killer tortilla wrapped hot dog with pastrami, chili, and stir fried teriyaki vegetables. That’s a dellcious tri-ethnic trifecta.

To resurrect an old fave: I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

By the way, it hasn’t come up in this thread, but Chinese Food Pizza can be great! They served it on an experimental basis at The Pie (aka The Flying Pie in Salt Lake City. apparently it didn’t go over very well, but I liked it.

years later, I found out that my bride and her friends used to make this to fuel their RPG sessions.
It’s a violation of everything holy, since it mixes Chinese food (usually something pretty spicy) with both bread AND cheese, both absent from Chinese food. And tomatoes, which are apparently allowed bt, in my experience, pretty rare.

Wait a minute, I grew up in RI, and was never served bread with Chinese food. It seems just as strange to me as everyone else! What restuarants are these?