Chinese Buffets-More than meets the eye?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve done my fair share of traveling here in the states and have noticed that almost every place, big and small, has the same Chinese buffet clone. In nearly any small town I know that if it is big enough to have a couple of stop lights I can find a Chinese buffet.

A couple of observations…

They all have an almost identical food spread and taste at pretty consistent prices.

The wait staff seems to know very little English and have a fairly high turnover rate.

There is typically one or two older Chinese couples who seem to be permanent. I assume the owners.

I’ve never really come in contact with any of these folks outside of the restaurant. This isn’t such a big deal in a metropolitan area, but in small towns it’s pretty strange to not become part of the community.

The price of the buffets doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain all of the overhead necessary to run a restaurant.

More often than not the waiters are women in their early twenties and at least moderately attractive.

There are only a handful of words that seem to be in the names of the restaurants. (Wok, Dragon, Golden, Peking, Wall, Super, Great and Lucky)

Something seems strange, right!?

I’ve asked people, including police buddies, and no one seems to think much about it. (Oh the mind soothing goodness of General Tso’s chicken and imitation crab meat!)

Anybody know the story behind these places?

2

Ah yes, the Buffeticons.

3

I’ve thought of this myself.

Years ago I drove a truck delivering produce. I’d stop in the same places anywhere from a few times a week to once every two or three weeks. I was always paid cash and what I noticed after a while was the high turnover rate of the staff other than the owners.

What really made it memorable was the one stunningly pretty girl I saw once and only once. I was looking forward to my next stop there to hope to see her again and manage the chance to say Hi.

Don’t ask why I haven’t eaten in any of those places after seeing the back rooms…

4

Well, our local alternative weekly here in the northern reaches of Vermont ran this lead story last spring. Make of it what you will.
Hot & Soured

Note: Burlington is a Refugee Relocation Center city.

Link

5

I think it’s basically a franchise. The supplier of the food is the same, the menu printer is the same, etc. There’s been a couple threads about them on the board, I think.

6

Some of them may be a franchise, like Panda Express, but they all aren’t. It’s just a tried-and-true formula for What Works.

What Mid-America wants, when they wanna “eat Chinese”, is a buffet that includes the sort of Americanized Cantonese food that Americans brought up on La Choy and Banquet want. And it has “Peking” or “Dragon”, etc., in the title, because that tells the consumer exactly what to expect (“Americanized Cantonese, with fortune cookies”), the same way that “Burger” or “Chicken” or “Steak House” in the name tells you what to expect.

My folks live in Charleston, pop. about 20,000, and the town of Mattoon about 10 miles away has about 18,000, and each town suppors a Chinese buffet of the kind you describe. And in both towns, the proprietors are invisible–you only ever see them when you go in there for lunch.

People who want to become “active in the community” have to make a determined effort to do so; it doesn’t just fall into your lap. You have to go to Kiwanis and Chamber of Commerce meetings, you have to go to a church–any church, you have to volunteer at the hospital or with the Boy Scouts or with the United Way. And I think that all of that requires a higher degree of assimilation than the “Chinese buffet guy” and his missus generally possess.

And it also requires time–but the Chinese Buffet Guy and his missus have a 112-hour workweek. They’re always there. Always.

If you own the place yourself, and don’t pay yourself for the 112-hour workweeks you put in, and if your missus runs the front, and you don’t pay HER for HER 112-hour workweeks, and if you pay a succession of newly arrived immigrants to bus tables for a pittance, you can afford to charge proportionately lower prices than Bonanza Steak House and still make a profit.

Also bear in mind that rice, vegetables, and cornstarch are cheap, whereas protein (meat) is expensive. And Americanized Cantonese buffets have very little by way of “meat”. No rounds of beef or ham to be sliced off like at the Hometown buffet. So it’s cheap food, served cheaply, and yeah, in a town like Charleston or Mattoon, where in addition the dining alternatives are extremely limited, it’s a license to print money. Every time you go in there, it’s always two-thirds full, doesn’t matter what time of day.

Every restaurant has high employee turnover, especially buffets, where you don’t have the promise of tips to hold waitstaff.

Women form the vast majority of restaurant workers industry-wide; it’s not just in Chinese restaurants. Cite.

7

But for how much longer? Last year a firm fell foul of food labelling laws by selling Welsh Dragon sausages that did not contain any actual dragon. :smack:

8

The Chinese Buffet around here has had the same employees for years.

What cracks me up about these places is the variety of food. Ours always has pizza, tacos, garlic bread, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, hot wings, and a salad bar. Not very Chinese. I was there just the other day and joking about how nobody can make a taco that melts in your mouth like the Chinese!

9

I started a very similar thread a long while ago. I wondered why you could go to towns of any size in places that have no appreciable Asian population and still find Chinese restaurants and buffets. A conventional explanation would be that Asian people end up living there and decide that a restaurant would be a good business for them. However, it appears that Asian families search for communities that are ripe for such a business and then move there even if it is in the middle of South Dakota. It also appears that some type of family group runs it and often keeps themselves shielded from the target community itself.

10

It’s like all those identical Authentic Irish Pubs popping up everywhere. You can literally buy it pre-fab. In the case of the pubs, there are two main companies and slew of small ones which will sell you the whole package: Gemmell Griffin and Dunbar…and Guinness. Yes, that Guinness. Decor, fixtures, set up, recipes, everything you need. Here are some links.

Same thing with Chinese restaurants. You can buy the menu boards, the paper menus, decor, the whole shebang, with recipes, that Americans expect when they enter a Chinese restaurant. So Chicken Kow in Peoria looks and tastes like Chicken Kow in Athens because it’s the same recipe. Asian Concepts, Inc is one of those companies in the Asian-American market. Once you’re set up, you can keep up with all the latest news and innovations in Chinese Restaurants by subscribing to Chinese Restaurant News, just to be sure you keep in lockstep with everyone else.

11

Are there also prefab American restaurants in China?

12

McDonalds?

13

In my neighborhood there are two such establishments. Restaurant #1, where I eat about once a month, has food that ranges from not-too-good to excellent. You have to learn what not to get, and enjoy the rest. It’s a huge place, yet I’ve never seen more than a handful of people there, even a peak hours, unless a large family shows up.

Restaurant #2, where I’ve been exactly once, is smaller and packed with customers, even at off-hours. The food is basically inedible; I tried literally everything, and there was nothing that tasted right.

I’m baffled as to ***how ***restaurant #1 stays in business and ***why ***restaurant #2 stays in business.

14

My wife is American-born-Chinese and her parents ran a small chain of Chinese restaurants in Chicago for many years. The food they served at the restaurants was the Americanized Chinese food and completely different from the food they serve at home.

Ed

15

KFC.

Burger King.

Taco Bell.

Pizza Hut.

Fascinating overview from 2004.

16

This part I’ve always wondered if it were an “immigration” thing. That is, maybe the employees were “sponsored” in some way, and were working off their passage in the restaurant.

Or maybe I’ve just watched too much TV.

17

The first rule of Chinese Buffet Club is we don’t talk about Chinese Buffet Club.

18

This is the answer.

To add to it: Chinese food is processed by a few companies and the whole Chinese takeout biz is networked back to the same suppliers, from paper menus right down to the soy sauce.

Used to be that Chinese food was fresh from scratch, but it is greatly centralized now. In some parts, you can still find a Chinese place that is more independent, rolling their own egg rolls and hand filling every dumpling. Outback are chicken feet used to make wonton soup, etc.

It’s just that the generic franchise style “Number One” and “Best Food in Town” take out places are outnumbering the ‘mom and pop’ chinese restaurant.

I used to like Chinese food from the moms and pops, so now I stick to Thai. If you like real American-Chinese, find a Thai place, as it is very likely an authentic mom and pop place, with fresh home cooking.

19

Is #2 older? When I was a kid, we always went to the same Chinese restaurant, for years on end. When my parents tried to take us somewhere different, Ime and my brother would throw a fit. Because they wouldn’t have “Volcano Chicken” or whatever our favorite was at the time.

So what I’m saying is that people don’t like change, and won’t switch if they can help it.

20

Oops, I wanted to qualify my Thai comment: There are many Thai dishes that will do you well if you enjoy some Chinese-American dishes. So, consider a Thai restaurant, sample their dumplings and enjoy their spring rolls and other dishes. You will likely discover a family-run place with people who spend hours rolling the spring rolls, stuffing the dumplings and chopping up the veggies.

Just my $.02

:slight_smile: