And in some communities, there are Vietnamese restaurants of a similar vein. Around here, there are dozens of Vietnamese places, and only two or three Thai restaurants.
Sangfroid, thanks for the articles. That’s exactly what I thought might be happening.
The really deep end part of me wonders about prostitution rings or even more sinister back room motivations. I’m not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the measure. But I always have the feeling that more is going on under the surface. I also think maybe these waitresses also are trying to find American suitors to marry them in order to obtain citizenship.
Perhaps there’s a secret code word or series of foot taps I could perform to unlock the mysteries.
“The flying wok seeks shelter for dragon balls.” plus three right foot taps just might get me into the back room where I can pick a girl, find a wife, gamble at Chinese checkers, join the Chinese mob or whatever else goes on.
I understand the food being centralized and thus similar … but what really gets me is the homogeneity of the decor on these newer Chinese buffet places. To my experience, they’ve all been open less than a decade. I’m sure it just took them a while to get down to SE Louisiana, though.
It’s really startling – there are several buffet places in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jackson (MS), and Houston that look exactly alike. Same chandeliers, same brass, same tables & chairs, etc. Same back-lit “moving paintings” of waterfalls. And so on.
Very little overhead in Cat.
Regarding the Americanized food that these prefab Chinese restaurants serve:
We have one of those generic Takeout/Storefront Chinese Restaurants with a couple of tables that opened up in my very rural hometown and it is very successful. I believe it is family owned and run (the daughters that take the orders speak very good English) and it sells all of the typical very cheap versions of “chinese/cantonese” dishes, ya know with the $5.95 combo dinners (Your choice of preselected dish off the special menu with pork fried rice and eggroll packed into a tin for takeout).
Well, anyways, I came in one day to pick up my sweet and sour pork combo meal, and the whole staff was eating Lunch at a table in the tiny dining room. I looked on longingly as they were chowing down family style on tiny fresh snails still in the shell, quick stirfried with a delicious smelling sauce, some kind of steamed fish (I think Halibut) with black bean sauce, a heaping plate of some kind of stirfried garlicky greens, and big bowls of sticky rice.
I thought, WTF? Why isn’t that on the menu? But then I remembered where I was as Jim Bob Billy Bob walked through the door and I knew it would never fly.
I was going to post that exact same story (good to see some more VT dopers…I think there’s four of us…maybe five.) I’ve eaten Chinese food exactly once since I read that article, and that was because I was out-voted in the car I was in on where we were going. I feel bad about not eating it too, because I’m usually NOT one of those people who reads one article on Subject A and then changes their life because of it, but it’s basically slave labor. Is every Chinese restaurant like this? Probably not, but I’m willing to bet more of them are than aren’t.
They are sponsored in the illegal sense. They paid whatever person X money to get them to America, but X wasn’t enough, so he basically sells them to someone else who’ll put them to work. If you’re lucky, you’re just sold to work in a Chinese restaurant. If you’re not, well, pray you’re not young, female, and sent to a large city.
You buy cat? Cat good quality. Me pick Cat this morning. You buy Cat 50 MSK? Cat very good quality. You very smart. I sell you cat good deal. 1 cat 50 MSK, 2 cat 70 MSK. Cat comes in colors of many. You buy cat now?
maintain picturing John Pinette comedy about all-u-can-eat Chinese buffet…
“*You travel place now, fatboy! You been here four hour! You scare my wife! You eat more than than slayer whale! Sign state ‘All you can eat’ not ‘You eat all’!”
*
Good laugh.
Salmo Trutta writes:
> Perhaps there’s a secret code word or series of foot taps I could perform to
> unlock the mysteries.
Larry Craig thought he could communicate secretly with a series of foot taps, and look where it got him.
You could talk directly to the owners/cooks and they might hook you up. Of course it will be more than the $5.95 value meals, but this can and will work in many Chinese restaurants. I had a friend that used to own a Chinese restaurant until he got tired of the hours and sold it. We would go out to lunch sometimes and he never ordered off the menu. He would just ask for dishes he knew they could make.
My sister had success with this at a place she use to eat at weekly. They knew her by name and vice-versa and she got to asking them about some of the dishes you could get up in China Town in NYC. They were happy to make these dishes. Again, charging more than the typical menu items.
I won’t bore you with more anecdotes, but it can work and it is worth asking.
Jim
Trick is to realize that usually they will make anything you want, if they have the ingredients – they just figure out a charge. If they have a friendly counterperson just ask: do you have any greens stir fried with garlic?
The greens you saw might have been the greens from sweet peas – in chinese “dao miew.” My dad asks for them all the time, and usually they are available. They come in two forms – thin thready greens, which are the young shoots, and a more leafy stalky form, the adult greens. Both delicious.
When I lived in Central Virginia we had a chinese buffet of the type described, fair to not-bad. However we also had a nice Thai restaurant, not Americanized and moderately priced, and it was extremely popular. The local paper ran lots of stories on the family. Basically, they just wanted to live out in the country. Why not?
I’m now wondering about the giant Chinese buffets that dot the GTA. They’re in strip plazas and big-box-store plazas.
My workgroup went out to holiday dinner at one yesterday. It was not bad but very generic. “Americanised Chinese food” is precisely right; they had such Asian specialties as mashed potatoes and leg of lamb. There are squillions of little restaurants all over the city where you can get better Asian food. But they don’t have the facilities to serve multiple groups of twenty at the same time.
Edit: I’m now wondering about the traditional small-town Chinese restaurant that may have been the father of these giant buffets. There were two in Whitby when I was growing up. There are two in Bancroft, Ontario, which as a population of only 3000 people. And they’ve been there for decades, years before the bug rush of Chinese immigration. How the heck does a Chinese restaurant end up in small-town Canada?
You no buy cat, silly! Leftover rice in alley! Cat come free! You keep two best and never run out of cat again! Then re-use leftover rice! Low overhead!
That was the core question of my earlier thread. As far as I can tell, towns are scouted for potential and then the family moves there to open and run it no matter where it is. That seems to be different from other ethic restaurants where the ethnic group already lives there and a few decide to open restaurants. Even the town of Mayberry from Andy Griffith show had a Chinese restaurant and that was in the early 1960’s. Sure, the show was fiction but the idea of Chinese restaurants in very small and rather remote towns must have been firmly established even then.
I in ur eetin ples feedn ur fokez
Sunspace writes:
> Edit: I’m now wondering about the traditional small-town Chinese restaurant
> that may have been the father of these giant buffets. There were two in Whitby
> when I was growing up. There are two in Bancroft, Ontario, which as a
> population of only 3000 people. And they’ve been there for decades, years
> before the bug rush of Chinese immigration. How the heck does a Chinese
> restaurant end up in small-town Canada?
There’s a Sylvia Tyson song about how depressed the inhabitants of a small Canadian town were on “The Night the Chinese Restaurant Burned Down”. Apparently such places were the only semi-exotic note in otherwise typically bland towns. I can’t find any link to the lyrics of this song.
Place in my neighborhood is like this. The owner stands in back and makes her own noodles from scratch, all day, every day. It’s more expensive than the King Luck Dragon Gate place in the same area but man is it worth it. And then there’s the Szechuan place with the second menu written mostly in Chinese…
On a street about a block away from me there is approximately 15 Chinese restaurants. Well, to be fair, one Vietnamese and one Korean. You will not find one Chinese person working in any of them. For the most part, they are manned by Koreans or Vietnamese.
The answer may lie in convenience stores. We had a little corner shop by our old house that we lived in for 5 years. The employees did a complete turnover about 10 times. One of the last times, the folks spoke pretty good english and my husband asked them about the store. New immigrants would come in, buy it, get themselves stabilized, sell it to the next set of immigrants (mostly family or extended family), get stablized, sell it, lather, rinse, repeat.
Chinese restaurants and convenience stores don’t really require a whole lot of english to run profitably. Since most appear to be rather turn-key enterprises, it would be easy to hand it on over to the next one in line. Restaurants that are more…upscale don’t seem to have the same sort of turnover of ownership.
And yes, I wonder about the back side of such establishments. I work with a disproportionately large percentage of asian folks and hear often about how popular gambling is. I believe the exact phrase was “Asian people gamble on breathing. We don’t care. We gamble on every thing.”
They also all seem to hire the same interior decorator. Every self respecting Super Buffet, China Buffet, Super China Buffet, Great Wall Buffet, etc has the obligatory backlit portrait of the great wall, the Forbidden City, or the Jumbo Floating Restaurant on a wall-papered wall. 
Interesting post about the wait staff and their vocabulary. The obligatory phrases seem to be “Hi! How Many?” “What do you want to drink?” “How was everything?” and “OK! Thank you!” All good tongue in cheek of course, I respect their hard work and effort to keep a business going and its patrons happy.
I haven’t noticed the rapid turnaround of the staff though. There’s a place up in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland that I’ve been going to for the past 3 years or so and none of the staff have changed. Seems like it’s a higher than average quality place judging by the more authentic food they seem to serve and the wait staff wearing white dress shirts and black vests.
Ditto for one of the 2 Chinese buffets in Ames, Iowa, a college town of about 50,000. The working staff there has been fairly consistent during my 2 1/2 year tenure there and includes the obligatory couple as well as the stereotypical grandmother who shouts instructions back to the kitchen in Mandarin ordering the next batch of food to be prepared. All in all good fun and a site to behold
Another thing I’ve noticed myself from the 3 buffets I’ve been to in the Chicago area, the 1 in Des Moines, Iowa, the one in Ankeny, Iowa, the two in Ames, Iowa and the 2 in the eastern Cleveland suburbs is they all have the wait staff occupying a quiet corner during slower hours with a mountain of string beans on the table being peeled with a cleaver.