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What sort of unique dishes or variations of popular dishes did/do they serve at American Chinese food restaurants (as opposed to actual Chinese restaurants) you’ve been to?
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Has anyone actually had chop suey. I’ve read several references to chop suey but haven’t actually seen in offered in a restaurant before except for one place in LA that said “Chop Suey” on the sign which I didn’t go in.
I once saw a movie from the 1950s or so with a Chinese restaurant that had a neon sign advetising chop suey. I’ve never seen one myself, but it seems to me that much of (American) Chinese food would qualify as chop suey, whether it’s actually called that or not.
Our local Chinese restaurant does a couple of dishes for their own consumption that aren’t on the menu. They say Americans no like. I’ve tried and love them, so I often order them. One is a Chinese eggplant dish in a Hunan sauce. The other is a simple string bean and spinach dish.
ETA: I’ve only seen ChopSuey in LaChoy cans.
We ate at a local American-Chinese place when I was a kid (this would be in the 80s). We always got the family style dinner and so had bbq ribs, egg rolls, moo goo gai pan, kung pao, sweet and sour and chop suey. IIRC, chop suey is a very celery heavy dish with snow peas and cornstarch or MSG coated pork. We loved it. Then our family discovered Thai food…
If you live in the Dayton/Kettering Ohio area, you are undoubtedly aware of the Chop Suey Carry Out on Dorothy Lane. Excellent food for a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese Restaurant.
Don’t know if they actually have Chop Suey, though.
One of my elderly aunts was practically addicted to Chinese food . . . but always ordered chop suey. I suspect it had something to do with her ill-fitting dentures.
There’s always the usual “Sweet and Sour Pork” / “Lemon Chicken” where it’s battered and deep-fried pork or chicken covered in a syrupy and vinegary sauce, usually vividly colored with food coloring.
I’m sure there’s some kind of actual Chinese versions of those two dishes, but I doubt that they’re what you usually find at an American Chinese restaurant.
General Tso’s chicken is an American invention, I’m pretty sure, as are a lot of variations on Hunan chicken and Szechwan chicken that you see here.
Other than that, I think it’s more a case where a lot of actual Chinese dishes are either too intense, too weird or too dependent on hard-to-source ingredients (e.g. crabs in Milwaukee in the 1960s, Szechwan peppercorns before the last decade or so) to be on the menu.
Therefore we get things that are easier to make with local American ingredients, and a few specialty ingredients that travel well - oyster sauce, soy sauce, etc…
I actually ordered Chop Suey for the first time last week. Most Chinese takeout places still have it on the menu.
Around here, Chinese take out restaurant menus are all alike*. There are variations in how people prepare the dishes – different proportions, different flavorings – but the names of the dishes and the variety of them are the same. They even use the same pictures in the signage. Our local one has added a few different entrees (a Bourbon chicken dish), but I haven’t tried it.
*There is one that does pride itself on authentic Chinese food, and which has some very interesting dishes you don’t see anywhere else.
The Salem Willows in Salem MA has the famous Chop Suey Sandwich. Chop suey on a hamburger bun. My extended family loves them. I find them to be an abomination.
Bring on the hot spicy versions of the rest of the menu for me. Of course, anything more exotic than salt and pepper is often too much for many New England Irish’s tastes.
I had chop suey in the 70s and I think there was a canned version that was pretty popular then. I also have a vague recollection of a movie musical that had a song about chop suey in which the dish was a metaphor for Asians assimilation to America.
I’ve never been to China, but I’ve had sweet and sour and General Tso type dishes in Chinese run places in Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. They may, or may not have had the same names, but the dishes were very similar, but of better quality that typical buffet glop.
At one time, all chinese owned/named restaurants had the words chop suey appended to their names, if their served chinese food.
I decided years ago that Sysco must do Chinese food too, because the sweet and sour sauce and Mandarin sauce around here is exactly the same no matter which Chinese restaurant you go to. Day glo colors and gloopy with way too much thickener. When I say exactly the same, I don’t mean similar recipes. I mean the sauce could have come out of the exact same 5 gallon bucket.
There is no such thing as authentic Chinese anywhere near me even if Chinese families are running the restaurants.
There is a string bean dish that a few restaurants serve that’s just amazing. I could eat a pound all by myself. It seams to be uncut green beans stir fried in soy sauce, ginger, and garlic. Love that stuff.
My mother made the worst possible chop suey when I was a child. I have since vowed that I will kill the very next person to put a plate of it in front of me and expect me to eat it.
Can’t eat the General Tso chicken at the place in the building across the street from where I work. Sure, they have huge lines every day! But their secret is that they use metric tons of sugar in the sauce so that it fries up nice and crispy. Being diabetic, I can’t eat it. Instead I walk past them, past the Chinese place in the next building (too bland and they stopped making the Garlic Chicken), to the place in the third building to order it. Theirs is nice and spicy.
Of all the Chinese food joints around my way, only the big kitschy sit-down restaurants carry chop suey. I’ve never known anyone who’s ever ordered it. The only time I’ve ever seen it in abundance was back in the junior high cafeteria.
We have a number of authentic Asian restaurants in my area, though, so that’s probably the reason. Many of them serve dishes that would make most Westerners (or at least those who have little to no knowledge of authentic Asian food) turn up their nose, so they also keep a westernized “Chinese food” menu.
- At local greasy spoon American Chinese joints in Chicago you will generally find any combination of the following:
Chop suey, chow mein, kow, sweet and sour, chow fun, mongolian beef/chicken/pork, kung pao, egg foo yung, and probably some more I’m forgetting.
- Yes, pretty much every typical Amero-Cantonese-style Chinese carryout has it here (in other words, your “regular” Chinese carry out.)
This is a typical menu. Yes, it’s from a place called “China Ho.” No, I’ve never eaten there, but the menu is representative of pretty much every non-Chinatown, non-trying-to-be-authentic-Chinese carryout I’ve seen around here.
I recently found the best cheap little greasy spoon Chinese place in my town that serves perfect Chinese American food like what we used to get 30 years ago. I usually get the #8 which has pork chow mein, pork fried rice, sweet and sour chicken and almond chicken. All the sauces are made in-house and everything that comes out of the fryer is so hot and crispy it crunches when you bite into it.
Chop suey, sweet & sour, fried rice, etc. = gringo chinese food.
We have plenty of that, but we also have some good (altho I cannot say authentic, since I have yet to visit China) dishes at some local Chinese restaurants, which include clay-pots, frog porridge, and some very good Dim Sum.
I don’t even know what Chop Suey is, but I think I’ll have to try it the next time I see it.
In Australia chop suey is completely associated with urban America, and not something found in Chinese restaurants operating here.
Older Chinese restaurants often have family connections, mainly Cantonese, back to the gold rushes and market gardening, that offered ‘Chinese and Australian meals’, meaning steak and chips for the timid. The newer wave include lots of ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia and offer a great range of non-traditional Chinese national dishes plus various Chinese standards. One near me includes kangaroo and crocodile in its meat choices.
Regarding Sweet and Sour, that’s not really true: