This may seem like a silly question, but how do chinses restaurants operate? First of all, they always seem to have chicken stock on hand. Making chicken stock is no easy task. It usually consists of boiling a chicken with carrots, celery, onions, and spices. It can take several hours. But I never see chinese restauants making it. Are they making it at night when the restauant is closed, or do they use canned soup?
Also, how do they run their buisness? These are usually people who just came off of the boat from Hong Kong and speak no more than a few English words, but they can run all of the tasks of a buisness (runing english adds in newspapers, understanding tax codes) in a country they recently came to? How do they learn to cook the dishes when they aren’t regular dishes in their own country?
You can buy “essence of chicken” in bulk. It’s a liquid, concentrated stock of boiled-down birds.
If the people you’re talking about are actually from Hong Kong, then their standard of literacy and numeracy is bound to be pretty high, as the state education system in HK has high standards, and there’s a big emphasis on business studies. Most people in Hong Kong speak English, and the business and taxation laws are loosely based on the UK model.
If they’re from other parts of China, then I share in your mystification.
I’m no expert in this area, but I doubt that they just hop off the boat and open a restaurant. (I know you didn’t mean it this literally.) In my area, Chinese restaurants are operated by people who have been here at least a reasonable period of time and who have a considerable support network of established family and acquaintances here in the U.S.
Additionally, many of the restaurants I’ve been familiar with are run by families, the members of which work long hours for relatively little pay. They live and work together and pool their resources, which greatly reduces overhead. IMO, this is why you hardly ever see a Chinese restaurant go out of business.
Here in Dallas Asian business men will buy vast amounts of commercial property than populte it with various Asian businesses. Kind of like mini-“China towns” peppered through out the city.
All this I’m sure make it easier for the prospective Asian-american to make things happen. Since nearly anything they could want or need, the would know another Asian that could hepl them out or provide such services to them.
Man, this threads got me to thinking now how often I take this city for granted. So much cultutre here.
…And I actually hit send before previewing on accident. Sorry, hope my thread makes sense.
I can’t speak from any kind of experience here, but two possibilities strike me as obvious (applying much more broadly than just Chinese restaurants):
-For those restaurants preparing the food from basic raw ingredients(i.e. whole raw chickens and whole fresh vegetables), it would be a fairly simple thing to toss the bones from filleting the chickens, plus all the vegetable trimmings (carrot tops, onion skins and ends, celery bases and leaves, cabbage hearts etc) in to one or more very large stockpots, fill them with water and put them on to simmer overnight. The logistics of how to safely/hygenically store the raw stock ingredients before boiling and how to store the finished stock after cooking will either be ingeniously solved or simply ignored.
-For those restaurants assembling dishes from prepared ingredients (chicken fillets, ready-trimmed/cut vegetables, etc.), they’ll probably just buy in ready made chicken stock in bulk.
Of course it’s probably not the case that there are only two distinct methods of operation; lots of businesses probably use a mixture of the two.
Now, what has always perplexed me is some of these “Chinese Buffets” you see. You know the ones, the food isn’t great by any measure, but they’ll be quite popular in a lot of areas because for an incredibly low price you can get an incredible amount of food. They’re extremely popular among, perplexingly enough, a lot of the “rural” types who live in my area.
What’s strange though, is how the Chinese restaurant of this type existed in the small town where I grew up. It was a pretty popular place for people in high school back then, it was cheap and teenagers typically will eat anything and lots of it. I knew the town pretty well, we had one public high school and two junior highs. It wasn’t a big place, and you tended to know virtually everyone of your age, and you certainly knew the town like the back of your hand. And yet mysteriously there was this Chinese restaurant in town, staffed by quite a few (I’m guessing since most couldn’t speak English) Chinese immigrants. Some of them were even my age, yet I certainly never saw any of them in school (my high school was small enough that the chance I didn’t notice multiple asians in it is 0%) immigrants or not I don’t know how they got around truancy laws. And from all accounts no one knew where they lived, no neighborhood I was aware of housed them all. I had a suspicion they lived in the restaurant.
I doubt many Chinese immigrants to the US who are opening restaurants are from the People’s Republic. I do know one woman I work with whose family ran one of these restaurants in Florida then up here, and they are from Hong Kong. But the majority of Chinese immigrants I’ve seen running restaurants are from Taiwan & the diaspora of Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia etc.
Given that the menus are almost identical and the methods of cooking and suppliers of ingredients seem to be centralized and consistent, at least city by city, I think it’s more like opening a family-owned franchise with a indepedent branding than opening a mom-and-pop operation.
While I obviously have no cite for the proportion of mainland vs. Taiwanese Chinese restaurants, there are some Beijing Chinese who have a nice (if a little edpensive) restaurant just down the road.
Most newer Chinese food places are run like a franchise. The food, the signage (even the pics of the food on the menu and menu boards), the menus, the containers, the decorations in the store and everything else is distributed by what is essentially the franchise management company.
There are some big organizations around most major cities that tie the Asian community together, helping workers become legal, assisting with immigration/emmigration, setting up the supply chain, etc.
Walking into many places is like walking into a McDonalds, because the owner is just following the standard operating procedure, much like a franchisee.
No one is rolling dumplings or spring rolls…no one is cutting off beaks and feet and making won ton stock. It is all supplied and very generic…like a franchised BK, KFC or McDonalds.
Some older restaurants are still shops where food is crafted by hand. Fresh dumplings, eggrolls, and soups. You will see ‘specials’ in these shops, which demonstrate their particular specialty.
For real Asian flavor, visit the Asian center or “China Town” of a major city. You’ll get more homemade cooking and local spins on taste and spice.
Why would you expect to see what Chinese restaurants are making? Are you spending time in the kitchen? I don’t mean to be snarky about it but I am curious as to what sparked this question, since restaurants do all sorts of things that you never see. And some things that you probably wouldn’t want to see.
Chicken stock is actually easy to make. It’s probably the easiest thing a restaurant can make. Any idiot can make stock: if you can chop up some vegetables, throw bones in a pot, and add water, then you can make stock. They don’t make it to order anyway, in case that’s what you’re thinking; they either buy it already made or they make it 10 or 20 gallons at a time.
Your question is kind of puzzling. Do you ever see any restaurant making any item at all? What is so unusual about Chinese restaurants? Do you ever see the staff at Applebee’s or Outback making the mashed potatoes? Do you see them washing the lettuce leaves? Do you see them trimming the fat off the steaks? Do you see them making the stock for whatever soups they serve?
I have actually wanted to ask this question for a while but I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it. I have traveled all over the U.S. and the number of podunk towns that have a Chinese restauarant is astounding. It is mainly suprising to me because many of the little towns in the South and Midwest and elsewhere have no Asian population to speak of. I have always wondered how the family that opened the restaurant picked East DimSumVille to open a restaurant. It is a common enough trend that I am pretty sure that there is some cultural factor at play. Do some Chniese families seek out towns where there are no Chinese restauarnts and few other Asians for competition on purpose? You can even see this phenomena on old TV like The Andy Griffith Show where 1950’s Mayberry even had someone move in and open up a Chinese restaurant.
good evening friends,
i work for a small fire equipment company in nebraska. our company services ansul fire suppression systems in most of the chinese restaurants in town. i have noticed that, while the owners of these restaurants are chinese, the kitchen staff are mostly hispanic.
i have been in these places as early as six am to test the fire equipment. at that time, there is usually a whole kitchen full of people chopping vegetables, trimming chicken ect. there is always a large wok with stock of some sort simmering away.
many hands make light work…
I think you’re onto something here. I too have noticed in recent years something of a franchising (and increasing homogenization) of/among Chinese restaurants, along with a serious drop in quality of food. As everything spirals toward the lowest common denominator–the fabled $6.99 buffet–the execution is really lousy. I think a lot of the food prep is centralized along a factory model. I can’t believe more than a statistical handful actually make their own stock, but then that can be said of most non-Chinese restaurants too. Most of the nation’s chains/franchises do lots of tear and pouring. At Romano’s Macaroni Grill, I saw a cook pouring the contents from a 5-gallon package of Alfredo sauce. My guess is only the very few actually prepare their own sauces or make their own reductions.
Our local Chinese take-out prepares much of their own food, though exactly what ingredients are shipped in pre-prepared and what’s prepared on site is a good question. But I mention them because they have large take-out menus printed by the Chinese restaurant supply firm that presumably sells them many of their ingredients. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of that menu around, but I seem to recall it being in the Midwest (we’re in N.C.)
My coworker’s family from Hong Kong ran a restaurant in a small northern Florida town and then up here in Philadelphia. She mentioned that her father did in fact move them somewhere where there’d no competition, but the family hated living there as unusual immigrants and eventually they convinced the father to move them back to the city. Thus I can confirm one instance of this.
Outside of Chinatown most of the cheap Chinese places here aren’t buffets at al - there’d be no room in most cases. They’re usually mostly or entirely take-out places that are run from corners of blocks of rowhomes, are usually open nearly 24 hrs, and therefore are also run from behind bulletproof plexiglass. Many of them also do a brisk trade in soda, “blunts” (for your pot), condoms, potato chips and candy. Generally the less of that sort of thing they sell the better the food is I’ve noticed, even though the suppliers/menus are the same.
Yes, when I go to a take out restaurand, I see all of the action going on.
A little hint: if you can get to know/make friends with people who run a Chinese restaurant you’ll get to taste some great food. Otherwise, not so much. I had a Taiwanese friend in Cincy whose girlfriend’s family ran a restaurant. Very mediocre. Then one night we were invited to eat with them: phenomonal! I asked why they didn’t offer this stuff on their menu: American people no like. They like other food. Which is probably generally true, but their daughter eventually got them to open a more innovative place in an upscale part of town and now they are swamped with business.
I think what you are seeing is them putting the items together. Not the preparing of the items in the first place. If you get chicken with broccoli, you might see them taking the chicken from a container, putting it in the pan, adding broccoli already cut up, adding sauce they have already made, etc. You don’t see them chopping and boning the chicken; washing and chopping and storing the broccoli; and taking bottles and jars out of the cupboards and measuring them into a pot and then heating them up and making the sauce. It’s the same way with the chicken stock: they make it in advance.
There’s probably a whole section of the Chinese kitchen you cannot see from the take-out window, and probably a bunch of people you never see who are doing prep. All restaurants work this way, not just Chinese ones.