Chinese Restaurants

Factual Questions
21

If you’re curious about this topic, I highly recommend the Chinese Restaurants series of documentaries, which just came out on DVD. It is an excellent series of documentaries focusing on Chinese restaurants across the world.

I saw the “Song of the Exile” installment (about Chinese restaurants in Israel, South Africa, and Istanbul) and “Three Continents” (about Norway, Canada, and Madagascar). They are excellent. Each one focuses on a specific restaurant, but discusses how Chinese food, Chinese immigrants, and people of Chinese descent fit into the overall history and culture of each society. There’s the eloquent, poetic South African activist who’s actually a terrible cook, but inherited the restaurant when her husband died; the fast-paced, sharp, urban Hong Kong couple running a restaurant in the oppressive darkness of a small town in northern Norway; the born-again Christian in the Holy Land who makes his restaurant a center of the Chinese Christian community and sees it as a tool to convert immigrants to his faith; and many other amazing, moving stories. Not all the restaurants are even Chinese. The Canadian restaurant is actually an American-style diner that’s just run by a Chinese man.

22

Another thing - Chinese restuarants are not always opened to make a substantial profit; some just open them in order to get a green card. So just because a restaurant is open doesn’t mean that it’s making money hand over fist, or even necessarily trying its darndest to do so. For example, I live in a heavily Asian part of New Jersey suburbia, and there’s a large number of Chinese restaurants, many more than market forces warrent. Many close down after several years - it’s rather sad, actually, because many of them cook really good food and deserve to succeed.

23

I have the same impression regarding kebab. Here in Germany, the numerically most important community of immigrants are Turkish people, and accordingly there’s a lot of Turkish places selling kebab in any German town, even minor ones (we have Chinese restaurants everywhere as well). Since I’m not particularly keen on cooking myself (law student :wink: ), I frequent those places a lot, and I believe many kebab takeaways buy a lot of their ingredients (bread, salad, sauces, meat on rotating skewers) prepared from wholesale suppliers. Which, of course, results in the food not being very fresh, and tasting the same everywhere.

24

Mmm, döner.

In my hometown of 60k or so people, we have a bunch of very similar chinese restaurants, almost all of which are buffet style, if we’re still polling the public on their chinese restaurants.

25

I want to know how on earth the 5.99 buffet stays in business - even if it’s operating at a loss, how on earth does it not go bankrupt? There’s this one in a building that used to be a titty bar here, and I’d never been there before - went with my boyfriend last week, and there were five steam tables just chock full of different dishes. Hundreds of them, easily! Now, we got there early for lunch, and as we were leaving it was filling up. But even if it’s mostly pre-prepped or frozen or whatever (it’s not like it was super-great or anything), the sheer quantity and variety is pretty mind-boggling. How on earth do they do it? (And there’s always that 16-year-old cashier, how’s come you never see her in school?)

The Mexican restaurants staffed with immigrants, I can understand - most of the dishes are variants on a few simple things, so they’ve probably got like five pots on back there, the family works there like slaves, you work your way up the English-speaking ladder to become a waiter, etc. But the Chinese ones seem to follow a different model, and I don’t at all see how it’s viable.

26

The one that opened up near me is $12.95 for adults. They have the standard run of 100 trays or so of everything from chicken chow mein to cheese pizza. The thing that gets me though is that they have a seafood section with huge tubs of things like Alaskan Snow crab. Then, they have an actual seafood raw bar with 3 different kinds of premium oysters shucked to order. They are the real deal a half dozen will run you $12 by themselves as an appetizer at other restaurants. Then, they have a sushi bar (included) as well as a cook to order bar where you can pick out quality raw meat like steaks and have them cooked oriental style.

Most people stick to the volume tubs but not me and I wonder why that is in their business model.

27

Would I be correct in assuming that the overwhelming majority of the staff in those places, from the kids helping out after school to the wizzened old grandmothers, would speak perfectly fluent, accentless, idiomatic American English (or regional equivalent)?

The reason I ask is that - and I’m no US history expert, so this is a WAG - the people running those places are descendants of Chinese who came to the 19th century Californian goldfields, and even today, the best way for a person with an Asian face to get easy work and acceptance in many small towns is by running a Chinese restaurant.

I’m basing all the above on the Australian experience, which on the face of it, seems identical to the American one - namely, Whitebreadsville, population 1500, inevitably having a Chinese restaurant.

After their American experience, when the Australian gold rush started, many Chinese came to the “New Gold Mountain” of New South Wales and Victoria. Some of them set to work on the diggings, but many set up as merchants, cooks, etc on the goldfields (generally the smart ones, in hindsight). Many of their descendants are still here today, and still living in those former gold districts. They have broad Australian accents, they cook mediocre Chinese food, but if you turn to the back page of the menu, you’ll often see “Australian Meals”, and you’ll get the best damned T-bone steak you’ve ever had.

28

Regarding the cheap prices of many restaurants:

I guess it’s a misconception to believe that large quantity of food equals high costs for the restaurant, so the buffet places must be running at a loss. Think about it: The raw food (vegetables, meat, salad) is darn cheap. Go into your local supermarket, or even better wholesale stores, and see what a large quantity of food you can buy for a few dollars/euros (of course not top-quality stuff, but perfectly safe to eat). What makes going out for dinner in restaurants expensive are not the costs of the food, it’s labor costs. And the buffet scheme reduces those heavily: You don’t need waiters, you just need a bunch of people in the kitchen preparing the same stuff endlessly in bulks, reducing per unit costs. Additonally, the buffet scheme reduces the need for keeping less common ingredients at stock, because the variety of food you can choose is limited. To all this, add the well-known fact that many of the people working in those places are willing to accept lower-than-average wages*, and you get a notion of why it works.
[sub]* No xenophobia, cliché thinking, or even racism intended here. I guess the wages many of the people employed in those kitchens are below average, and most of the people willing to accept those wages are immigrants that haven ot been to the country for long time. You can discuss possible social injustice here, but it’s a fact.[/sub]

29

You would not be correct. For the most part it’s immigrants. Naturally sometimes the kids speak English with the same accent as their peers dependent upon how young they were when they arrived.

30

That still doen’t answer my other question, where do they learn to cook their dishes when the dishes are not served in Asia?

31

This would be totally different from my experience in Canadian Chinese restaurants, where no matter how bad the food is on the Chinese side of the menu, the food under “Canadian specialities” is worse.

32

Does anyone have cite or evn just a company name on the franchisors? If they are indeed franchises, then the recipes probably are standardized-as well as the rest of it.

I’ve always been amazed at the high degree of uniformity from restaurant to restaurant, from city to city, small and large (US) in the delivery Chinese food–from the menu (the paper menu as well as the dishses offered, pricing etc.) to the carry-out packaging, to the recipes. I always assumed that they weren’t franchises because they don’t use a single trade name like most restaurant franchises–but the uniformity is nearly at the level of a McD’s.

33

wow. this was a strangely entertaining thread. and since my computer ate my first extremely long winded reply, i’m going to be lazy and just do a few points.

my parents owned one of those little take-out joints.
my dad came to the US, worked in a chinese restaurant for a few years, and then opened his own restaurant.
it was family run. we never had more than 2 non-family employees at a time.
they sold the restaurant when they lost half their employeebase to colleges.
obviously, yes, i went to school. and did well. i was the geeky asian kid in the front row with glasses.

yes, we made our own chickenstock. the entire chicken was cut up for meat, and the bones thrown in the stockpot. the stockpot was pretty much going from 9am to close. any time we cut more chicken and had more bones, it immediately went into the stockpot. no, it didn’t cook overnight. something about fear of burning the building down. canned chickenstock is expensive and tastes like yuck.

we also cut all the veggies. precut veggies = expensive overhead = expensive food = bad.

day in the life of our restaurant: 9am, open, do lots of cutting and prepwork. 11-1:30 was the lunch rush. 1:30-4:30 was more prepwork. 4:30-7 was the dinner rush. after 7 was more prepwork. since my brother, grandmother and i didn’t play with the knives, guess who made all the wontons, all the eggrolls, and deshelled all the shrimp?

yes, there have been lots of crappy chinese franchises that hae popped up in recent years. but the little hole-in-the-walls are generally family run. look for lots of little asian children running around. or taking your money. or answering the phones.

and yes, all chinese menu’s are basically the same because…well, it works. as another poster said…americans want americanized chinese food. would YOU order bird’s nest soup? or tripe? or bittermelon? also, a lot of real chinese veggies can be expensive to get in the US, esp if you’re not in a city with a real chinatown. SO…if a restaurant sold real chinese food, it would be more expensive, and less people would eat there. doesn’t sound like a good business strategy.

34

An interesting and informative post.

Thanks, nital. :slight_smile:

35

Re: Cheap buffets.

Anthony Bourdain made the observation that if you hang around the Fulton Street fish markets near closing time, the Chinese and Korean buyers descend upon the market just before closing time and snap up anything that nobody else wanted during the day. The only ones who come in after are the pet food buyers. If your eating Chinese Buffet seafood, then your eating one step up from cat food.

36

If the restaurant run by my friend’s family is at all typical, the answer is that it’s much like an old time ‘apprentice’ system.

New employees (often relatives from the ‘old country’) arrive, not knowing English or how to cook ‘American style’ Chinese food.

No problem. They get put to work doing dishes and chopping vegetables. And they keep their eyes open. How many times do you have to see someone cook a dish before you can do it yourself? And as they pick up english they start handling duties that involve interacting with customers.

In not very long, they are the experienced ones, and in turn they teach the tricks of the trade to more freshly arrived employees.
Not all that different from a lot of jobs, actually.

37

Living in the Bay Area, I can tell you that the menus of the Chinese restaurants here, even the good ones, don’t have those interesting vegetables even though they are readily available at farmer’s markets and giant Oriental groceries. I don’t know if the Chinese menus have them - I know we get more interesting things when we go to Chinatown in NY with our friend from Hong Kong.

38

Down here in SC, I happened to notice the business license on the wall of one of our many Chinese buffets, and the owner of the business was listed as a company in NYC, so I can presume that this one may be franchised in some way. This particular place is new and has nice furnishings, not like the usual drab, red-carpeted, plasticky places which I have grown to love.

39

yeah, if it’s actually decorated, and the bathrooms are actually clean, then it’s probably a chain. if there’s very minimal decoration, and the bathrooms and funk nasty-scary, then it’s more likely a family business.

and i’m not familiar with the bay area, but here in houston, most chinese restaurants outside of chinatown still serve americanized chinese food, again, because you seriously limit interest in that dish. most people aren’t interested in trying something new. my parents had duck on their menu. i honestly only remember that being ordered a handful of times in 14 years. every now and then you might find a restaurant that serves a couple real chinese veggies, but if they’re anything like my parent’s restaurant, they give the blah stuff to americans (sorry, but it’s true), and the tastier stuff to chinese people that come in. i think my parents have actually made real chinese food with homegrown chinese veggies on occasion for chinese customers.

now, if you actualy go to chinatown, THAT’S where the good stuff is. course…most of the menu’s are just in chinese…some also list an english name for the dish, but whoever translated it did the most blah job possible, because the english names usually just don’t sound appealing.

40

They learn by first working in a restaurant of the same type. My MIL owns and runs a Chinese Restaurant in an outer suburb of Toronto, and naturally my wife and I help out whenever we visit. I’ve been “promoted” from prep work to actual cooking and I’ve already learned about half the menu, even though we’ve only been there maybe 5 or 6 times. Once you learn a handful of basic techniques, most take-out style food is just remembering what ingredients go into the wok in what order. It’s not terribly difficult, culinary-wise.

Speaking of prep, if the restaurant is not ordering everything pre-packaged from a supplier there is an immense amount of prep work done before and after opening hours. My MIL’s restaurant is open from 10am-11pm. In addition to the continuous prep work and chopping that goes on throughout the day, after the doors close all of the more labor intensive work is done. Deboning and portioning meat, making stock, chopping vegetables, preparing the spring rolls and dumpling-type dishes that are to be deep fried later, etc. They typically don’t leave the restaurant until 2am, and usually show up a couple of hours before opening the next day. The restaurant is closed Monday and my MIL usually spends that day shopping for ingredients and supplies, and occasionaly goes in and spends the entire day on prep work. There are about 4 other kitchen workers and they are all constantly busy. Running a Chinese restaurant is extremely labor intensive and hard work, much like any other type of restaurant.