All the Chinese restaurants around here use styrofoam boxes. The little white paper boxes are used for gravy or sauces. I’ve never eaten take-out where the entire meal came in one of those little white boxes.
Everyone’s missing an important point here: Paper is a much better insulator than foil. Foil conducts heat away, and (from my understanding) would lead to colder food.
Unless I’m missing a major point in physics, our chinese food would be alot hotter.
I would most definitely eat cold Chinese food and I have. Sometimes it even tastes better that way. I will eat almost any leftovers cold, actually, no problem.
Frozen pizza, for me, would be like the taste equivalent of nails screeching down a chalkboard. Euuuuuuuuuuugh. 
Concerning Chinese takeout–with the exception of fortune cookies, if there isn’t steam rising from the food I’ll give it a pass.
Another movie food cliche that bugs me: I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a woman eating anything in a movie…
Wait…you mean…
Girls eat too? Damn. Females just get more enigmatic by the day…
Liquid makes those paper cartons not just leak, but actively spew sauce tens of feet in all directions staining everything in sight. :eek:
And many of us don’t live in NYC and so don’t have convenient Chinese delivery to our houses. It exists, but it’s not very convenient. Still, it’s quite plausible in a work setting for people to sit and eat out of the carton from food that either was just delivered or picked up by somebody on staff. Same for homes, although I like taking bits from several dishes too much to confine myself to just one.
As far as I can tell, though, unless the habits of New Yorkers are different than the rest of us - probably true - people don’t eat cold Chinese food much. It’s perfect for tv, though. It doesn’t tie the actors to a table, so they can move around and talk - directors love that - and the eaters have something to do with their hands - actors love that. And you can’t see the food, so they don’t really have to eat - a problem when you need ten takes - and the amount of food doesn’t visibly change from take to take - the continuity director loves that. And above all it’s picturesque to use chopsticks. Everybody wins.
Maybe you should ask your parents.
Anyway, I eat Chinese food at any temperature, but only straight out of the white box. My mother used to transfer leftovers into casserole dishes, then reheat them. I hated that; it just didn’t seem like Chinese take-out anymore.
There is nothing better (Chinese Food wise anyway) than cold Sweet and Sour Pork over Fried Rice. Especially when the sauce has become a gelatinous blob in the shape of the white box that it was taken home in.
The places around here only use the paper cartons for the rice. (And, incidentally, they aren’t the same as TV cartons - they got rid of the wire handle so it’s microwaveable.)
For everything else they use really nice white plastic containers with clear lids. It’s actually nicer than that disposable tupperware. I have a whole drawer full of them.
I could be wrong, but I imagine that a paper/cardboard container will hold in heat much better than foil, which has an extremely low heat capacity (thus giving off heat more easily. Ever put foil in the oven? Even at 400 degrees you can touch it with your hands).
Er, on preview, I see that Electronic Chaos has already made the same point.
I totally agree on the nastiness of cold fried rice, mainly because it gets to that weird half crunchy, half chewy consistancy that sticks in your teeth and “blaaaaaargh” is what I say to that.
I do, however, very much enjoy cold eggrolls, lo mein, and pretty much anything else you could cart away from a Chinese restaurant. shrug Just something about it, I guess. Only eaten with chopsticks straight out of the container, though.
Then again, this may have much to do with me being a lazy college student…
For me, the test of a good sweet and sour chicken/pork/shrimp is how it tastes straight out of the fridge around midnight. But I don’t eat cold rice; I’ll finish that when it’s still fresh and hot, or throw it out.
Cold or reheated, it’s all good to me!
There aren’t too many people on these boards who know what you meant by this.
I know, of course, because I grew up in the Mon Valley.
We get take-out in the little paper boxes from Szechuan Garden down the block, and despite consistantly ordering the most liquid-y, sloppy things on the menu, I can attest that they do not leak even slightly. We take it home, stuff ourselves, place leftovers in refridgerator, and remove them about two hours later to finish them off without reheating.
Mmmm…General’s Tofu.
Where I live, there are Chinese takeout only (and eat-in) restaurants abound, and not just in Chinatown. The overwhelming majority use the ubiquitous white carton. It’s waxed and folded, and will survive a small fall without splashing its contents all over the place. A growing minority of places, especially in the suburbs, are the black plastic with clear top containers. Those are really nice for storage and reuse, but I prefer the cartons. You see these types of containers mainly in the suburbs. Every place I go to (and I go to a lot) all use the white carton for rice. I’ve notice the tin foil the first time I was in the UK. I thought it was an anomoly. How can you carry anything when the foil is boiling hot? I actually used it to iron my shirt one day, in attempt to have it cool off before I started eating it. Oh, and I’ll gladly eat cold chinese food, just not cold rice.
I wonder what the American equivalent of this is? I don’t think it exists. Is this more traditional Chinese? (My first and only time in China I ate at American places because our hosts thought we would like familiar food.) Does it have peas and corn and carrots like 99% of the dishes there?
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I have never had a problem with the folded, waxed white boxes the food comes in. When it arrives it is hot and ready to eat.
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I love cold food - regardless of ethnicity - when it is well-prepared, so a night in the fridge means the ingredients get to blend even more. A good beef stew. Chili (mmmm, chili). Spaghetti sauce. An Indian, Thai or Vietnamese curry - it’s all good good good cold.
Grew up in California - lived in SF and went to the best damn American Chinese* food place in the world for 8 years (U Lee, on Hyde and Jackson, home of the best pork dumpling potstickers you will ever have) - and now live outside NYC.
*I say “American Chinese” under the working assumption that real Chinese food might be different, just like American Pizza is different that what you find in Italy…
Seconded. I’ve never seen anything like this at a Chinese resturant, but it sounds great and I’d love to try some.
First of all: For me, when the food comes it’s always warm enough to eat. The main entrees usually comes in a styrofoam container, although something like dumplings comes in a cardboard box.
Second of all: chinese food is one of those things that I’ll never eat cold. Their sauces, often, have a lot of corn starch in them to give them a thicker consistency but when they’re cold, that tends to become gummy and gluey. (like in lo mein, or General Tso’s Chicken).
And, I don’t like cold rice.
You do get chinese food in those containers sometimes, but in the movies, ALL chinese food is in those containers. It’s just movie shorthand for “chinese food”.
IME the servings are, by volume, much bigger than your average Fast Food volume. Plus, the square is a relatively well-packed shape, area-wise, as opposed to sandwich - and - fries style configurations. So the combination of the two makes the food cool slower.