i think zimmern has a point about modren chinese resturants

Cafe Society
1

heres the controversy MSN
But I think he’s right …the fast food mentality has taken over and 90 percent of the Chinese restaurants that’s opened in the past 10-15 years are horseshit……

I don’t know what the recent region of Chinese are running the restaurants these days but when a new restaurant is no different than the mall food court something needs to change

2

I only know what it says in the link you posted, but the link you posted seems to make it relatively clear that the issue is not that the Midwest has good Chinese food, it’s that:

  1. Zimmern is not Chinese.
  2. From a culinary standpoint, there is no such thing as China. The country is highly diverse in its cuisine, including both a large number of different cuisines developed by the Han people, and also the cuisines of other cultures like Tibetan, Uighur, etc.
  3. While I’m not an expert on China, I did live in Japan for quite some time and there, there are a large variety of sub-cuisines. A shabu shabu restaurant is a completely different place from an okonomiyaki restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a ramen shop, etc. When I see a “Japanese” restaurant in the US and they’re putting wildly different types of Japanese cuisine together into the same menu, I know that I can’t expect much since they aren’t properly doing any one thing. I would expect that China is much the same and that even if you chose a single regional cuisine, that you will still end up with a restaurant that’s a meaningless mishmash of poor implementations of different types of food.
  4. The Chinese have a tendency to eat everything under the sun. Americans eat beef, chicken, pork, onions, corn, carrots, potatoes, wheat, and a smattering of a few other things. Midwesterners are not going to eat a meal of sea cucumber, sparrow spit, roasted scorpion, etc. so even if you could source all of the weird exotic vegetables and spices from China that a midwesterner might be willing to put in their mouth once, you’re really only looking at the recipes that are made with pork or which are vegetarian, if you want to sell anything in the US. It’s fundamentally impossible to sell non-Americanized Chinese food to Americans on the simple basis that there’s simply too drastic a difference between the cuisines. Anyone wanting to sell “Chinese” food in America will produce radically inauthentic “Chinese” food. It’s the only way to make a buck. An actual Chinese restaurant would only work in New York and LA, and would have a very small audience of people who are willing to stick anything in their mouth, and who are willing to pay the cost of sourcing exotic ingredients.
3

I think the 4th point Sage Rat makes is really relevant. When most Chinese restaurants opened the majority of Americans weren’t comfortable eating things they weren’t at least passingly familiar with, so to stay in business you had to cater to American tastes and basically take just about everything Chinese out of the dishes. Now Americans are giving them shit for serving the dumbed down food they demanded.

4

I long for the day when a public figure can voice an opinion without having to apologize for it 24 hours later.
mmm

5

This.

6

The fact that he may be correct doesn’t make his comments not insulting. The fact that Andrew Zimmern is a white man opening a (actually not an “authentic”) Chinese restaurant is not insulting.

What IS insulting is Andrew Zimmern criticizing and diminishing the work of people who, unlike himself, do NOT have the luxury of deciding the level of “authenticity” of their restaurants. They are not in position of privilege where they get to make that decision; their businesses are their survival, and the survival of their families, and they produce the food that their customers will buy, period. It’s not a pet project, it’s their life. There’s a reason Chinese takeout joints also sell wings, onion rings, sandwiches and subs, and I promise you it ain’t because the proprietors’ dream is to one day open a delicatessen. They’re in the restaurant game to earn a living any way they can, and the fact that Andrew Zimmern is going to talk shit about what they do, even if he is 100% correct, is massively insulting.

7

We made a mistake a few years back eating at a Chinese restaurant in North Platte, Nebraska. The meat was inedible! In Nebraska of all places.

If you can’t do “adequate” why bother even trying?

8

Whether you’re putting your all into it or not, living from day to day or not, if you run a Chinese restaurant and you are selling onion rings, I suspect that you would fairly agree that as far as authenticity goes, your place is horseshit. Someone with a restaurant like that has no delusion that their place is a little slice of Shanghai brought to Smallville. Nor are they going to begrudge another restaurateur from making his pitch to get his restaurant to be successful (so long as he doesn’t start up a place across the street from yours).

9

It’s really a matter of the classic ‘punching down’ issue again. A person in a position of power slamming people who are not just looks bad and almost guarantees some sort of blow back.

Sure, Zimmern may want to promote his new thing - which I’m willing to bet is only marginally more ‘Chinese’ - but it’s possible to do that without being a dick to other people. Classic ‘Don’t be a jerk’ pushback. I don’t feel for him at all.

10

It’s one thing to know that, in your words, “your place is horseshit.”

It’s entirely another thing for a rich white guy to show up and not only tell you what you sell is shit, but that they’re going to go and do it “better.”

No, these people don’t give a shit if Andrew Zimmern opens a restaurant. They are fully aware that he’s not their competition. However, it’s like Amazon coming to town and talking shit about the public library; there’s no reason for it. Andrew Zimmern doesn’t need any excuse to open any kind of restaurant he wants, but for whatever reason he felt like he needed to justify opening an Asian-fusion restaurant by denigrating poor immigrant families who are just trying to get by.

I don’t believe Zimmern’s comments were made maliciously, he seems like a genuinely decent man, but they were tone-deaf, at best.

11

My brother spent a little over a year living in China. According to him, what we think of as “Chinese Restaurants” are not what exist in China as “Restaurants”.

12

OK, so Chinese restaurants that sell onion rings aren’t “authentic”.

So what? Why is authenticity a big deal? When I eat out, I don’t care if the food is authentic; I care if it’s good. And really, the impetus behind most “authentic cuisine” is “How can we make something that’s at least barely palatable from these super-cheap ingredients that are all we can afford?”. Making “ethnic cuisine” that’s too authentic will result in barely-palatable food.

13

I lived there two years and this is only somewhat correct.

China is obviously as diverse as any nation in the world and their food is:

  1. Insanely diverse. Like, many hundreds of thousands of things. Most of which we do not have here. Many oils used in cooking and methods are just not done or available here.

  2. Insanely good if you know what you are looking for. If you make Chinese friends and tell them to get you “the real stuff”, you can get some incredible food. It has been 15 years and I still think about my meal at a Hunan restaurant there and also about my meals at Quanjude(Beijing duck fit for royalty).

My comparison of China restaurants to American-Chinese:

  1. You share everything there and I love that. Why order separate dishes when you can all share everything?

  2. 90% or more of the food has been deemed not appreciated by Americans and is not served here. Much higher, since seafood is an absolute must in China and it is not a major feature of Amerian-Chinese restaurants.

  3. There are, however, many things that we have here that you can get there. Sweet and Sour is identical(it made the trip over the ocean for some reason). Many chicken dishes do exist there and here. Most beef things here are pork there, though. I hardly ever had beef in a regular restaurant there.

My wife and I talk about the people there a lot. It would be dishonest of me not to admit that we talk about our favorite restaurants almost more. We went out to eat there often and the food in a “hole in the wall” was incredible.

Zimmern is right that a lot of Chinese restaurants in the US-midwest are bad, but there are some quality ones, too.

14

amen to this. unless the restaurant makes a stated claim to authenticity, who gives a crap?

taco bell isn’t mexican food, either, but people still seem to like it. it’s its own thing, just like “american chinese food” has become it’s own thing.

15

What does this mean?

16

I agree with your sentiments but just want to mention that of the many Asian restaurants I have been in I have never seen sandwiches, subs or onion rings. Wings are another story, they are a part of many Asian cuisines just like chicken feet.

Dennis

17

A celebrity chef making a disparaging comment on the state of the food industry is just so so wrong! What gives him the right? Think of the poor immigrants making crappy food!

18

The restaurant we used to eat in San Jose had lots of Chinese families eating there and what amounted to two menus. In the front it was English with mostly Cantonese dishes* and in the back it was straight, untranslated, traditional Chinese. When we were feeling adventuresome we’d tell the waitress/daughter, “Bring us something good not more than $10.” (this was a long time ago)

We’d not ask what it was until we’d eaten it and, while some we did not care for, I can’t say we got anything really disgusting/bad. They still might have catering somewhat to our round-eye palates but at least it wasn’t egg fu yung for the umpteenth time.

*This was unusual because SJ mainly had Hunan restaurants; for Cantonese, go to San Francisco.

19

I would absolutely not say that. The Chinese food may very well be “authentic” and the place just serves other food to cater to other tastes. This is fairly common in my experience. I would never make a judgment based on on ethnic authenticity because the menu included hamburgers, onion rings, and chicken strips on the menu. One of my good friends ran a critically acclaimed Yucatecan restaurant here in the Chicago area and had to add some American foods and also other styles of Mexican food to the menu to appease other tastes. There was nothing at all inauthentic about his Yucatecan menu.

But this “authenticity” talk is a little bit of horseshit in and of itself. I mean, yes, I do like exploring food as it is presented in the native country (so what one may call “authentic”) but it’s not the most important thing and, if we always stuck to “authenticity” we’d never have cuisines evolve.

I actually came across this video (starts at 3:27) a few days ago with a young Chinese restaurant proprietor (from Xi’an Famous Foods in NYC) seques into talking about “authenticity” that I found very interesting. And, yes, he talks about serving French fries and chicken wings, too.

20

Yup.