Yeah, but this is supposed to be the starting point of a chain, which I presume is going to expand into smaller cities at some point.
Only tangential to the OP, I think that the rise of cheap Chinese buffet, while certainly popular, has done a lot of harm to the perception of Chinese food outside of major metropolitan areas or areas with large Chinese populations.
Outside of those two areas, the buffet has largely has become the dominant model for sit-down Chinese options, and in large areas of America, the sit-down Chinese option is either a) buffet b) P.F. Chang’s or c) Panda Express/mall food court.
The dominance of the take-out/buffet model for Chinese restaurants have kind of locked Chinese food into the cheap/value niche of restaurants in America, maybe just a cut above fast food, and Chinese restaurants that compete compete on price points often suffer.
Way back in the day, the Chinese chop-suey joint and the Italian spaghetti house both occupied the same niche. They were cheap ethnic eats that had to Americanize their menus to survive. However, Italian restaurants have moved up from that rung to cover everything from the pizza place to fine dining, even outside of big cities.
Chinese restaurants were starting to climb off that bottom rung in the 60s and 70s, with the openings of larger, more elegant restaurants and moving into to regional Chinese such as Hunan and Szechuan. However, the buffet boom has really put the brakes on that, and locked Chinese restaurants into competing primarily on a price/volume continuum, an obligated to keep serving the same dishes that appeal to the customer base that is drawn to the low-price/big-portion model.
Meanwhile, as I posted above, restaurants with other Asian cuisines, are spreading into my neck of the woods and are providing better food than most Chinese buffets or Chinese takeouts can provide. Since people are around here have less expectations of what Thai or Vietnamese or Indian or Korean food should be, the chefs/owners can present food that is less skewed to perceptions of what Americans will eat.
While a lot of these places are inexpensive, they are still not as cheap as Chinese food, and are starting to open more restaurants in a higher price range. I can get family members and friends to try and eat at these places, but I have a hard time getting them to try Chinese restaurants that are not a) cheap and b) resolutely Chinese-American.
I’m not convinced that buffet restaurants have made Chinese restaurants worse in the U.S. I’m not even convinced that there are hugely more buffet restaurants among Chinese restaurants in the U.S. or that they are worse on average than the not-very-good Chinese restaurants they replaced. As you point out, bmoak, you grew up in an area with better Chinese restaurants than where you now live. In fact, I suspect that you grew up in an area where restaurants in general are better than where you now live. I suspect that what you’re observing is that many of those not-very-good Chinese restaurants out in the places where Chinese restaurants (and restaurants in general) aren’t very good decided that it was more profitable to change to being buffet restaurants. It may also be true that other types of restaurants also changed to being buffet restaurants (but still serving their own cuisine) because it was more profitable to change to being buffet restaurants. It may then be that not-very-good restaurants in general have decided that if they can’t be very good, then they might as well just try to be profitable.
The problem in making this claim is that to check it, it would take someone who has lived a single area for many decades, who was willing to try many restaurants every year, and who can make an objective claim about the overall quality of Chinese restaurants in that area. Furthermore, for every area in the U.S., it would take at least one person in that area who is able to do that. I doubt if it’s possible to do that. I don’t see how it’s possible to get an objective account of the quality of all the Chinese restaurants in every area of the U.S.
that description was my favorite restaurant “mandarin gate” they had take out and delivery even lunch buffet and monogolian bbq and a huge menu and a bar from the 50s (along with the ww2 era bartender who knew how make all the tiki drinks) and they disappeared one day
Now all ive seen open is the mall/store front places that change owners every year or so and get worse each time aka “Chinese mcdonalds” also kari-out dosent do anyone any favors quality wise either
And FYI lemon chicken is no different than orange chicken ….just made with slightly sweetened lemon syrup I mean sauce poured over a chicken pattie or over a chicken tempura type of thing
While I agree the comparisons in my posts in this thread between where I live now and my hometown are somewhat like comparing apples to oranges, but here are a few mitigating factors.
-While my hometown is much bigger than where I live now, I did mention in this thread that I can get to large towns and cities if I want to drive an hour or so, and these places are at least as large and cosmopolitan as my hometown in NJ. The options for other Asian food are good, but the Chinese restaurants are still mostly limited to cookie-cutter takeout or buffet.
-I’ve been back to or through my hometown numerous times, and while I don’t eat go there to eat Chinese food, I notice that while there are more Chinese restaurants, the only non-takeout places I saw were buffets. The better quality sit-down places of my youth are long gone. One place I do go back to when I’m in the area, a Peruvian-Chinese place that opened and I sued to go to just before I moved away, has much better Chinese food than the Chinese place across the street, although the Chinese menu is limited and I usually eat Peruvian food there.
-While I’ve talked about buffets being a bad influence on Chinese food in America, perhaps more important is something I mentioned earlier in the thread: the standardization of Chinese restaurants by wholesaler syndicates that supply everything from menus to signage to foodstuffs. A lot of the newer generations of Chinese restaurants are basically chain restaurants in all but name.
hence my statement that kari out and theres another place that almost everyone gets their sauces ect from hasn’t done anyone any favors quality wise
This must be some kind of regional variation.
The dominant Chinese food place around here (medium-to-large-sized Midwestern city) is the sort of small dine-in/takeout restaurant I grew up with long ago in a borough of NYC.* We also sometimes patronize a fancier Chinese and Thai place a few miles away. There’s at least one Chinese buffet around here somewhere but I’ve never been to it.
*there was one joint ancient enough that it had once been called “The New Republic” in honor of Sun Yat-Sen. I still remember the childhood joy of riding home in the car with my father, holding a large sack of hot, fragrant Chinese takeout food. 
There’s probably some regional variation, but the sit-down Chinese restaurants that existed in my NYC youth are basically gone. Of course, there are still sit-down restaurants in Chinese neighborhoods, but those are different from the ones I’m talking about. When I was a kid, there were sit-down restaurants with wait staff and bartenders. If you wanted to order takeout, you would order it at the bar or with the hostess. Now, the only sit down-restaurants outside of the Chinese neighborhoods are buffets. The other option is take-out places that might have 2 tables right next to the window where you can eat from your takeout container. Like this
I suspect that most non-Chinese kids in this generation wouldn’t know ‘real’ Chinese food if they were served it. “This isn’t what they serve at Panda Express!”.
Chain restaurants like Pizza Hut and Papa Johns have taken pizza so far from it’s origins that I don’t know what a pizza is anymore! Ironically, I suspect the pizza I got at Woolworths in the 60’s and 70’s with a thin, slightly burnt crust, plain tomato sauce, oregano and mozzarella was probably closer to the original pizza than anything I can easily get today. Same with Taco Bell which vaguely resembles the Mexican food I used to enjoy at Cha Cha Cha Salsaria here in Hawaii.
When was Macau under British rule?
Hell, there’s a Cantonese place near me that sells Mapo Tofu, a Sichuan dish. It’s been altered for Cantonese palates, and it tastes much different than what you’d get at a Sichuan restaurant ten miles away from us.
My father (who is Cantonese) and I went to western China about fifteen years ago, and he couldn’t eat the food there.
Do kids today (I assume you really mean something like people in their late teens or early twenties) really think that Pizza Hut is authentic Italian food or that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food or that Panda Express is authentic Chinese food or do they really think that it’s obviously just American food vaguely influenced by Italian, Mexican, and Chinese food?
Heh. Same thing happened to me last year. The Chinese take-out my parents order from is your basic American-Chinese/Cantonese influenced take-out. I was excited when I noticed they had ma po tofu on the menu. Ma po tofu, at least served the way I get them at Sichuan restaurants in Chinatown here in Chicago, is one of my favorite dishes, and I am not generally a tofu eater. What I got from this take-out place … I have no idea what it was. It was just gloppy tofu served in an overly cornstarch-thickened sauce, with little spice, no taste of sichuan peppercorns (so no signature ma la), no chile oil, etc. They did at least have ground pork in it, but it was such a muted dish compared to what I was used to.
Edit: Double Post
If they’ve never been exposed to the real thing, how would they know otherwise? I told the story about a guy (who admittedly was very sheltered by his Mom) who thought Taco Bell was real Mexican food and refused to follow me into a Del Taco (which is at least a step above Taco Bell) because he didn’t understand the concept of not having a preset menu for him. He also thought Pizza Hut was real authentic pizza, because he never had anything else.
Ironically, he loved dinuguan (a traditional Filipino dish made with pork and pig’s blood), but only the one his Auntie made, not anyone else’s. There are as many variations as there are cooks. So at least he knew what at least one traditional Filipino dish was (he was 1/2 Filipino on his Mom’s side).
Just to be clear, Macau was never under British rule. It was under Portuguese rule and handed over almost 2-1/2 years after Britain handed over Hong Kong.
Duh…of course. I even knew that. Brain fart! 
lingyi, you assume that the default belief is that any food they try for the first time is authentic example of the food of the foreign country it supposedly comes from. Perhaps the default belief is that any food they try for the first time is just American food that long ago may have been inspired by the food of some foreign country. I don’t know which belief is more common.
Food is regional, not national, and tastes are individual. To condemn one or the other on generalization is unnecessary.
I have had Chinese on the East Coast, the West Coast, in many places in flyover country, and in the Western Pacific. It can be either good or bad, but it’s always different.
I have never seen Prickly Ash sauce on the mainland US. Has anyone? Where?
What is prickly ash sauce? Googling isn’t helping me out. I mean, we have lots of places that use prickly ash (which we call Sichuan peppercorns, usually) in their sauces, but I’ve always seen it in combination with Chinese red chile peppers for that ma la flavor. (Also, it should be noted that Sichuan peppercorns were banned in the US up until about fifteen years ago, due to some agricultural thing. I seem to recall there was a risk that it could carry some kind of plant disease.)