Not to mention there is a freaking TIKI BAR in the restaurant. What was that about authentic Chinese food?
We’ve hosted students from China several times and taken them to our local Chinese place, and there was little on the menu that they’d have gotten to eat at home. We knew this - but figured they’d enjoy seeing American “Chinese” food. The staff also got a kick out of seeing the students and talking to them (it’s a family run place, been around for 30+ years, and many of the staff are natives of China, though I don’t know what part).
I also had a meal from a place in a small town in Vermont this past week. It was walking distance from where we were staying, and as we walked past it, I glanced in and wasn’t impressed. But someone we talked with the next day recommended it, so we went in - and I think my first impression was spot-on. We got several standard dishes. The hot&sour soup was bad - second worst I’ve ever had: not hot, not sour, and roughly the consistency of Elmer’s Glue (the worst I ever had was near home, and was all of the above + burnt). The chicken dish I had was edible if unexciting. The dumplings were probably OK - my daughter devoured them before I could try one. She also wolfed down her lo mein without comment.
But, while we were waiting for our takeout order, a group of people came in, sat down, and ordered - and they were speaking Chinese (I think; I don’t speak the language but I thought I caught “shieh-shieh”). They may have been from a nearby youth hostel.
It’s quite possible that the place was making dishes the way locals wanted them. Maybe when it’s that cold out you WANT soup that literally sticks to your ribs :D.
Any food evolves when it goes to a new country. I’m reasonably sure that people in Italy eat things other than spaghetti, pizza, and chicken parmegiana, and I’d bet their everyday versions of those don’t bear much resemblance to what we get in the US.
Zimmern can get bent. I’ve been to very few restaurants that had anything remotely “authentic” on the menu - usually these are places that do dim sum (it’s how we accidentally tried chicken feet, for example). But you can adapt your dishes to serve the local preferences, and the results can be done well or badly even allowing for local preferences. Most “Chinese” restaurants are perfectly competent at what they do.
Here’s the type of menu you’ll see at my favorite types of places.
It’ll have a mix of some of familiar food to your average take-out Chinese diner (pot stickers, spring rolls, crab rangoon, hot and sour soup, fried rice, orange chicken, sweet & sour pork) and more “exotic” Chinese fare (green peppercorn frog, tofu and pork blood cake, sea cucumber with sour pickle chili, pig ear szechuan style, double cooked spicy pork intestine, etc.) My favorite there is the Szechuan Boiled Beef (shuizhu niurou) and the lamb cumin. Of the odder bits, the sliced beef and maw (stomach) szechuan style is delicious.
My god, that is the largest menu I have ever seen at any type of restaurant, it’s like 500 items.
Chinese restaurants, from my experience, are notorious about having everything and anything on the menu. If you click back up to my earlier link, the proprietor of Xi’an Famous Foods in New York talks about this, and how it’s a point of pride. ETA: Here’s the link at 3:10, so you don’t have to dig in the thread. (Plus this link is cued up a little earlier to where my last link was cued.)
(And I’m not sure Lao Sze Chuan has anywhere near 500 items–but it’s surely over a hundred.)
Looking at the online menu, it is over 200 items, but also remember that many of the items are just variations of similar items.
“Taco rice,” you say! Never heard of this. Well, I know what we’re having for dinner tonight! And looks like it practically takes no effort to make. Perfect for a lazy Wednesday before the kids start back up at school and the madness continues tomorrow.
My favorite as well. It’s accessible for the unadventurous but offers a great experience for those looking for authentic ingredients and preparation.
And that entire strip mall is full of restaurants that show authentic ethnic food is alive and well if you look for it.
I suspect the food at Zimmern’s place uses ingredients and preparations that are much higher end that one would find at places he would consider authentic. Like many others here, I’ve traveled enough to know that most good restaurants cater to local tastes. What is considered exotic to us is likely comfort food for local patrons.
In a similar vein, although the number and quality of Thai restaurants have gone way up in Hawaii since the wife and I were in school here 25 years ago, back then the handful of Thai restaurants sucked so bad that none of the Thai students, all of whom I knew, would ever go there. There was even a rather famous one here in Waikiki, long since departed, that was frequented by visiting celebrities, whose photos eating there adorned the walls. Expensive as all get out too, but every Thai student agreed it was horrible.
The are some good Thai restaurants here now though. Some not-so-good ones too. But at least some are good, unlike before.
He doesn’t have to apologize if he doesn’t want to. But you don’t call people’s livelihood horseshit and expect them to not get pissed off about it.
If he meant it, he should just say, “no, I think you run horseshit restaurants, and my cold sesame peanut noodles will make it clear that your version isn’t fit for dogs.”
Why won’t he stand up for what he believes? (hint: it’s because he felt cool being a dick like that, and didn’t really think about the fact that there are human beings who make a living on those “horseshit” restaurants who might not appreciate being insulted by a famous, wealthy restaurateur)
Andrew Zimmern is full of shit. Every restaurant is authentic to itself, and any that stick around longer than a year are pleasing a lot of customers, even if it isn’t some celebrity’s idea of “authentic Chinese”.
Still, he lost his show because of that? It’s nowhere near Rosanne-level gratuitous bigotry that I can see. It sounds to me like he threw down the gauntlet, made grandiose claims, a la “My restaurant will beat the pants off the weak, substandard competition” and it turned out to be a poorly conceived PR mistake. A misguided attempted at edgy boosterism that backfired. But hey, I don’t make programming decisions at whatever network airs his show. I guess they thought he’d lose them money. He’s nowhere near Rosanne’s level of celebrity, either.
We have an Uighur place near us (fantastic) that has a second menu of traditional Chinese food for the faint of heart. So it depends on the clientele.
I think the bigger part is insulting the much larger eyeball base that is the customers of those restaurants being told, “Hey stupid Midwestern yokels, I am a sophistimacated big city boy here here to save you from liking what you think you like, but are too clueless to know is horseshit.”
That said I would be shocked if the show canceling was 100% percent about the comment. It just feel more like a timely event to excuse something wanted they wanted to finish with anyway, but I have nothing to back that up of course.
Somehow, I totally missed that his show was cancelled. And I agree, I’m sure it’s not based on just that one comment.
Zimmerman’s restaurant is fusion cuisine, so by definition, it’s not “authentic” Chinese. I looked over the menu, and yes it’s like a variant on Panda Express or PF Chang’s. Some of it might be “authentic” Chinese, but I have my doubts.
If I want really authentic, high quality Chinese food, I drive 2.5 hours to Hongcouver Canada. There are some decent places locally but nothing that compares with the Richmond district of Vancouver.
Let’s put it this way, one of the more authentic Chinese restaurants locally is Ding Tai Fung. Expensive for what it is but most of the dishes are reasonably tasty and authentic. And I’m sure it blows Zimmerman’s fantasy project out of the water.
So many things wrong here. As already pointed out, there are surely plenty of good Chinese food places (authentic even) in his area. He just isn’t looking hard enough. Also both ‘authentic’ and Chinese-American can co-exist. One does not preclude the other. I went to a restaurant with my mom in the suburbs. They gave us a menu, then asked me if I spoke Chinese. I said “No, but she does” and they gave my mom another menu with more stuff. You know, the real stuff.
The other point is he’s really not paying attention to his own field. I was reading the book “Best Food Writing 2017” and there is an entire section “Whose Food is it Anyway?” with several articles written about culture, appropriation and who gets to represent a cuisine and the power imbalances therein. The concept isn’t new, yet he stupidly walked right into it.
Back when I was in Taiwan (granted, this was back in the 1990s), one of my sister-in-law’s uncles was telling me how much he enjoyed visiting New York City because there were so many different styles of Chinese restaurants there with all sorts of food that he could not get in Taiwan. Taiwan isn’t exactly China (unless you talk to someone in the People’s Republic). But it is pretty close.
Personally, I think it matters more how much you enjoy a dish than it’s precise ‘genealogy’. I don’t get to travel as much as I used to, but I always enjoy trying to sample whatever local dishes there are, where ever I am. Part of it is intellectual curiosity, part of it is the thought that I am immersing myself in the local culture. But in reality, it’s mostly the idea that I might have a brand new experience. So what if it isn’t what someone’s grandmother used to make – if it gives you pleasure, why complain? People are always experimenting, substituting ingredients, trying new combinations. Hell, I’m not a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m always coming up with new culinary inventions in the kitchen (mostly because I don’t like following other people’s recipes). Some work better than others. I knew an excellent italian chef (while I was a busboy at a nice italian restaurant) who would always use the staff as guinea pigs for his new inventions. And everything was always excellent. And all of it was, more or less, original. Does it mean it wasn’t italian? Who cares? It was good. And the restaurant had a great, albeit local reputation (especially his deserts which were to die for).
A good chef will try to replicate other people’s dishes. A great chef will create his own (which will eventually be copied by others, as soon as they figure it out). It’s food. Just eat it.
It’s weird because Xi’an Famous Food has a very limited menu.
Zimmern has a point in there that he makes very poorly. It comes across badly because it looks like he’s slamming Chinese cooks, promoting his own restaurant, and coming across as a douche (not a reach for Zimmern). The talk about authentic Chinese food is also a loaded term and off-point (although I don’t see Zimmern actually use the word authentic in the linked article).
People who are bringing up tasty hand-pulled noodles, exotic ingredients, the cuisines of the remote regions of China, secret Chinese-only menus, and the state of Chinese food in NYC, Vancouver, Portland and other large cities with foodie scenes and large Chinese populations are kind of missing the point.
I can’t speak for the Midwest, but let me tell you about the state of Chinese food here in small-town upstate New York. I live in a town of about 7,000 that is the largest town in the county. There are three Chinese restaurants in my town (one buffet, one buffet/takeout, and one takeout), and four more takeout Chinese restaurants in the county. Other than Italian restaurants (all pizzerias) and a Taco Bell, they are the only ethnic restaurants in the county, and they range from mediocre to dismal. Their menus are almost 100% identical, and they have the same food/menu pictures over the takeout counter. Someone who had their first Chinese food here would assume that Chinese cuisine specialized in gloopy soups, doughy dumplings, fried bits of stuff, and breaded chicken nuggets in variations of sweet syrupy sauces. The part where Zimmern talks about having to educate people about chili oil, hand-cut noodles, and real roast duck would be spot on for this area.
Now if I drive roughly an hour in each of the four cardinal directions, I can reach a large town or small city and my food options greatly expand. I can get good Thai, good Vietnamese, good Indian, and good Korean food, but Chinese food is roughly the same. There are take-out places and buffets, and while some of the buffets are nicer, the general food quality is about the same. I have found better places that are not what I call cookie-cutter Chinese, but they have either a) closed down or b) not maintained quality or decided to switch to “standard” Chinese-American menus.
I took a friend to one of the good places before it closed and she was dismayed because a) they dind’t have General Tso’s chicken and b) she had to pay more than $10 for a Chinese dinner. Frankly, if someone in my neck of the woods says they want to eat Chinese food, I take that to mean they want a cheap meal with large/unlimited portions.
Calvin Trillin once described trying homemade gazpacho at a neighborhood street fair. While eating it he was explaining to someone how it differed from authentic gazpacho, then realized that the main difference between what he was wolfing down and the authentic stuff, was that the version he was enjoying tasted better. 