I kind of wonder if this talk about authenticity is something of a red herring though. America has a long tradition of culinary syncretism- some examples of “American” dishes:
[ul]
[li]Cajun/Creole food is basically French cuisine adapted with native ingredients and hefty doses of Spanish and native cuisine.[/li][li]Chicken fried steak (of Texas fame anyway) is a riff off of German schnitzel.[/li][li]US pizza styles are riffs off of the original Italian.[/li][li]American “Italian” food is what immigrants made with abundant local ingredients.[/li][li]Tex-Mex is probably one of the most famous- it’s a border cuisine that blends traditional Mexican cuisine with Anglo ingredients and influences.[/li][li]Viet-Cajun crawfish are a recent Houston-area thing- a sort of second-generation of syncretism.[/li][/ul]
Hell, steak, potatoes, ham, etc… are all of European derivation originally.
I guess my point is that there’s nothing wrong with Chinese-American food because it’s not strictly authentically Chinese. It’s its own thing now, and there’s no reason to shit on it any more than there is for Tex-Mex not being strictly Mexican.
Once again, I don’t understand the controversy about these comments. He didn’t call Chinese people by an ethnic slur, say that Chinese people were inferior, or other otherwise say anything remotely mean or degrading to anyone.
His comment, as I understand it, was that the typical American Chinese restaurant serves slodge, barely a grade up from fast food, and that he is opening up an “authentic” Chinese restaurant.
I fail to see how this is different than almost any other restaurant advertisement out there. My restaurant’s food is good, theirs sucks donkey balls. That is free market competition and I have never, not one single time in my life heard of someone whining about puffery in advertising.
Other posters are spot on about the “authentic” argument. Of course when foods cross cultures, there will be something added from the latter culture that changes the identity. Sometimes this change is good; sometimes it is bad. As others have said, the food style must change so that fat ass Americans will go eat it.
“Authentic” is just one of those marketing buzz words that are used all of the time and is not degrading. I mean, if I have a restaurant and advertise “homemade” vegetable beef soup “just like mom used to make” it would seem as if posters here would be claiming I was insensitive because I am saying that women should be in the kitchen cooking, not everyone had mothers, and I am not taking into consideration other cultures whose mothers did not make vegetable beef soup. Those are marketing terms and everyone knows what they mean.
I would be interested in getting some objective measurements of how good American Chinese restaurants are. First, there are approximately 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. That’s about three times as many such restaurants as there are McDonalds in the U.S. Maybe it’s impossible to have that many restaurants of one type without most of them being somewhat poor. How does this compare to the Chinese restaurants in other countries (which are not majority-Chinese in ancestry)? How many Chinese restaurants are there in European countries or the Americas outside the U.S. or in Africa or in Oceania? Is it about the same number of Chinese restaurants in proportion to the population of the country as the U.S.? How good are those Chinese restaurants on average? Is there any (non-majority Chinese) country in the world that has, in proportion to its population, as many Chinese restaurants as the U.S. and where the average quality of those restaurants is as considerably better than in the U.S.? Is it just impossible for there to be lots of a particular type of restaurant without most of them being rather poor?
Have you ever watched “Shokugeki no Soma!” (AKA “Food Wars!”)? It’s a bit like if HentaiHaven produced Iron Chef; a shonen battle anime with lots of fan service where instead of fights to the death, the drama plays out over (typically) one-on-one cook-offs.
Those of you who have seen the show, I want you to picture Zimmern imported as a character in that show. Let’s say that one of the first things you see about him is his comment about “horseshit” restaurants. What role would he play? Would he be one of the “good guys”? Would he be a heel, like the arrogant italian chef eager to take a bite out of our protagonist? Would he be a full-on villain, like the student council?
Those who have seen season three don’t get any points for guessing that the answer would almost certainly be that last option, because that kind of snobbish bullshit is one of the major things the show uses to mark its primary antagonist. Because it’s a really shitty thing to say, even if it’s true, and it’s not hard to figure that out.
Is this a common thing? I have actually never heard anything resembling “theirs sucks donkey balls”. That’s what makes this statement so odd to me. The closest thing I can think of is something like Ramsay’s Kitchen Disasters, but “let’s invite a well-established famous chef to point out how we can stop being horseshit” is a far cry from said famous chef just flat-out saying, “X, Y, and Z are horseshit”. Advertisers typically don’t go out of their way to slag off the competition - at most, they offer themselves as “the best around”, which is still a far cry from “the competition is horseshit”.
The town I live just outside of has a population of 1,600 and a single Chinese restaurant, owned and operated for decades by a very nice Chinese family. I’ve discussed “Chinese restaurants” with members of the family (I’m a good customer/friend).
From what they’ve told me there are only a few wholesalers that all Chinese restaurants buy their stuff from. The light fixtures in the restaurant, pictures of various dishes, wall hangings, menu templates, teapots, dishes, etc are all uniform because they’re all purchased from the same supplier.
It has been shown repeatedly that a hard working family, running a restaurant that follows a simple script and purchasing from a specific supplier, can turn an ok profit. It’s very close to owning/operating a McDonalds franchise.
Especially when Zimmern is trying to pass off food as art. It’s like Thomas Kincaid saying, “That Jackson Pollock guy? His work is horseshit.” – slamming the competition without offering anything of his own that betters it.
Chinese restaurants are crap food largely because they are staffed with unskilled exploited labor. Many of their employees have never cooked a day in their life, so they need simple dishes that are hard to mess up. Triad members and snakeheads exploit smuggled illegals to staff the restaurants at below minimum wage and working 12 hour days 2 weeks straight for peanuts. It’s why butt-end nowhere Indiana has a Chinese restaurant with a dozen workers, but you never see them in stores or out in the community. They are kept in group housing and many of the back room cooks are Latino since they are easier to find.
Of course, that doesn’t apply to every restaurant and it’s not uncommon to find workers who save up enough to open their own restaurant where they in turn use more exploited labor.
Here’s a great piece on them, but it’s hardly the only one. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret. There’s a second part to the expose as well on the site if you dig for it.
I think there’s a couple of mistakes Zimmern made. First, the problem isn’t Chinese food in the midwest being inauthentic, the problem is that food in small population areas is generally terrible. I call it the myth of the small-town hole-in-the-wall. The odds of a town of 100k having any restaurant that isn’t going to be pizza, fast food, or terrible Chinese is slim. Maybe they have an Italian joint that serves a lot of frozen stuff, or an old diner, but that’s about it. When looking for places to eat on road trips, all of these terrible options are highly rated on Yelp, which is absolutely no indication of how good they are. Yes, this sounds elitist as hell, but it’s the truth. Small town food sucks.
But Minneapolis? I’m sure there’s good food in Minneapolis, I’m sure there’s good Chinese food in Minneapolis. Probably a lot of terrible Chinese (and other restaurants) as well but it’s got a big enough population to support decent restaurants. Maybe not NYC quality but I don’t think Lucky Cricket is going to be booked 6 months out anyway. So I think his first mistake is casting too broad of a brush, and incorrectly at that, with his “Midwest” comment.
But more importantly, he should have said this: “I think customers are increasingly demanding high quality Chinese food, so we’ve created Lucky Cricket to satisfy that demand.” This accomplishes the same basic dig on existing Chinese restaurants but rather than putting their customers on the defensive (What? But I love the Jade Dragon!) it gives them an opportunity to put themselves in the role of the discerning consumer (Yes, I do demand quality things in my life, I think I’ll give this place a shot!). It’s marketing 101.
He’s not bringing “good Chinese” to the towns of 7,000 people though – he’s setting up shop in Minneapolis with 3.6 million people in its metro area. Which isn’t New York City but it’s not Podunk, Nowhere either. I’m going to guess that the Minneapolis area already has a couple decent Chinese food joints or at least as good as what his menu suggests.
Coincidentally, the first and only time I ate at P. F. Chang’s was in Minneapolis. Which is about the same level of quality I perceived in the Lucky Cricket website posted upthread.
Obviously the donkey balls comment is hyperbole, but criticism of the competition happens all of the time. Compare our product to “the leading brand.” Use Visa because at XXX, they don’t take American Express. Our burgers are “always fresh, never frozen” (implicitly not like those other fast food chains).
I agree that saying the competition is “horseshit” is taking it one step further, but the implication is one of racism, not of being a meany pants.
Honestly, in the restaurant industry, I don’t really see as much direct comparison to competitors in advertising as perhaps with other industries. Yes, you get “fresh, never frozen,” but I don’t really see that as direct comparison to the competition (especially as there are a lot of places that do fresh, never frozen), but more bragging about the quality points of their own product.
I don’t even know if I’d go so far as to call it racism; but there’s also implications of snobbism/classism/elitism by demeaning the entire Midwest for apparently having horseshit Chinese food. It’s just such a tone deaf comment all around, and especially somewhat ironic given his menu which, as has been noted, just looks like fairly mainstream mall Chinese fare, perhaps sexed up a little bit.
Depends what you mean by “decent” and “Chinese.” There are excellent restaurants doing the “classic” Americanized Cantonese and Mandarin style, especially on the north side. Places with “Orange” or “Chop Suey” in the name have tended to be winners for me. There’s also a bustling Chinatown that offers a wide variety of Chinese and Chinese-American food of highly variable quality (although some of the area’s stalwarts have shut down pretty recently). There’s also Friendship, one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, which has a talented chef doing an improved take on Americanized Chinese without being too ritzy or “fusion”-y.
But there are, regrettably, also a ton of very low-quality fast-food-quality places that serve either bad or extremely inconsistent food. I think one of the problems is that Chinese restaurants are expected to always have an extremely wide menu and asking a small kitchen with maybe two or three people working in it to be able to produce 100 different dishes in 15 minutes or so is a recipe for mediocre food.
As long as the food is one style, e.g. Cantonese, the number of spices and sauces is rather limited. It’s when a restaurant tries to mix different regional styles (e.g. Panda Express) that things go wrong because the ingredients may be completely different and they begin merge to styles. I’m sure somewhere, there’s Mandarin Style Dim Sum.
I had a co-worker whose father used to be chef in Hong Kong and she’d always bring leftovers for lunch. Meat or poultry, vegetables, rice. Something different every day, but always those three things.
