Hmmmmm. I’ve lived in NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn) for the past 23 years, and I’ve never heard of “New York style.” Of course, we don’t call Delmonico or strip steaks “New York steaks,” either, the way a lot of the rest of the U.S. does.
Two urban legends about NYC Chinese takeout:
A) Every takeout place delivers food from one vast subterranean Chinese kitchen, possibly located beneath the New Jersey Meadowlands. Enormous pneumatic tubes blast moo shu pork, wonton soup, and General Tso’s chicken to the furthest reaches of the five boroughs, where the local establishments put them into little white boxes and plastic quart containers and ship them out via bicycle to hungry customers.
B) There are three kinds of Chinese takeout food in NYC: one kind for white people, one for black people and one for actual Chinese people. While this theory is not usually elaborated, the underlying ethnic slur(s) are that white folks like bland food, and black folks like deep-fried food.
Okay, I now have in my hand a menu from Szechuan Delight (Fast Free Delivery!), a typical NYC Chinese joint located on Seventh Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. Along with the aforementioned mooshu, won ton, and General Tso, the extensive menu includes such everyday fare as egg rolls, spring rolls, BBQ spareribs, cold noodles in sesame sauce, Hunan beef, double-sauteed sliced pork, Mandarin or Peking duck, bean curd with black mushrooms, a variety of fried rices and noodle dishes (lo mein, chow fun, mei fun). There are amusingly-titled specials, like Happy Family, Lover’s Shrimp, Empress Chicken, and Szechuan Triple Delight.
THIS is the sort of thing they probably mean when they say “New York Style.” It’s what New Yorkers order when they say “I feel like Chinese tonight.”
As opposed to a REAL outing, when you hop on the subway to Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, Queens’s Flatbush, or any other heavily-Asian neighborhood for really GOOD Chinese food…at a place where none of the dishes in the above paragraph will be available, the English section of the menu is poorly translated and doesn’t have any of the really good stuff on it anyway, and you have to point at the tables full of Chinese people around you and say “We’d like one of THAT…some of THOSE…a platter of THOSE…one of THAT; what IS that, is it good?”
To continue a hijack: Oh GOD Chinese food in India! So yummy!
I was treated to Chinese food in Latur, a fairly small city (only 500,000 people or so) in Maharashtra province. We had chicken with noodles, and a sauce that seemed to consist of chopped green chillies, scallions and soy sauce. My God it was amazing food.
Especially since the lovely people we were staying with thought we’d explode if we went within 5 feet of a spice and had been feeding us dhal and rice without any kind of seasoning for the past 3 weeks. You know how desperate you are for flavour when you start eating dhal with chilli ketchup.
(For anyone who is wondering, My two friends and I spent a month in India, and none of us were sick, not once. Don’t believe everything you hear about travelling to india equalling obligatory intestinal upset.)
To return you to your original programming: Perhaps the Chinese takeaway is just hoping to get some NY emigrants, homesick for big-city Chinese food. Not necessarily any different to normal Florida Chinese food, just a marketing ploy to appeal to a certain demographic.
There’s a restaurant a couple of miles from me that serves what they claim is Chinese food as it’s served in India.
Ukelele Ike writes:
> THIS is the sort of thing they probably mean when they say “New York Style.”
> It’s what New Yorkers order when they say “I feel like Chinese tonight.”
Every single one of the items you mention I’ve seen on the menu of Chinese restaurants that are nowhere near New York and don’t call themselves “New York style”.
Yeah, me too.
So I figure, for some across-the-Hudson Chinese restaurants, “New York Style” just means “Americanized Chinese food, but still a little more sophisticated than chop suey” ?
There are regional differences in American-Chinese cuisine. For instance, in the midwest you get “Crab Rangoon” as a fairly standard appetizer. In California, it is almost nonexistant. I don’t know if I can say exactly what New York style is, except to say that brown rice is always an option, whereas in the rest of the country, who the hell eats Chinese food with brown rice?
There are also regional differences in the availability of authentic Chinese cuisine. New York City doesn’t seem to have as much Cantonese food as compared to Shanghai or Sichuan food. San Francisco has much more Cantonese style food.
And Indian-style Chinese food (Desi Chinese), is to be found wherever there are large Indian populations. In California, there are several places in Silicon Valley that serve it, and in Queens there is at least one place in Jackson Heights that specializes in it.
FWIW, the Wikipedia has an article on American Chinese cuisine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chinese_cuisine
And another on Chinese cuisine as a whole, directing you to different pages that cover the “Eight Great Traditions” of it, plus regional variations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cuisine
About three miles from where I live (in Miami), there is a take-out Chinese place that says it is “NY style”. I was comforted when I walked into it because it reminded me of the take-out places in northern New Jersey. It had the same food pictures on the wall and the same menu, offering the same dishes and combination plates. I thought, “I was eating NY style Chinese food back when I was living in NJ and didn’t even know it”.
But right across the street from me, the take-out Chinese place is set up the exact same way, only they don’t advertise themselves as “NY style”.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that that appelation is just a hook. People tend to assume that NYC has the best food in the country, even if they’ve never been there before. Also, NY has a certain caché–everything from NY is “cool”. So NY style Chinese food has to be better than local Chinese food.
It is interesting that you ask about Cajun-style Chinese food. A local Chinese restaurant recently changed its name to “Cajun”-something, probably to differentiate it from the “Flaming Wok” next door. (Or maybe to get rid of “Oriental” in the original name?) However, their basic menu has remained pretty much the same as before.
I sense an elephant (perhaps a quiet, motionless stone one) in the middle of the thread, to wit:
“New York” is often a code term for “Jewish.” (It sure is with cheesecake, bagels, sliced-meat sandwiches and the noun form of the word appetizing.) And in New York at least, Jews were historically the most ardent non-Chinese consumers of Chinese cuisine.
Mind you, Jews in NY don’t necessarily eat different Chinese food than non-Jews, unless it’s kosher (eg: moo shu veal). But they’re generally thought to have been its chief popularizers, suggesting that “New York Style” might mean “the kind of Chinese food Jews eat.”
Another New York-related point: Wikipedia makes no mention of Cuban-Chinese food. (Yes, there was Chinese immigration to Cuba.) Is it well established in, say, Miami?
The Chinese places around me all serve fried plantains, and there are some dishes that have ham in place of pork. But these are the only main differences I’ve seen from “NY style” Chinese food.
NYC’s Cuban-Chinese restaurants don’t serve an Asian/Hispanic fusion cuisine.
One side of the menu lists Cuban stuff, the other lists Chinese.
Well, I guess it would be rather silly to call something “New York style” smack in the middle of Manhattan.
Do you have New York style cheesecake up there, called as such?
Is it just me, or is the reference to the Meadowlands (with its reputation as a place for gangsters to make their little embarrassments disappear) meant to evoke suspicions which make the whole “cats in Chinese food” issue look positively benign by comparison?
“House special chow me fun is peeeeeee-ple!”
No, we have “cheesecake” and “Italian cheesecake,” which is much less sweet, and made with ricotta.
Chop Suey? It was invented in San Francisco…
I’ve only have Indian Chinese food once or twice, in an Indian resturandt not far from my parents. That stuff was great. Off to try to find an Indian-Chinese place within driving distance…
I lived in NYC for 25 years, and don’t recall ever seeing New-York-style Chinese food, pizza, cheesecake, steak or anything else. If a New York restaurant used that phrase, I’d assume it to be a tourist trap, and not fit for the locals.
I wonder what they call Philly cheese steak in Philadelphia?
So, I guess the theory is, a little more spice makes it New York style?
Maybe I should have asked this in GQ. It might have gotten the attention of Unca Cecil.
Do any of you guys have “Florida style” up there?
Pat’s King of Steaks, in South Philadelphia, invented the cheese steak in 1930. It’s still owned by the same family. Their menu calls them just cheese steaks. Jim’s Steaks has been in business since 1939, and their menu also refers to them simply as cheese steaks.