I might be missing something, but it strikes me as odd that a large chunk of China is tropical (or at least lower than the Florida peninsula), but none of the Chinese food I have had here in the West appears tropical. That is, no mangoes, no coconuts, no pineapples (except for sweet-n-sour pork), no avocados.
Is it just not as tropical as I think? Is there more tropical food over there that didn’t make it here? Is their “tropicalness” shown in some other way I am missing?
“Tropical” Chinese food is best represented in Hainan. However, your description more closely matches Indochinese food, Thai, Malay, and Vietnamese.
Western “Chinese” food is based very, very loosely on Peking or Cantonese (eg dim sum).
There used to be a Chinese restaurant in NYC’s West Village that had a dish called “rainbow chicken.” It was composed of chunks of chicken with various tropical fruits, in a creamy white sauce. But I have no idea how authentic it was.
BTW, does anyone has a recipe for this?
Waverly nailed it in one. Hainanese is very tropical. Hainan pinapple rice is a well known dish. I ate some wierd ass stuff in Hainan Island (seahorse, snake, etc). Hainan is the southern point of china and same latitude as north viet nam.
Hainan island is a great place to visit, but I recommend avoiding the goat dishes. They just weren’t for me.
Sapo you must find a Cuban Chinese restaurant. I went to one in New York City once, but I don’t remember the name, they had things like fried rice with ripe plantains, and roast duck with yuca. It was excellent.
Chino-Latino, perhaps?
I believe there is a restaurant by that name in Old San Juan. Wait. Yes. Google says there is. I will have to go and check it out.
Thanks, Waverly. I guess it is just that Hainan hasn’t made the splash in the US dining scene that szechuan or cantonese have. I will google it out now that I now what I am looking for. A first try for hainan recipes gives me mostly chicken rice (which sounds pretty good but not particularly tropical).
It was precisely because of Vietnamese and Thai cuisines, that are very tropical, that I was curious about not having heard of anything similar from China.
That and the fact that my cooking leans towards Asian and I get tons of avocados, papayas and plantains that I don’t know what to do with them. Any good pointer towards tropical (hainan) Chinese recipes would be very welcome.