Now, I realize China is a huge country and cuisine is going to vary greatly from region to region. But for those who’ve lived in China, or know a lot about Chinese culture, give me some examples of dishes that are popular around the country.
Is it possible to get “authentic” Chinese food anywhere in the U.S. and if so, where?
Also do any of the dishes you might find on the menu of a typical American Chinese take-out place or buffet come even close to being authentic?
IIRC we’ve had a few threads on this topic in the past. The largest difference is that there is lots of really oddball stuff served you’d wouldn’t eat on a bet. In the case of Chinese food “authentic” doesn’t always equal yummier for western palates.
One way to get really authentic Chinese food is to go into a restaurant actually owned and operated by Chinese people with a fellow diner who is also Chinese and will order off-menu items. We used to do that sometimes for lunch at a place I used to work at. Most of us non-Chinese didn’t really like the authentic stuff. I can’t describe the difference, but the seasoning was really different.
As a Vancouverite, I’ve had plenty of authentic Chinese food - enough to say that “authentic Chinese food” is vague enough of a term to be meaningless.
Authentic Canton style can be pretty gross, for the Western palate. This is stuff I’ve choked down out of politeness more than anything else. Chicken feet, eels, lots of mystery meat. On the other hand, it’s got lost of things that you’d have to be dead not to like. Hot & sour soup - mmmm…
In contrast, Hong Kong folks put on a dainty spread. If it looks like something your maiden aunt would make, it’s in. Nary a fish eye in sight. Everything is very presentable and inoffensive.
I don’t pretend to be an authority, but “authentic Chinese food” covers a pretty wide range of cuisine.
Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads.
Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up–YUM!
Lyrics recalled when I glanced at the hostess’s plate when she was on dinner break.
ETA: I know from cleaning fish that care should be taken severing the head from the body because there’s lots of meat in the shoulders, and I know that cheek meat can be tasty, regardless the genera.
You can certainly get authentic Chinese food in places like LA, San Francisco or New York. Probably elsewhere too, if you know where to look. A lot of it is perfectly acceptable to Western palates. Things like dumplings, bing, noodles, scallion bread, etc, don’t take much getting used to. Other things such as fish-head soup, jellyfish, and pork intestine & blood stew are a little more adventurous. But you can get all those in the U.S. without much issues, provided you live in a big city.
From the few times I’ve been in China, I’ve found the food to be overcooked, too sweet, and drowned in oil. It seems to vary a bit by region, with the south being the closest to edible. I’ve heard that Chinese cuisine was better before their economic success allowed to afford excesses of oil and sugar. Right now, I’d say the best place to get “authentic” Chinese food in the U.S. is Panda Express, or a similar fast food chain. My advice: abandon the quest for authentic and go to a decent restaurant.
Vietnamese food on the other hand is fantastic … at least for now. Oil and sugar are starting to creep into it as well. Damn prosperity! 
You can easily get authentic Chinese food in the Chinatown of any major US city.
You may want to try yum cha if you can find a restaurant nearby that does that. This is similar to tapas. Usually, dim sums are pushed around the restaurant in little carts, and you can just order whatever that looks interesting on the carts. This way, you can try out many different things and don’t have to worry about picking something out from a menu.
As mentioned, while some authentic food may be a bit, um, adventurous, I think most of them should be acceptable to Westerners.
Even though I’m from Hong Kong myself, I don’t really like most Cantonese food, at least not the every day food that you would normally cook at home. I come from a Chinese Indonesian family, and I’m used to food that tends to have a lot of herbs and spices and very strong flavours. I find most Cantonese home-cooked meals to be very bland, almost tasteless. Many items tend to be steamed, so they all come out soft and soggy, which really doesn’t help with the bland and tasteless aspects. I hated it when my friends invited me over to eat when I was little: I usually hated the food, but it would be rude to say their food sucked, so I would have to eat them anyway. But on the other hand, I think they didn’t like my food too… 
For what it’s worth, my mum actually made something similar to the ‘potato chicken’ at Panda Express, with chicken, potato, carrot and celery pieces stir-fried in ketchup.
IMHO, I think food from northern China, which has more wheat-based dishes such as bread and noodles, probably have more in common with Western cuisines than food from southern China.
No answer to the OP. Cantonese people won’t talk to Sichuan people won’t talk to Taiwanese, when it comes to food. Then, most/all food you will see in the West is filtered through the Fukienese (maybe Cantonese, but less now) immigrant cooks, and Fujian province is (among the highly racist Chinese I know) reknowned for having crap food. It’s a huge debate in which, believe me, you don’t want to involve yourself.
What to do, what to do? As suggested, find a friend hailing from (1) Beijing; (2) Shanghai; (3) Hong Kong; (4) Taiwan; (5) Chengdu – each has a traditionally-distinct (very different) cuisine, and they are passionate about food. See where they take you, and see if you trust their instincts. My favorites are good dim sum (Cantonese); Taiwan; and Sichuan; but friends tell me Sichuan in China, at least outside that remote province, equates with cheap student food.
It’s complicated.
Do think about geography. If your cooks are from coastal Fujian, will they get Sichuan right? Doubtful. Will a Northern Mainland Han understand the Hong Kong seafood culture? Again . . . a long shot.
IMHO, the best Chinese food I ever had was in Taiwan, second best, three way tie among Vancouver, S.F., and New York. I had some fussy banquet experiences in Hong Kong, and family style in Taiwan, so the comparison may be unfair.
I live in Sichuan. The food here is awesome! Sichuan food emphasizes hot peppers, Sichuan numbing pepper (a truly acquired taste), garlic and fresh ingredients. A good meal will leave you with a numb mouth, tears in your eyes, and a good buzz. A typical meal for me and my friends might consist of:
Eggplant in a garlic-vinegar-sugar sauce
Cubed chicken with cubes of melon, spring onions and peanuts (the original kung pao chicken)
Scrambled eggs with tomatoes
Spicy-as-fuck strips of beef with green peppers
Spicy hash-browned potatoes
Fried pork fat with peppers and green onions
Lightly cooked greens, covered in dried red peppers and garlic
Cold cucumber in a vinegar-garlic sauce.
Pork-meatball and greens soup
Unlike American restaurants, the rice usually comes out near the end of the meal, and often isn’t really a huge part of the meal. People prefer to fill up on the good stuff if they can afford it. You never see people just slopping stuff over rice. Food is eaten from a communal plate, with each person getting a small personal bowl, which they usually neglect. Each person usually also gets a plate for bones.
We also eat a lot of hot pot, which can sometimes contain strange stuff- though my favorite is duck-bean-bamboo hot pot. For snacks there are noodles, dumplings, fried rice, and BBQ meat and veggies- plus plenty of other stuff.
People do eat plenty of strange things, but most of that stuff comes out at banquets (had bee larvae at my last one.) Most meat has the bones in it, so that can be a bit strange (especially since you usually just spit the bones on the floor.) And Sichuan food is very spicy. But every single foreigner I know loves it. Eating is one of the best things about living here.
[envy][/envy]
Friends just came back from visiting the panda sancturary, and enthused more over the food than the GD pandas. It’s unfortunate that so few actual Sichuan chefs are among the emigre cooks – it’s mostly in the hands of Eastern Chinese fry cooks, who pour chili oil on anything and call it Sichuan – opening up a sub-debate among my grad student friends over the Western tendency (among Chinese restaurant owners) to conflate “Sichaun/Hunan,” and to characterize both as “whatever we were doing before, plus chili oil.”
I ate a lot in China. There are carts with cold appetizers that are rolled around. There may be sliced pigs ear, seaweed, pickled vegetables, cold sliced meat and other things that are really nice. In a typical meal you’d try and get some variation: meat, seafood, vegetable but they all seemed to come out together rather than in courses. There are lots of vegetable dishes and the process seems to go something like this: Do you have asparagus? Yes. OK I’ll have that with oyster sauce. What kind of meat do you want with it?
Then there are tons of things you never see here: duck bills, pig rectum, goose intestine, fu tofu (spoiled tofu that smell like ripe cheese).
I didn’t find it as different from US Chinese food as some do, but then I live in an area with lots of good, authentic Chinese restaurants.
Waffle Decider, you’re going to get nothing except a confused look if you try ask someone in most English-speaking countries where to find yum cha. In the U.S. and the U.K. (and presumably most other English-speaking countries), it’s called “dim sum.” I think that Australia is the only English-speaking country where it’s called “yum cha.” Yeah, I know that in Cantonese the term “yum cha” refers the type of meal and “dim sum” refers to the range of dishes served, but in most of the English-speaking world, nearly anyone who talks about such meals in restaurants is going to refer to such a meal as “dim sum.”
It was many years ago that I visited, but I do remember how hot and spicy everything was in Sichuan, including the many vegetable dishes. Tasty!
Another was a sweet and sour with egg. It resembled an Americanized sweet and sour dish, with vegetables and pineapple, except the protein was an egg, sort of deep fried and added to the mix. When you cut into it, the yolk flowed out and blended with the rest. Divine!
Our first roast chicken, with head and feet still attached, was a bit of a surprise in presentation, but good.
Many of my favorites were the appetizers, including fried walnuts.
About thirty years ago a group of our friends went to Toronto to see some big show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is a major museum in Chinatown. We had eaten before at a Chinese restaurant across the street and we called them to make reservations for ten. They got very excited that we were calling them from the States. We didn’t know how excited.
They threw out the menu and served up an entire banquet. I had no idea what I ate at any time. (I do know a lot more about Chinese food today, but I bet that most of it would still baffle me.) Some was good, some wasn’t, but the good stuff was very good.
The point is that any decent restaurant that attracts a Chinese crowd can do fairly authentic meals. A good restaurant in a large Chinatown will be able to import far more ingredients and get even closer to the originals. It’s no big deal.
My brother went to China with a group from the Motion Picture Academy. He said they were treated like heads of state. (so I don’t know how representative his experience was) He remarked that rice was rarely on the menu at any of the meals. The explanation he was given was that rice was too common a food to serve to visiting dignitaries.
Is it possible to find a favorite restaurant dish prepared the same way in a different restaurant without trying every restaurant in the area? Here’s why I ask: I used to live in the D. C. area and had a favorite Chinese restaurant a friend and I went to regularly for one dish only – Sichuan chicken, “extra spicy.” Basically it was strips of white meat chicken with shredded carrots. I was never able to find this particular dish done this way (including the sauce) in any other Chinese restaurant (not that I tried them all). I’m now in northeast Florida. The Sichuan chicken I’ve tried here is more like what I know as Hunan chicken (chunks of chicken with a variety of veggies and mushrooms). At one restaurant, it had green beans in it. Interestingly, I discovered a dish from that restaurant which I consider close to what I want – pork in garlic sauce. No carrots in it – more like cabbage, but it tastes very similar to my Sichuan chicken, so maybe they got the sauce right. I called my friend back in the D. C. area and asked him to get some of our favorite, pack it in dry ice, and mail it to me. He hasn’t done it. I went online for a recipe and tried making it myself. It was a disappointment. Would it help if I asked first what region of China the chef was from, or would that be considered impolite? (And I assume that wouldn’t be a guarantee that it would be what I expect.) Any suggestions? (I swear, the next time we visit the D. C. area, I’m going to buy a ton of the stuff to bring home!)
One of the things that most confuses Chinese people is our habit of throwing whatever we have around in a wok and calling it a “stir-fry.” Most Chinese veggie dishes around here involve only one main ingredient. A meat dish, if it is complicated, might involve three. So they think it’s strange that we have stir fries with like five different veggies.
And yeah, the food is very oily for American tastes. You get used to it.
I’ve never specifically had a chicken and carrot dish, but you could probably ask for shredded chicken and carrots. That is exactly how a dish like that would translate in Chinese. Unfortunately, your food is going to very not just based on what region the chef is from, but what city. I live four hours south of Chengdu, and I swear our Sichuan food is waaaaaay better than that Chengdu stuff. They’ve even opened a restaurant serving my city’s food in Chengdu- it’s kind of like having a “Fresno food” restaurant in Sacramento. Even going one town over will lead to noticeably different food.
Yeah, rice is considered a filler, and to eat a ton of it at a banquet- that probably involves so many dishes they are stacked three high on the table- would not make sense. To eat rice at a meal like that would imply that your host did not feed you enough.
Ahhhh, so you visited Shanghai then?
I added a few and cut down Even Sven’s list to some pretty common “authentic” stuff you can generally get all over China. There’s a lot more but these came to mind:
Spicy tofu mapo doufu （麻婆豆腐）
gongbao Chicken or pork (kinda spicy, has peanuts, dried roots)
Eggplant in a garlic-vinegar-sugar sauce
Scrambled eggs with tomatoes
beef with green peppers
Fried pork with a lot of fat with peppers and green onions
Lightly cooked greens and garlic
Cold cucumber in a vinegar-garlic sauce.
4 season beans (四季豆）
pork dumplings
Personally I think that Sichuan Peppercorns (花椒) are absolutely disgusting, and makes Sichuan food virtually inedible for me. On the other hand, I love both Hunan and Guizhou cuisines, which are just as spicy as the Sichuan but minus the peppercorns. Lucky me, I’ll be in Sichuan next week (Yangzi river cruise).