Actually, sounds pretty good to me…most chicken satay receipes will include peanut butter, which, when you get right down to it, is just a convenient mix of pureed peanuts, salt and sugar. Hmmmm…this might give me an idea for my next Iron Chef competition…
A side question, but a related one: Why, apart from fast-food joints and a handful of “pub fare” places, are there no real national restaurant chains in the UK? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Pizza Express (despite its name, it’s actually a sit-down restaurant with bar service), but I don’t think it’s much found outside of the south of England.
Another one around here (Silicon Valley) is Mr. Chu’s. Same category as Panda Express - fast food type place that serves cheap Chinese. IMO, Panda Express is a lot better. PE isn’t great cuisine, but you get a decent, if a little bland, two item combination for about the same price as a meal at a burger place (the orange chicken is good, as noted).
A few fast-food styled Indian places are turning up around here, which certainly look like chains.
I think it’s mainly economic and I think this answer would be true for almost any skilled or semi-skilled asian cuisine. Most Chinese (and Indian and Vietnamese etc) restaurants pay a lot less in terms of real salaries to their relatives and “from the home country” workers than chain restaurants (hiring skilled workers) could get away with.
One of the appeals of Chinese food is usually that’s it’s relatively inexpensive for what your get, and a large component of this is not just food, but labor costs. If a Chinese restaurant had to hew to the standards and scrutiny of a major chain restaurant I don’t think there’s any way it could be economically competitive with the smaller Chinese restaurants. If you lose the cheap relative and home county labor overall costs will go up significantly.
Ok, so apart from the chains, what explains the eerie sameness of Chinese takeout places? In my area, there are numerous “real” Chinese restaurants (as well as ones that serve Chinese cuisine as well as another nearby style, like Korean or Vietnamese) and each of them seems to serve their own style of food. But then there’s the other kind.
The takeout place. It’s got the aforementioned backlit picture of mountains and pagodas, it’s got the pictures of dishes on the wall, and if it’s a buffet, it’s got the same fried rice as every other place. A lot of them are owned by actual, authentic Chinese immigrant families, which heightens the confusion, given how very, very identical the restaurants are. Is there some business that operates below the radar to provide standardized decorations and food to independent family businesses?
And furthermore, no matter what the quality of the Chinese restaurant is - from takeout to rather expensive food, why do their menus always lack plurals? I’m aware of the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, but my Chinese professor rarely if ever omits a plural even in speech, and her English is nothing to write home about. Surely, if the people running the place know enough English to compose a menu, at least some restaurants some of the time ought to have someone in the family who understands basic English grammar. English classes are fairly widespread in China, after all. But no, you always find “Prawn and peapod in tasty brown sauce.” (Yes, I recognize the inconsistency of English plurals when they apply to food. You have broccoli, but you have peapods. Shrimp is a mass noun, but prawn is not. But surely that should only result in improper plurals - “Peapods and broccolis” seems like a more natural mistake than simply omitting plural endings altogether.) It doesn’t bother me, but the absolute consistency from restaurant to restaurant seems improbable at least. I’ve often wondered if there is some rule book that explains how to write a menu to give it that authentic Chinese feel.
Hey guys, be kind, I didn’t know about the twelve Chinese chain restaurants in existance, how am I gonna know about the Japanese and Indian ones?
Maybe I should have worded the OP to say “chain theme Chinese restaurants”, a la Ruby Tuesdays/OG/FGI Fridays/Applebees/Chi Chis.
This thread makes me think of one of my favorite moments in “Waiting for Guffman”.
Eugene Levy and his wife (the Jewish couple) take Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara to a chinese restaurant, somewhere in or around Blaine, Missouri.
In the establishing shot outside the restaurant, you can just hear Fred Willard saying something along the lines of: “Ohh, so exotic! How did you FIND this place?”
China Coast used to have a location in Houston, and our family thought it was pretty good. I’d like to note that it was not just in “the model of a Red Lobster or Olive Garden”; I thought that it was in fact owned by the same chain as Olive Garden.
We missed the restaurant when it went out of business.
There are also some local chains around – not so much nation-wide (which is what it looks like you were looking for), but local businesses that are doing well. One example is Kim Son’s. It’s a Vietnamese and Chinese restaurant chain with several locations in Houston that grew from one location there. I would love to see them expand out of the area as well.
There’s also a Chinese chain called Pick Up Stix around here. There are a lot of them in California, but I think they are only in a few in other states. The Panda Express also operates a chain of Japanese grills called Hibachi-san.
In the Pacific Northwest there aren’t many Chinese chain restaurants, but there is a lot of east Asian cuisine, mostly family-run restaurants where Mom cooks and her sister waits tables and her son busses them and her daughter runs the cash register—you know the kind.
Not that Chinese families are incapable of incorporating or organizing into a chain of restaurants—far from it—but I think the perception that there aren’t any chains is because there will always be mom-n-pop start-up Chinese restaurants.
There are also a number of loosely related Japanese restaurants called Happy Teriyaki, at least around here. I don’t know if they’re franchises; they seem pretty independent.
The real question is, to me, why aren’t there more non-franchised American food restaurants? Why do we rely so much on chains?
Just wanted to toss out another vote for Panda Express. While it isn’t fine Chinese cuisine, it is decent for “fast food” meals, and beats a number of those “$1 Chinese Food” places that dot the landscape. They also have a few sit-down restaurants, Panda Inn, which seems to serve the same food but in a more upscale environment.
Never been to Pick Up Stix nor PF Changs, though I get the feeling PF Changs is aiming more for the “upscale” diner instead of the fast-food folks (like Black Angus vs. Sizzlers).
Anyone know which budding Chinese restaurant chain is the biggest at the moment? Last I heard, Panda was only recently opening outlets in Nevada and Arizona…
Actually, there’s a Panda Express food-court outlet here in the Niagara Falls outlet mall. Blew me away when I saw it, because I thought it only existed in CA, too. Too bad the mall itself is so dirty (I’ve seen cockroaches in the food-court area, blech!) that I have no desire to eat there.
As an aside…heh, I used to live in Torrance, rjung, we’ve probably eaten at the same Panda Express. I lived two blocks from the one next to the Best Buy on at PCH and Hawthorne.
Just in case somebody had the same idle thought I did:
Panda Express is sprouting all over and seems popular - their web site says they have 600 stores in 37 states. So how are they as an investment? They aren’t. Privately held by “Panda Resturaunt Group” which operates Panda Express, Panda Inn and Hibachi-San.
As far as sushi chains, Benihana has been around forever.
It used to be really ‘in’ to go to Benihana’s about 15-20 years ago. It was a fairly common cultural icon to talk about, and pretty near the top of the list to take important guests. But now it seems to be fairly obscure, at least the young 'uns I talk to have never heard of it.
Disclaimer: I did grow up in Denver. For about 90% of the long time residents I know Benihana was the first place they ever saw and had sushi, and the knife show was really impressive. Now there are sushi places everywhere, so that may be why many fewer people have heard of it or ever go there. Places on the coast that actually had a tradition of fresh seafood, may not have ever given a crap about Beni’s, but it seemed like a big deal to us
Seems like almost every mall food court in the Boston area has a Panda Express. There are also a fair number of Sarku Japan restaurants around here that serve a limited sushi menu, among other Japanese fast-food-type things. There’s even a Middle-Eastern chain, though I’m blanking on the name…Sammi’s maybe?
I gotta say, I don’t mind walking by the food court and having one of the msg pushers hand me a toothpick with a wad of orange chicken on it. I mean, it’s got it all: salt, spice, grease, sugar, breadding; even orange flavor, I think. It works. I succumb. I break down and buy a big pile of orange chicken plus some of that gawdawful fried rice and snarf it down with gusto.
Of course I pay for it the rest of the day, but man, while I’m eating it, I’m a happy guy.
I remember, near where I grew up, there was a mini-chain of Chinese restaurants, very fast-foody drive-in style. One of them was named the Wok In. We started calling it the “Slide Out” because of the grease. Hoo-boy, I used to dive into that egg-foo-young goop or whatever the hell it was like a hungry beast when I was a kit. Nevermind the fact it would squirt out of me like a hose later on (I know, TM frickin’ I), I loved it. Mmmmm.
