As I have detailed in past articles, there have been two distinct eras of Chinese food in the United States. The first era covered the period from the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century, to the enactment of immigration reform by the United States in the late 1960s. During this period, the only significant immigration from China to the United States were rural immigrants from the area outside of the city formerly known as Canton, now known as Guangzhou. Most of these immigrants came from an area known as Toisan, or nearby adjacent districts. As such, the Chinese population in the United States during this time period was largely homogenous and not representative of the whole of China. Likewise, Chinese food in the United States strictly reflected the nearly homogenous Toisanese population, rather than truly depicting Chinese food.  

The second era began with the effective repeal of the Chinese Exclusion laws and continues to the present. In the first decade of the 1970s, the new migrants came to America from Taiwan and Hong Kong, as the United States and Mainland China had not resumed diplomatic relations.  Immigrants from Hong Kong modernized the old Cantonese cuisine, while Taiwanese immigrants introduced new non-Cantonese regional cuisines to the United States.  However these versions of Szechuan- and Hunan-style food were highly Americanized and authentic versions would still be a couple of decades in the coming, coincident with immigrants arriving from Mainland China after the normalization of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations.   

Despite a clear analytical demarcation between the eras, in which non-Cantonese food didn’t show up at all in the United States until the 1970s and truly authentic versions of non-Cantonese food not until years later, these eras are not completely neat and clean. First of all, traces of non-Cantonese food can be found in America as early as the 1940s. The 1945 classic Chinese cookbook, How To Cook And Eat In Chinese, makes reference to three Shanghai-style restaurants in the United States, two in New York and one in Washington, D.C.  However, their names and circumstances appear to be lost to history.

One reason for the existence of non-Cantonese food prior to the full effective repeal of Chinese exclusion is that even though Chinese immigration to the United States was saddled with the puny 105 annual quota into the late 1960s, the end of World War II saw the first numbers of non-Cantonese, non-quota immigrants, such as students, scientists, and refugees. Even during the Chinese Exclusion period, exemptions were made, such as for Chinese diplomats with their families and entourages. During World War II, a stream of students and trainees arrived in the United States in connection with the war effort. The first documented appearance of non-Cantonese food at a U.S. Chinese restaurant was The Peking in Washington D.C., founded in 1947 by a gentleman who came to the United States in 1941 to be a butler at the Chinese Embassy.   Subsequently, alumni from The Peking went on to start their own non-Cantonese restaurants in Washington and New York. 

Meanwhile, in the mid-1950s, Cantonese restaurant owners like San Francisco’s Johnny Kan pushed Chinese cuisine in the United States forward by offering a more upscale version of Chinese food to the American public. Kan’s Szechuan Chicken may well have been the first appearance of a Szechuan-style dish to appear on a menu in the United States. Interestingly, superstar entertainer Danny Kaye became a kitchen protege of Kan, and Szechuan Chicken became one of Kaye’s specialties.

Moving into the late 1950s and early 1960s, pioneering Shanghai-style restaurants popped up at Shun Lee in New York, The Mandarin in San Francisco, and Twin Dragon in Los Angeles. There was no great number of Shanghai natives in the United States at the time, so these and a few other Shanghai-style restaurants in Manhattan and elsewhere were serving primarily native New Yorkers and Californians, though the New York restaurants were patronized by Chinese diplomats from the nearby United Nations, too. 

As noted above, the first wave of post-1960s immigrant chefs from Taiwan sparked a wave of “faux” Szechuan and Hunan cuisine, rather than authentic versions, first in Manhattan, and then spreading across the United States.  This was “faux” cuisine for two reasons. First of all, it was faux because like the early Shanghai-style food, there were few “native” diners living in the United States, so the food was adapted to the tastes of non-Chinese diners. Additionally, this Szechuan and Hunan cuisine was not brought directly from the Chinese mainland. Rather, it came from chefs who had fled the Mainland in the late 1940s, parked on Taiwan for a generation, then moved on to the United States in the 1970s. Essentially, they brought over their own version of Szechuan and Hunan cuisine, based on the memory of what was served in those locales two decades previously, and subsequently evolved. It wasn’t until another generation later when natives of those Mainland regions began to immigrate directly to the United States that truly authentic Szechuan and Hunan cuisine was widely available here. 

But once again, while authentic Szechuan and Hunan cuisine in America are considered to be late 20th century developments, there were small exceptions to the general rule. For a brief period of time in the 1970s, a few restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown served authentic Szechuan-style food, or more correctly, authentic Szechuan-style Chinese food as remembered by pioneering chefs from Taiwan, serving their fellow migrants. Best known was Hwa Yuan operated by the legendary Taiwanese chef Shorty Tang, remembered to this day for introducing sesame noodles to Manhattan and attracting a high-profile clientele to his restaurant in the East Broadway neighborhood that later became Little Fuzhou. So revered was Tang that when 40 years after his death, Shorty Tang’s family reopened Hwa Yuan at its original location, it was not only the leading news item in Manhattan’s food community, it was also covered by the New York Times. Strangely, these 1970s Szechuan restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown were gone a decade later, and with the flowing sands of time, nearly forgotten. 

Today’s Chinese American communities now feature the full range of authentic Chinese regional cuisines. But reaching that point took a long road of limited choices that took many decades to blossom.  

"Forgotten Pioneers of Non-Cantonese Food in America" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

For years I’ve been puzzled about one of the most iconic Chinese American dishes, broccoli beef. Its appearance doesn’t fit into the otherwise neat evolution of Chinese food in the United States. 

As I have explained in the past, there were two separate and distinct sources of today’s Americanized Chinese food. The first category of food was rooted in the Toishanese immigration to the United States, from the time of the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century until the late 1960s repeal of discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws in the United States. Basically, rural Cantonese food was adapted to ingredients available in the United States, as well as to the taste buds of the American public. In this category, one finds classics such as chop suey, egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and wor won ton soup, which most of America erroneously believed representative of food eaten throughout China. 

However, after the change in American immigration laws, Chinese people of more diverse backgrounds began to come to the United States. The first wave in the 1970s included the Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese, most of whom themselves had evacuated the Chinese mainland as it fell to the communist regime. Taiwanese chefs, many of whom had arrived in Taiwan from Hunan and Sichuan provinces two decades previous, arrived in New York and started serving what they remembered as Hunan and Sichuan food. But since there were few natives of Sichuan or Hunan living in the United States at the time, these chefs found themselves cooking for native New Yorkers. The result was the addition of new Americanized Chinese dishes to restaurant menus — mu shu pork, General Tso’s chicken, and hot and sour rice soup, to name a few.   

While we’re now used to seeing a mashup of Cantonese and non-Cantonese dishes at Americanized Chinese restaurants, the difference between the two was originally like night and day, except perhaps for the presence of white rice at both styles of restaurants. Furthermore, because the first half of the 20th century saw little migration from China, it consisted almost exclusively of friends and relatives of the Toishanese already here. As such, Chinese restaurant menus during this period stayed stable, making the contrast of the non-Cantonese regional foods brought by the Taiwanese chefs even greater. 

Now back to the mystery of broccoli beef. This dish is not found on Americanized Chinese restaurant menus in the early 20th century. Yet, it had become a standard dish in Americanized Chinese restaurants before the second wave of Americanized Chinese food that began in the 1970s. As simple stir fry mixtures of meat and vegetables evolved in Chinese restaurants in the 1920s (coincident with the American public’s willingness to partake in Chinese food beyond chop suey and chow mein), broccoli beef would likely have been an acceptable Chinese American dish.  So why didn’t this dish arise until a period of time where there was little evolution in Chinese food in America? 

As it turns out, there is a simple reason there was no broccoli beef in the early 20th century.  It was because there was no broccoli, period. Broccoli did not arrive in the United States as a commercial crop until the 1920s when it was brought by Italian immigrants. And it didn’t become a mainstream vegetable in the United States until the 1940s. So it was an evolution in American food, rather than anything specifically due to Chinese food or the Toishanese community, that led to the introduction of the classic broccoli beef, truly making it an American dish. 

As an interesting juxtaposition, in the late 20th century, American broccoli gained popularity in Hong Kong as a fashionable vegetable, leading to its substitution for Chinese broccoli in trendy Hong Kong restaurants. This trend spilled over into the United States where cutting-edge Hong Kong-style Cantonese restaurants in Chinese communities started serving broccoli beef with American broccoli. The shift occurred much to the puzzlement, if not disgust, of Chinese American diners, who had always considered beef with American broccoli to be a dish to be served only to gringo palates. And even today, beware if you go to an authentic Cantonese restaurant in the United States and you see “Broccoli Beef” on the menu instead of “Chinese Broccoli with Beef.” You might want to inquire as to which broccoli you’ll be getting.

"Solving the Broccoli Beef Mystery" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

Over the past two centuries, the Chinese community and its cuisine have endured several forms of discrimination. The Chinese exclusion laws of the late 1880s left Chinese food in America exclusively Cantonese for over a century. Housing discrimination restricted Chinese Americans to a limited number of neighborhoods, affecting the geographic distribution of authentic Chinese restaurants to this date. And twentieth-century protests by labor unions threatened the very existence of Chinese food in the U.S.

Now, a new threat to Chinese restaurants and cuisine is unfolding. San Francisco, San Jose, Berkeley, and three dozen smaller California cities have banned natural gas hookups in most newly constructed buildings. While these building codes may seem a reasonable approach to limit carbon emissions and curb climate change, they also endanger a revered element of Chinese cuisine.

Wok hei, sometimes referred to as the breath of the wok, is a hallmark of Chinese cuisine. Wok hei requires high heat, the kind that can only gas stoves provide. Indeed, some Chinese families (mine included) buy special 18,000 BTU gas ranges to accomplish wok hei at home. The open flame works with the rounded bottom of the wok to produce perfect Chinese dishes (for a scientific explanation of how this works, look here). In some newer California housing communities, an attractive amenity is the wok kitchen, a separate, confined cooking area specially designed for wok cooking.

While the environmental regulations do not take away existing gas connections (yet), Chinese restaurants that rely on open-flame cooking will soon not be able to set up shop in new real estate developments. Naysayers may argue an electric range or induction top can create the same effect. What next? A flat-bottomed wok? (Gasp).

At best, this oversight demonstrates a lack of cultural sensitivity. Unfortunately, Asian cuisines have been the frequent target of misguided public health over the decades. In the 1980s, local health departments often cited restaurants that displayed Peking duck and other Chinese roasted meats, claiming they violated state laws requiring refrigeration. Subsequent research led to legislative exemptions for Chinese meats, but not before hundreds of violators were fined and forced to trash their wares.

More recently, Asian rice noodles that are delivered warm have also come under unwarranted scrutiny. These noodles stay fresh for several hours, and refrigerating them effectively destroys them. Despite thousands of years of incident-free handling of unrefrigerated rice noodles around the world, local health departments have mandated refrigeration. Similar dustups involving mooncakes, stinky tofu, and other ethnic foods have added to this inglorious timeline of discriminatory actions in the name of safety.

Sure, not every attack on Chinese foodstuffs is without merit. Bans on shark fins and endangered species are completely reasonable. The former ban on Sichuan peppercorns in order to protect citrus crops was necessary. But these exceptions hardly excuse the cultural elitism undergirding many of the rules targeting Chinese cuisine.

Food is so important in Chinese culture that when we meet, we often don’t ask “how are you?” but rather “have you eaten yet?” The bans on gas hookups, which facilitate such a core principle of Chinese cuisine in which food is life, are wholly indefensible.

"Can Chinese cooking survive new environmental codes?" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

As bad as the pandemic has been, we’ve all needed to look for small silver linings along the way. In my case, it’s been the rediscovery of the mid-20th century Toishanese/Cantonese favorite, pressed almond duck. 

20th-century Chinese dishes such as chop suey have been described as Americanized and inauthentic. But many dishes from this era, including chow mein, fried rice, and wonton soup, certainly are authentic, as they were enjoyed by the Toishanese who constituted most of the Chinese immigrants living in the United States.

As a young child in the midcentury, one of my favorite Chinese dishes was war sui opp, or pressed almond duck. If you’ve never eaten it, it consists of deep fried shredded duck meat cubes in a gloppy brown sauce and garnished with lettuce and crushed almonds. To steal a tagline from this era, it was indescribably delicious.

I’m not sure exactly where on the authenticity continuum pressed almond duck should be placed. I doubt it would be high on the authenticity scale since it didn’t appear in the United States until perhaps the 1940s, when immigration from China to the United States had been virtually ended for many years. This dish wasn’t brought over by Toishanese/Cantonese immigrants. Instead, almond duck is associated with Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic, a Chinese/Polynesian genre of food that spawned such inauthentic offerings as crab Rangoon and pu-pu platters. Due to its relatively late introduction, every restaurant seemingly follows the same original recipe, tasting and looking the same just about everywhere.

On the other hand, almond duck does have ties to some more authentic Chinese dishes both in China and in the United States. Consider the companion dish to war shu opp (opp being Cantonese for duck), war sui gai (gai being Cantonese for chicken). War shu gai dates back at least a decade before war shu opp, and as I mentioned in my piece on Chinese-American regional specialties, is strangely peculiar to Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, and Louisville. Visually, the duck and chicken dishes are not similar. War sui gai is a deep-fried flat chicken steak that’s cut into diagonal strips. Conceptionally, however, they are both deep-fried boneless poultry cut into bite-sized pieces, indicating at least some degree of authenticity in preparation style.

Here in Los Angeles, I cut my teeth, almond duck-wise, at Paul’s Kitchen. Its vicinity near the City Market produce terminal served as LA’s “real” Chinatown from the 1930s to the 1960s. With its Chinese businesses, residents, and institutions (and without the faintest hint of tourism), this “secret” Chinatown developed after the original Los Angeles Chinatown was torn down to make way for Union Station. The “New Chinatown” constructed a few blocks away was conspicuously devoid of any residential areas, turning it into a Chinese-themed tourist destination with virtually no Chinese residents.

When the late 1960s brought a rewrite of our country’s immigration laws, the demographics of the Chinese American community changed. Old-time Cantonese-American cuisine began to fade. Lovers of pressed almond duck found fewer outlets to sate their cravings. Today, local online message boards identify just a handful of restaurants scattered throughout the Los Angeles area: Chinese Garden and Canton City in Montebello, Fu Sing in Torrance. Fortunately, Paul’s Kitchen continues to operate, even as the City Market neighborhood has been swallowed up by the adjacent garment district. These days, I wouldn’t drive to any of these scattered eateries to eat pressed duck, particularly with all kinds of new amazing Chinese dishes continually arriving in the San Gabriel Valley (not to mention pressed duck tends to be a real grease bomb, something I could do without at this stage of my life).

So how has the pandemic led me to rediscover pressed almond duck? Well, when I described the early effect of the pandemic on Chinese restaurants, I mentioned Kim’s Restaurant, which closed in March as the result of anti-Chinese harassment. Customers in the surrounding Crenshaw neighborhoods, initially unable to contact the owners, rallied in support of the restaurant and ultimately persuaded them to reopen.

When I lived in Crenshaw for many years, Kim’s Restaurant was my closest Chinese restaurant. But I seldom ate its highly Americanized Chinese food, trekking first to the City Market area, then later to the San Gabriel Valley. Indeed, the only reason my family ever visited Kim’s at all was that one of our favorite waiters from On Luck Restaurant started working at Kim’s.

But after seeing what happened with the closing and reopening of Kim’s Restaurant, I decided to revisit. I had actually looked at the menu several times before even noticing the almond duck. I was stunned to find it, because Kim’s Restaurant had never come up in online discussions looking to find this increasingly scarce dish. When I finally came back, the familiar fried duck met me with a little crunch inside, a few nuts on the outside, and that wonderful gloppy brown sauce and lettuce on the side. And guess what? Kim’s version is hardly greasy at all! Now, pretty much any time I’m in the Crenshaw area, I’m sure to be back.

"Rediscovering Classic Cantonese Almond Duck" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

In May, I painted a rather pessimistic picture of the early effect of the coronavirus pandemic on Chinese restaurants in the United States. A combination of xenophobia, prescient caution in the Chinese-American community about dining out, as well as a high concentration of mom-and-pop enterprises, the Chinese restaurant industry seemed to be perilously close to wide-scale collapse.  

Los Angeles Chinatown looked particularly stark. In April, a good two-thirds of the Chinese restaurants had shuttered. The restaurants that remained opened for take-out only significantly pared their food offerings.  For example, only a handful of dim sum varieties were available at the two remaining eateries, Tian’s Dim Sum and Keung Kee. These establishments were likely the least-known in Chinatown, until Ocean Seafood and Golden Dragon closed, eventually followed by Won Kok Restaurant, Long’s Family Pastry, Lucky Deli, CBS Seafood, ABC Seafood (which remained open for steam tray but not dim sum), and others.

The San Gabriel Valley looked less bleak than feared, with a clear majority of Chinese restaurants managing to adapt to the takeout model. Surprisingly, hotpot restaurants and even one Chinese buffet are among the survivors. 

But like Chinatown, dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley has nearly dried up, as the palatial, high-cost, high-volume settings struggle to pivot to take-out dining. A small number of dim sum parlors like Lunasia, Sea Harbour, China Red, and 888 Seafood have stayed open. But Elite, King Hua, Chef Tony, NBC Seafood, Capital Seafood, Longo Seafood, World Seafood, Monterey Palace, Five Star Seafood, Atlantic Seafood, Grand Harbor, Tang Gong and Top Island have all closed, leaving us in fear that few dim sum restaurants will come back. Indeed, without Lucky No. 1, Ocean Bo, and Dim Sum King stepping into the void, dim sum fans like me might have experienced total despondency.

NBC Seafood promised a July 4 reopening, but that date passed without a change. A week later, I stopped by to peer in the window and saw no apparent activity, reinforcing my concern. But miracle of miracles, a few later, NBC did reopen for takeout and subsequently outdoor dining. One by one, the dim sum palaces returned. At the end of July, social media reported that Elite Restaurant was down for the count, but the next day, it reopened! Only King Hua has acknowledged it will permanently close.

Adding to the miracle, new Chinese restaurants are opening in the San Gabriel Valley. While some new establishments are replacing restaurants that sold or closed, it’s heartening that somebody is stepping in. Though we’ve lost long-loved standbys like the original branch of Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, the Arcadia location of 101 Noodle Express, New Lucky Seafood in Monterey Park, and Plum Tree Inn in Chinatown, the resiliency of other Chinese restaurants is indeed encouraging.

Despite the bleak forecasts, the Chinese restaurant industry around LA has avoided the disaster previously predicted. A few months ago, experts braced for a closure rate of 50 percent for Chinese restaurants. Nationally, the permanent closure rate for all restaurants has been estimated at 25 percent. While there’s not a lot of good news around the pandemic, the survival of Chinese food in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley leaves me grateful.

"Los Angeles Chinese Restaurants Battle Through the Pandemic" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

Even in good times, a restaurant operation can expect a net profit of about 3% on sales. Employee wages are often 25 percent or more of restaurant costs, so it doesn’t take much of a decline in restaurant revenue in such a low-margin industry to trigger labor cutbacks.

But Chinese restaurants have been hit by a triple whammy during this pandemic. Not only have they been buffeted by the general economic disaster, but they have suffered additionally for serving Chinese food. COVID-19 originated in China, and from the beginning has been associated with unfortunate terms such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” Immediately as the virus spread through China, business at Chinese restaurants in the United States, and indeed throughout the world, began to sink — even before the rest of the world economy and other types of restaurants became impacted.

Startled by this unwelcome rise of xenophobia, the food community attempted to fight back. Food bloggers around the country attempted to whip up support for neighborhood Chinese restaurants. An organization called No Appetite For Ignorance started a campaign to support Chinese restaurants by having Chinese food personalities, including the greatest Chinese food expert of all, Fuchshia Dunlop, highlight their favorite Chinese restaurants. (You can check out my own recommendations, too)

This effort could not stanch the bleeding. After serving the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up for over 40 years, Chinese restaurant Kim’s Restaurant had to shut its doors due to anti-Chinese harassment. Meanwhile, things got ugly at Taste of China in Chesapeake, Virginia. The restaurant owner saw her car vandalized with “Go Back To China” and other racist graffiti. People also ran into the restaurant screaming anti-Chinese epithets and pouring water inside the premises.

Fortunately, both of these episodes have a happy ending. At Kim’s Restaurant, upset customers tracked down the restaurant owner and presented him with a ten-page printout from the neighborhood online message board decrying the anti-Chinese harassment and saying how missed the restaurant was. After seeing the extent of neighborhood support, Kim’s Restaurant reopened. Meanwhile, the customers of Taste of China organized a takeout tailgate in the restaurant’s parking lot, overwhelming the restaurant with orders. Still, these are isolated successes, and reported episodes of anti-Asian bias have numbered in the thousands.

Of course, xenophobia does not totally account for the early body blow to the Chinese restaurant industry. Chinese-Americans themselves started abandoning Chinese restaurants even before the coronavirus was making a conspicuous presence in the United States. I remember exchanging Chinese New Year’s greetings with one of my old friends this past January.  But when the subject of our annual Chinese New Year lunch meeting came up, he told me that he was not going to set foot in a Chinese restaurant until the whole coronavirus thing blew over. And while Chinese New Year restaurant gatherings mostly continued through the end of January, San Gabriel Valley restaurants that cater almost exclusively to Chinese diners, fell off in February. Chinese-Americans went into a shelter-in-place mode well in advance of government mandates. (This behavior did prove to be prescient as infection rates in the Chinese-American community have turned out to be far lower than expected.) When I had lunch with a former Chinese restaurant owner at the end of February, he estimated that business had already dropped by roughly 30 percent at San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants.

On an early Sunday evening in March, my family and I drove up to Henry’s Cuisine in Alhambra, one of the most popular Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. As we pulled up, we weren’t sure whether the restaurant was open. A sign on the door indicated the restaurant was in fact open, but due to a sharp decline in business, would be closing the following day until May. That first episode was quite a shock, but in the next few days, we heard of other Chinese restaurants doing the same thing. Later that week, cities started ordering dine-in restaurants to cut their seating capacity by 50 percent, and by that weekend, dine-in operations were ordered to shut, with only takeout or delivery permitted.

The closure of dine-in eating in the middle of March was obviously the watershed moment for restaurants in general and Chinese restaurants in particular. The biggest and smallest Chinese restaurants were the first to close, either on an interim or permanent basis. Since then, Chinese restaurants have been struggling to adapt. Some tried to make a go of takeout and delivery but subsequently closed. Others, like Woon in Los Angeles, initially closed but re-opened for takeout and delivery. Henry’s Cuisine also reopened for takeout in early May. Often, these reopenings came on a modified basis, including changes to hours, a limited menu, adding inventories of food products and supplies for resale, refusing to accept credit cards and requiring cash, and other adaptations.  

Industry statistics indicate that Chinese restaurants have closed at over double the rate of other restaurant categories in the United States. While partially connected to the current stigma of being a Chinese restaurant, another factor is that a higher percentage of family-owned Chinese restaurants operate on a shoestring compared to other types of restaurants. As celebrity Chinese American chef Ming Tsai has stated, the post-pandemic future for mom and pop restaurants in general is bleak, warning that half of these operations are not likely to survive.

We all hope things return to normal as soon as possible with the least amount of disruption. But realistically, it is unavoidable that some restaurants will not reopen. In this regard, Chinese restaurants are more vulnerable. Besides falling into economic distress at an earlier point in time and the xenophobia factor, there is a particularly high concentration of mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants. With this triple whammy, it is likely that many of us will not have the opportunity to ever eat at some of our favorite Chinese restaurants again.

"Pandemic Hits Chinese Restaurants Especially Hard" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

A few years ago, I discussed the merits of ordering dim sum from a menu versus serving dim sum from heated carts. I argued that menu-driven dim sum is more conducive to creating new and better dishes, because offerings would not have to wheel around the dining room.

Carts have been dishing out longtime favorites like steamed barbecue pork buns, har gow, siu mai, cheung fun (rice noodle rolls), pineapple buns, turnip cake squares, lotus leaf sticky rice, and many others since arriving on the dim sum scene in the 1960s and 70s.

But America’s dim sum palaces are innovating all kinds of new, non-traditional dim sum items. Here are five ways they’re changing our expectations of Chinese brunch.

1. Adding or substituting ingredients of a traditional dim sum item

Chefs are dressing up basic dim sum items with gourmet ingredients. Siu mai with truffles and foie gras har gow are two examples of the new and innovative. Longo Seafood in Rosemead, California replaces the traditional shrimp in its har gow with lobster meat.

Dragon Beaux in San Francisco substitutes red rice flour for regular rice flour to create a stunning bright red cheung fun rice noodle roll.  Other restaurants have followed suit with their own red and even purple creations. 

2. Changing the appearance of a traditional dim sum item

Even when the original ingredients are retained, a fresh and innovative take can be achieved through a stark visual change. H.L. Peninsula in South San Francisco serves mango pudding, typically served in a small glass bowl, shaped into little piggy figurines.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s Palette Tea House & Dim Sum takes the ordinary taro puff and turns it into something fanciful. By turning the color to black and adding what looks like a long neck, taro puffs transform into graceful black swans.

3. Changing the ingredients and the appearance of a traditional dim sum item

Pineapple buns are so named not because they are made with pineapple, but because the crusty top resembles the texture of a pineapple. Dragon Beaux creates a purple version filled with yam paste. 

Other restaurants have since followed suit. You’ll find green or white versions (the white ones are often called snow buns) filled with almond paste, durian paste, oatmeal, sweet hot egg yolk, and whatever else the chef can imagine.

4. Reinventing a recipe completely

The baked barbecue pork bun first made its appearance some 40 years ago and has since become a modern dim sum favorite. The traditional pork-filled bun is pillowy soft with a sticky (often honey topped), light brown colored top. 

Hong Kong’s Tim Ho Wan, led by chef Mak Kwai Pui, turned this well-known dish into a fabulously crispy pale sweet bun. The reinvented dish almost singlehandedly propelled Tim Ho Wan to become the least expensive restaurant to ever garner a Michelin star.

Copies of the new dish have spread to dim sum parlors around the world. One California restaurant serves a matcha tea version.

5. Introducing totally new dim sum dishes

The sky is the limit for non-traditional dim sum.

At Casa Victoria in Markham, Ontario outside of Toronto, you’ll find a lamb roll with cucumber and avocado in teriyaki sauce, duck with chive dumplings, chicken with black fungus dumplings, and crispy fried mashed potato cake with shrimp. 

At Koi Palace in Daly City, California, you can order pumpkin cake rice balls, crab claws with fish paste, and baked green tea lemon buns. At H.L. Peninsula Pearl in Burlingame, California, find porcupine custard balls (they resemble a porcupine), orange-flavored winter melon, and two of my favorites: bird’s nest pandan tarts and pumpkin buns with green bean paste. 

Fun honorable mention

In addition to the piggy mango pudding I noted above, I want to mention the piggy bun. This piggy doesn’t fall neatly into any one of my classifications, as you’ll find a wide variety of fillings depending on the dim sum restaurant. But doesn’t he look good enough to eat?

"5 Ways Dim Sum Is Changing in America" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

Since my first article for Menuism in 2012, I always wanted to discuss the difference between Chinese fusion and authentic Chinese food. I’ve heard traditionalists say they hate Chinese fusion since it means messing with a revered cuisine. But as I’ve often said, Chinese food in the United States continues to evolve into new and better forms. So, what’s fusion and what’s evolution?

A common definition of fusion cuisine is the introduction of nontraditional ingredients into a particular cuisine. On its face, this definition seems to be relatively straightforward to determine when a particular dish should be classified as Chinese fusion. Adding truffles to siu mai or foie gras to har gow would seemingly be classified as Chinese fusion. But when you see well-established dim sum restaurants serving these dishes, isn’t this just part of the continuous evolution of Chinese food?

Is it fusion?

I wrestled with this dilemma for a long period of time before thinking that I had figured it out. My initial conclusion was that if an innovative dish is made by a Chinese chef, it was evolutionary (but authentic) Chinese cuisine. If done by a non-Chinese chef, it was fusion. However, this delineation seemed wrong on many counts (you have to have a special gene for your creation to be authentic?), so I was still stuck. I wasn’t ready to write this article.

A recent trend prompted me to definitively tackle the distinction between Chinese fusion and evolving Chinese cuisine. The development? Cheese.

The history of cheesy Chinese food

You’ll just about never find cheese in traditional Chinese cuisine. Among my Chinese relatives and friends, many share a disgust for cheese, tied to the common lactose intolerance many members of the Chinese community endure. Indeed, lactose intolerance has made cheese and other dairy products generally a nonfactor in Chinese cuisine.

But today’s Chinese restaurants have begun to use cheese as an ingredient in dumplings and other small bite dishes. Can this counterintuitive cameo create a litmus test for what counts as Chinese fusion and what are innovations in authentic Chinese food?

As far as I know, the first appearance of cheese in Chinese food in the United States actually goes back quite a few years. Oakland tiki restaurant Trader Vic’s invented Crab Rangoon, a wonton-wrapped appetizer of crabmeat and cream cheese, in the 1950s. The dish became popular and common at Chinese buffets and Americanized Chinese restaurants, particularly in the Midwest. Cream cheese wontons and the introduction of imitation crab continued the dish’s evolution.

It may have been the cream cheese wonton that later inspired the Philly cheesesteak egg roll. This innovation is unique because the cheesesteak egg roll is only found at Americanized Chinese restaurants, Philadelphia-area restaurants that don’t even serve Chinese food, and chain restaurants like TGIFriday’s. Consequently, it’s a dish that few Chinese Americans have tasted.

But…

If we were to stop here, we could easily conclude that because of the widespread intolerance to cheese among Chinese diners, only inauthentic “fusion” dishes aimed solely at non-Chinese diners would contain cheese. But a closer look shows this is too simplistic an analysis.  

Take the Philly cheesesteak wrap served by the Bao Shoppe on Canal Street in Manhattan Chinatown. The wrap is essentially a Shandong beef roll, an authentic Chinese specialty commonly found in California, with which few non-Chinese are familiar with, slathered in cheese. The clientele at Bao Shoppe is mostly young Chinese Americans, who would not be scandalized by an Americanized dish like the Philly cheesesteak egg roll. On the other hand, Bao Shoppe does have its share of non-Chinese customers, and in fact, it was originally located in a non-Chinese neighborhood in Queens before moving to Manhattan Chinatown.

More cheese examples

Perhaps the best known Chinese cheese creation is the cheeseburger potsticker found at Ms. Chi Café in Culver City, on the Westside of Los Angeles. Ms. Chi Café opened last year by Top Chef finalist Shirley Chung, who describes her cuisine as modern Chinese-American. Chung professes an intent to foster a greater understanding of Chinese cuisine. Consistent with the location of her restaurant, Ms. Chi Café’s clientele is predominantly non-Asian; however, a fair amount of younger Chinese Americans patronize the restaurant because they consider her cuisine to be authentic.

In fact, the cheeseburger potsticker goes back to at least the beginning of the decade. El Monte’s Cha Café, a late-night hangout for young Chinese Americans in the San Gabriel Valley, offered cheeseburger potstickers in the early 2010s. And My Little Dumpling, which opened earlier this year on L.A.’s Westside, has its own cheeseburger dumpling. Unlike Cha Café, My Little Dumpling is a Chinese restaurant with a non-Asian owner and few Asian customers.

Then there’s the cheeseburger bao, offered by XLB Dumpling Bar in the city of Walnut in the San Gabriel Valley. From the outside, the cheeseburger bao looks just like a steamed barbecue pork bao, but the bao is filled with cheesy beef. Since it opened last year, the clientele at XLB Kitchen consists mostly of young Chinese Americans.  

Meanwhile, in downtown Los Angeles, Rice Box serves a steamed barbecue pork bao mixed with Monterey cheese to a mixed clientele of young Chinese Americans and non-Asian diners. 

It’s not just the kids

Lest you think that only millennials enjoy Chinese dishes with cheese, Tang Gong Seafood, San Gabriel’s newest dim sum palace, offers a dish of crispy rice with cheese on its menu. Meanwhile, at Spring Shabu Shabu, a typical Chinese hotpot restaurant, you’ll find fish balls filled with roe and cheese, quite unusual among the rest of the standard ingredients. At Haidilao, the Mainland China-based upscale hotpot chain, you can order cheese beef balls. 

Where does this leave us?

How should we sort out the difference between Chinese fusion and authentic Chinese evolution? My conclusion is not that far from my first inclination. But rather than looking to see whether the creator of the dish is Chinese or non-Chinese, I think the proper distinction is whether the dish was created for Chinese diners or non-Chinese diners. If the dish’s creator does not aim a dish at non-Chinese diners exclusively, then it’s evolutionary Chinese cuisine, not fusion.

Of course, this rule has exceptions. The cheeseburger dumpling at one restaurant might be categorized as evolutionary authentic Chinese, while the same item at another with a different clientele would appear to be fusion.

Like so many food classifications, it’s hard to draw a boundary between fusion and authentic Chinese cuisine. Rather, we’re left with fuzzy distinctions and overlapping areas; some kind of strange fusion may actually be authentically Chinese after all.

"Is it Chinese Fusion or Authentic Chinese Cuisine?" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

In the past decade, Chinese dining in the United States popularized “Mainlander food,” or non-Cantonese regional cuisines. The Mainland moniker distinguished it from food from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But Mainland food largely excluded Cantonese cuisine, even though Canton (now known as Guangzhou) sits squarely on the Chinese mainland.

Why Mainland food excluded Cantonese

Chinese have lived in the United States since the mid-19th-century. However, these immigrants did not come from the whole of China. Rather, they mostly came from rural villages around Toisan (now called Taishan), some eighty miles outside Canton. For over a hundred years, the majority of Chinese residents in America were of Toisanese origin.

The dishes that these rural villagers brought with them where what came to be known as Chinese food in America. The cuisine was adapted to use local ingredients and to fit local tastes. The Toisanese-influenced American Chinese food was not at all representative of authentic Chinese food in general. Chinese Exclusion Laws slowed Chinese immigration to a trickle, so this Chinese food wasn’t particularly representative of contemporary Cantonese food in China, either.  

It was only when America relaxed its immigration laws in the late 1960s that a significant influx of new Chinese immigrants arrived. However, because the United States and mainland China did not have diplomatic relations at the time, the first wave of new Chinese immigrants originated in Hong Kong and Taiwan, bringing with them the latest, up-to-date Cantonese cuisine. In ensuing decades, as Hong Kong blossomed as a culinary center, restaurant trends such as the development of seafood and dim sum palaces were replicated in the United States.

In the 1980s, after the United States and China re-established diplomatic relations, Shanghai and Beijing-style cuisine arrived in America. As more regional cuisines arrived behind them, Cantonese food became a relatively small part of the overall dining scene in most U.S. Chinese communities. In the Los Angeles area, for example, it seems like every new authentic Chinese restaurant either serves Sichuan food, hot pot, or skewers — none of which are Cantonese. 

Mainland food came to be identified with migrants who arrived from China after diplomatic relations were re-established. Though Cantonese people did migrate to the United States during this period, they had no effect on America’s Cantonese cuisine.

The picture gets complicated

This neat compartmentalization of Mainland and Cantonese food started to blow up in the past five years. America’s growing appetite for Mainland Chinese food attracted the attention of restaurant chains based in Mainland China itself. Many such chains, like Din Tai Fung, Hai di Lao, and Meizhou Dongpo, rushed to set up shop in the United States, primarily in Los Angeles but also in San Francisco and other communities.

H.L. Peninsula

When H.L. Peninsula restaurant opened in South San Francisco last year, it represented the first Guangzhou-based restaurant chain in America. Previously, Mainland Chinese restaurant chains reflected the new wave of non-Cantonese regional food, coming from places like Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu. But H.L. Peninsula is a Mainland Chinese Cantonese food restaurant.    

When dining at H.L. Peninsula, I can’t say there was much of an apparent difference from a typical Hong Kong-style Cantonese seafood restaurant.  The only thing truly distinctive was a plate of fruit waiting for us as we were seated at the table.

Ooak Kitchen

Shortly after H.L. Peninsula opened in the Bay, Guangzhou-based vegetarian restaurant chain Ooak Kitchen set up shop in Culver City, on L.A.’s Westside. Its situation was quite puzzling, as the predominant concentration of Chinese in the Los Angeles area is in the San Gabriel Valley, which lies miles to the east of downtown Los Angeles. But here, diners were treated to Guangzhou vegetarian specialties likely never seen in the United States, such as the mock shaking beef steak pictured below, rendered from a gigantic mountainous Chinese mushroom. 

Alas, Ooak Kitchen was the wrong place at the wrong time. It quickly rebranded as a more generic Chinese restaurant, Fifty One Kitchen. But it gave a glimpse of how Guangzhou-style Cantonese food could be different from the Hong Kong-style we’ve grown used to.

Ying Ji Chang Fen

Early this year, the Guangdong-based Ying Ji Chang Fen chain opened in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton. Ying Ji Chang Fen offers a limited menu specializing primarily in rice noodle rolls (often referred to in the United States as cheung fun) and congee. But this isn’t your Chinese American father’s cheung fun as pictured below.

No, Ying Ji Chang Fen serves a burrito-sized roll that comes close to being a meal in itself. There’s also a thin vegetable layer to make this rice noodle roll a more balanced dish than its Hong Kong-style version. It shows that Guangzhou-styled Cantonese food differs from what we’ve seen in the United States and Hong Kong.

What’s next?

Recently, H.L. Peninsula opened a second branch called H.L. Peninsula Pearl in Burlingame, near the original location. And Ying Ji Chang Fen opened on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. Surely, more Guangzhou-based restaurants will follow in California and throughout the rest of the United States. It raises the question of whether the terms Mainlander and Mainland Chinese food will continue to refer only to non-Cantonese cuisine. And it challenges chefs to see how distinctive Guangzhou-style Cantonese food may be from what we have come to expect.

"The Arrival of Guangzhou-Style Cantonese Food" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.

The early years

I did not eat much Chinese food as a little boy growing up in 1950s Los Angeles. Chinese cuisine available at that time exclusively comprised rural Toishanese dishes imported by immigrants from southern China. Plus, it wasn’t particularly good. As a 6-year old, I was disgusted by steamed eggs, preserved turnip strips with ground pork, oxtail stew, pig feet in tomato sauce, or the worst: bean thread in a horrid milky sauce. The thought alone made me sick.  The only Chinese dish that I enjoyed was rice with soy sauce.

The late 1950s and ’60s

Contrary to a recent article, rice with soy sauce is no longer among my favorites, nor has it been for many decades. 

In the late 1950s, I found new favorites in pig stomach marinated in soy sauce (the stomach itself, not pork belly meat) and bird’s nest soup. Today, however, neither dish is common in Chinese restaurants — pig stomach seems to be a dish of a bygone era, and bird’s nest soup is so expensive that most restaurants won’t bother to offer it. I saw a one-pound package in a Chinese store in San Francisco recently for $1,388.

Los Angeles experienced its first modernization of Cantonese food in the 1960s. The first Chinese restaurant with Hong Kong influences that my family frequented was On Luck Restaurant, in the City Market produce district. On Luck was run by George Cheng, whose family owned Hong Kong Noodle Co., the Los Angeles contender that claimed to have invented the fortune cookie over a hundred years ago. (Mr. Cheng also asked if I wanted to pen some fortune cookie fortunes for him, but as a busy college student, I declined the invitation.)

On Luck prepared a fantastic dish of tomato beef lo mein with thin, yellowish noodles. This marked a major departure from the thicker “Chinese water noodles” that Cantonese restaurants commonly used in chow mein and soup. On Luck’s lo mein also introduced us to tenderized beef treated with baking soda.

Hong Kong-style in the 1970s

The real modern era in Chinese food in the United States started in the mid- to late 1970s with the explosion of Hong Kong-style Cantonese cuisine. The early 1980s brought the opening of Chinese seafood and dim sum palaces, and a wide variety of new dishes we now take for granted, from chow mein made with even thinner Hong Kong egg noodles, to new varieties of dim sum like cheung fun (rice noodle rolls) and baked barbecue pork buns. 

L.A.’s quintessential seafood/dim sum restaurant of this era was ABC Seafood in Chinatown. Interestingly, its signature dish was neither seafood nor dim sum. Rather, it was its heavenly version of lemon chicken: perfectly cooked, lightly battered chicken cut into strips with a lemon sauce that balanced tang and sweetness. Everyone I knew made frequent pilgrimages to ABC for its magical lemon chicken.

Y2K and Mainland Chinese food

In 1999, when the owner and cook of ABC Seafood retired, I needed to discover a new favorite Chinese dish. At restaurants like Green Village in San Gabriel, I found Shanghai-style rice cakes.

After immigration reform in the 1960s, Chinese food in America evolved but remained predominantly Cantonese, with a healthy dose of Taiwanese influence thrown in. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, a decade after the U.S. and Mainland China established diplomatic ties, that other regional Chinese cuisines conspicuously appeared in the United States. Shanghai-style food expanded my worldview beyond Cantonese food. 

Starting in the late 1980s, Chinese dumpling restaurants sporadically opened in the Los Angeles area. But Y2K marks the start of their proliferation. When Dumpling 10053 opened in 2002, I was introduced to fish dumplings. Interestingly, for many years, Los Angeles was the only American city where you could find fish dumplings. Five years ago, when New York-based South China Morning Post correspondent Jeff Chu interviewed me, he asked about my favorite Chinese dish. When I responded with fish dumplings, he looked puzzled. Fish dumplings didn’t exist in New York at that time, so he had never heard of them. This anecdote typifies how Chinese food in New York has trailed that of California for the past couple of decades. (Shortly thereafter, fish dumplings finally did show up in New York.)

The current favorite

For the last few years, my favorite Chinese dish has been the crispy baked barbecue pork bun, generally made with a crispy round top and a crispy flat bottom. I first encountered a version at Sea Harbour in Rosemead. Its French-style baked barbecue pork bun was good, but not great.

Five years ago, I visited Hong Kong. I ate at Tim Ho Wan, the restaurant that invented the dish. The original is transcendent. Even though I’m sure nobody in America can equal it, I have been on a quest for crispy baked barbecue pork buns ever since. 

My favorite version here is Dragon Beaux‘s in San Francisco. I like several other Bay Area versions, too, including the pork buns at Hong Kong Lounge, Koi Palace, and Lai Hong Lounge. Honorable mention goes to Tang Gong in Monterey Park, Pacific Lighthouse in Alameda and the Tim Ho Wan branch in Manhattan (but not the one in Irvine, CA). Decent versions of pork buns are also on offer near Los Angeles, at Lunasia in Alhambra and China Red in Arcadia. And, for only $1.50, you can eat a giant one at Long’s Family Pastry in L.A.’s Chinatown or iCafe on Waverly Place in San Francisco’s Chinatown.   

As I have often said, Chinese food in the United States is always evolving and getting better. I eagerly look forward to the new Chinese dishes that will be my future favorites.

"How My Favorite Chinese Dishes Evolved Over the Years" originally published on The Menuism Dining Blog.