Posted on 05/05/2026 7:21:29 AM PDT by Red Badger
America didn’t ruin Chinese food. It built its own version, and China wants a taste.
The same food snobs mocked as fake is now being imported back as a real cuisine.
The American palate gets laughed at until the rest of the world starts copying it.
BRIEFING
Jett here. For years, food snobs have treated American Chinese food like some greasy little crime scene, as if General Tso’s chicken and beef with broccoli were culinary vandalism. My eyes are rolling back in my head right now because American-style Chinese food is freaking amazing. And now, it’s becoming really popular inside China, and suddenly the “fake” stuff doesn’t look so crappy anymore. Let’s get into it.
And FYI, this is where America doesn’t get enough credit.
Everybody loves to clown on us for remixing and redoing other people’s food. We take Chinese food and make it sweeter, crispier, saucier, heavier, and built for takeout cartons. We take Italian food and turn it into spaghetti and meatballs, chicken parm, baked ziti, garlic knots, and enough red sauce to make any nonna clutch her rosary.
And then the funny thing happens...
People try it, and most of them love it.
Because yes, America has a food culture. It’s not always ancient, delicate, or dressed up like it’s in some museum. Sure, sometimes it’s loud, messy, saucy, oversized, and served in a cardboard box with two packets of duck sauce and a plastic fork that will 100 percent snap under pressure.
But it works. And it’s delicious. And screw anybody who doesn’t feel the same way.
In many ways, American food culture is a remix machine. We take flavors from everywhere, run them through the American appetite, and create something new. No, it’s rarely authentic to the old country, but it’s delicious, memorable, and weirdly perfect for the way people here actually eat.
That’s what makes this story so fun and why I was so excited to stumble on it.
American-style Chinese food wasn’t created in Beijing or Shanghai. It was built mostly by Chinese immigrants in the United States, who adapted their cooking to American ingredients, customers, neighborhoods, and our cravings. And over time, it became its own thing. Not traditional Chinese food. Not fake food. It’s all American Chinese food.
And now that version is making its way back to China... and they’re lovin’ it.
SOURCE
Quick! Which of these menu items can be included in a typical Chinese meal?
Egg Foo Young?
Chicken Chow Mein?
Hot and Sour Soup?
None of the above.
Your answer will probably depend on where you live in the world. Those inside China would probably argue that none of those dishes resemble anything from a traditional Chinese menu.
But others might disagree.
For them, the idea of "western Chinese food" isn't an oxymoron, it's a genuine style of cuisine primarily developed by generations of Chinese immigrants to the United States.
Now, one restaurant in Shanghai is trying to bring American Chinese food back to China.
[...]
One of the biggest challenges was finding the right ingredients to use in the kitchen.
"As weird as it sounds, we actually import a lot of ingredients to make authentic American Chinese food in China," Fung says
Items like Philadelphia cream cheese, Skippy peanut butter, cornflakes and English mustard powder must all be brought in from outside China. Even the soy sauce must be imported from Hong Kong, because that's what the first Chinese immigrants to the US used in their cooking.
The extra effort appears to be worth the trouble. The restaurant is usually packed on week nights and on the weekends, long lines of customers can stretch out of the door.
Dave and Fung have learned to predict whether first-time customers will approve of their food.
"If you're an expat, 99% of the time you're going to be happy. When it's a younger local person, we have maybe a 70% success rate," Fung explains.
Some locals come into the restaurant and ask for their food to be served in American-style white cardboard takeaway containers, mimicking meals they've seen on sitcoms like Friends and the Big Bang Theory.
This is a real cuisine with its own ingredients, texture, flavor profile, memory, and identity.
And the Chinese customers actually get it. Chinese locals are curious about this remix. Some even want the whole American takeout-carton experience because they’ve seen it on shows like Friends and The Big Bang Theory.
Our culture is being exported. Yes, our culture... we have one, and it matters.
SOURCE
@notjimmymaio
American Chinese food in China? #greenscreen #china #generaltsoschicken #chinese
♬ original sound - Jimmy Maio
DEBRIEFING
China gave America the roots of its food culture, so thank you for that. But America built the remix, and when the Chinese students tasted it here, they craved it back home.
We’re not “ruining” other people’s food. We’re doing what we do best: taking something really good, making it bigger, louder, more accessible, and more addictive, and turning it into its own amazing thing.
NOW YOU KNOW
Good food has a way of winning arguments... and American Chinese food just won it all.
Mexican food in Australia is a wonder. To say that the palate down under is bland understates it. The "hottest" Mexican sauce there consists of flour, vegetable oil, and food coloring. I don't think a pepper or even a tomato comes anywhere near it. The same is true of their Italian fare, even pizzas. It is remarkable. This said, I did find some reasonably good pulche in a Mexican restaurant outside of Sydney. As I say, it is a wonder.
Give credit where credit is due: where the Aussies have the world beat is on the potato. Their French fries -- they call them chips -- and something they call potato scallops, which are large ear-like, thick slices of fried potato, are to die for.
My favorite is Lawyers, Guns, and Money. I was dating a waitress in Germany in 1979, but she wasn’t with the Russians.
We might have crossed paths. Thanks for bringing up memories. I miss the German food... schnitzel, shashlik, vinegar potato salad. Every little town had its own bakery and brewery. I have never had any beer in the U.S. that tastes as good as the German beer. The landlady would trade goodies for V-8 juice.
As long as we don’t open up a Panda Express in China. I have no idea how people eat that stuff.
is there such a thing as chinese food?
doesnt each province have their own dishes?
You better stay away from him, he’ll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I’d like to meet his tailor
True, but they are slowly getting closer. Where I am in Poland right now there's a rib place serving wood fired ribs. Not US style barbecue, but damn good. It's owned by Ukrainians, serves really good beer imported from Lvov (Lviv) on tap.
The staff are mainly Ukrainian and wear red shirts and black pants: the colors of Bandera. I would find that highly dubious, but the Poles don't seem to mind, and when I was in Ukraine they all denounced the Volhynia propaganda as Soviet lies, so I doubt it's an intentional "in your face".
sounds like germans can only afford cheap cuts
Modern communications and ease of travel cause a lot of that.
You aught to try a Chinese hamburger. No! I can’t do that to a friend.
There’s a KFC on practically every corner in Shanghai.
And there’s a Tony Roma’s, Rainforest Cafe, Hooters and Cheesecake Factory…
At least that’s how it was in early 2001.
We’re getting there.
Nathan’s in Coney Island sells frog legs, and, to tie it in to the topic here, chow mein sandwiches!
Almost every part of a cow, or game animal, is a delicacy, somewhere, and a not eaten somewhere else.
Traditionally, hunters in northern climates ate the organ meats first, and tossed to their hunting dogs the parts prized by Americans.
It is also true that food tastes, and trends, change. I saw a post by an elderly Englishman, commenting on how oxtail is now sold in butcher shops, and at a premium. He said he worked in a butcher shop, in the 50s, and the butcher used to wrap up the oxtails, and give them free to old age pensioners, because he could not sell them at any price. They even had a codeword for oxtail, so that the pensioners could get them without letting their neighbors know they had been reduced to eating oxtail.
When I returned to the States in 1972, I had to say goodbye to German beer, to which American beer didn’t hold a candle. When the Danish brewery Tuborg began to market beer in the US, its ads noted that it was “brewed light for American tastes”—in other words, watered down.
Check back in 15 minutes
Indeed he was. I bought Excitable Boy as a Junior in High School, having heard Werewolves of London late at night on FM radio in my rural home. I listen to it occasionally to this day, nearly fifty years later, and still love it. The songs, the playing, the singing, and the sonics of the recording are all first rate.
Yes they are.
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