chop suey!!!
It’s what you get when you have non-chef immigrants opening up restaurants in their new land. Eventually it turns out at least reasonably tasty or they go out of business.
General Tso fan myself. Good read. I think I will get some American Chinese food for dinner tonight.
They were looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein
American Chinese food beats the hell out of “authentic” Chinese “food” like dog meat, monkey brains, scorpion on a stick or pretty much anything that contains DNA.
Salt and Pepper Pork Chops have to be American Chinese food.
Wasn’t soy sauce invented by a Westerner?
If it weren’t for the French the chinks would still be eating rats, dogs, bats, chicken feet and insects. Well, the peasants still do, but you won’t find that stuff in upscale dinning.
American pizza is no different. It’s its own thing.
I’ve been hankerin’ for a bowl of bat soup with a side of pangolin.
We once went to a “traditional” Chinese restaurant in SF Chinatown at the urging of my uncle (who was a notorious cheapskate). The food, to 15 year old me, was inedible. I didn’t get hungry an hour later, I stayed hungry the whole time.
Tex Mex Chop Suey is the best.
When you go to China and look around, you realize that in many ways, China has been conquered by the West.
The clothing they wear, the furniture they sit on, and the form of government are all Western imports. There are “native” elements in food and interpersonal relationships, but other than language, anybody from the US could move to China and feel comfortable living there. There is very little culture shock.
Same goes for two of my favorite cuisines - Indian and Thai. They have that spice that Chinese cuisine usually lacks, and the American mods are going to end up making them better.
“They’ve seen the fork!”
Why? 1) because in each case immigrants from those places wanted to expand their customer base to more than just people from the old country. So they started experimenting with things that would appeal to a wider audience of people from everywhere else until they came up with things that were hits to a broad audience. 2) America is a rich country - not just in money but in land and resources. Meats and cheeses and spices that people in the old country simply couldn't afford, Americans could afford - and wanted. We always had plenty of land to graze more cattle on and a much lower population density. When you've got the money to add more/better ingredients, surprise surprise, the dishes taste better. Then that gets re-exported to the world. America has long been an ideal laboratory.
PS. I can tell you from having been an expat multiple times, Europeans still have not discovered Tex-Mex or genuine Barbecue yet.
In Southern California, traditional Cantonese cuisine developed by immigrants, such as chop suey, which you would find in a typical Chinese restaurant in the 1950s and 1960s is getting hard to find as more recent immigrants from China and other Sinitic communities demand “authentic” dishes.
I was introduced to “Beef and Broccoli” not in an American Chinese restaurant but in Tainan, and Taitung, Taiwan back in the 1970’s.
You don’t get real authentic Chinese food unless it is cooked with grease collected from a Chinese sewer.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of exporting culture.
If every place exported their culture, then every place becomes the same place. When I visit Europe, I want to be immersed in European culture. When I visit Asia, I want Asian culture. Same goes for any other place I visit. That's the WHOLE POINT OF VISITING THOSE PLACES.