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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.
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And fajitas are Texan, not Mexican.
Our sushi barely resembles what is in Japan
The list is endless.
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.
That’s what they also said about Japan in the early 1930s. They loved baseball and western entertainment.
It all changed, overnight.
And Hamburgers didn’t come from Hamburg..............
~~~
Would be funny if Frankfurters came from Hamburg though.
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!”
General Tso Tsung-t’ang, who served the Ch’ing Dynasty and was instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) one of the bloodiest wars in history, never would have dreamed that a dish would be named after him long after his death in 1885.
“It all changed, overnight.”
All it took was the high cost of raw materials and a scarcity of petroleum oil....
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.
Same with Thai food...lots of sugar
chicken feet. Fish heads and rice, etc. I've heard all kinds of complaints from Western expats about the food in China. Famine has been a longstanding problem in China. It makes sense they'd eat just about anything. Taste wasn't always the top consideration.
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.
chicken feet. Fish heads and rice, etc.
Eat them up, yum!
I am not saying that China is not a military rival, just that culturally, they are less strange to Americans than modern Japan. The other reply mentioned Iran. Iran had, I believe, Sharia law even while the Shaw was in power.
For better or worse, the Cultural Revolution in China did revolutionize the culture. There isn’t much “Traditional” Chinese culture left. It has been merged with Western ideas and concepts. It is no surprise that it would include food
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