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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I went to a ‘steakhouse’ in Germany and whatever they were serving was unrecognizable to me...............
There’s nothing blue cheese can’t fix.
Our local Korean supermarket sells marinated chicken feet, although I’ve never tried it.
You don’t get real authentic Chinese food unless it is cooked with grease collected from a Chinese sewer.
There isn’t much “Traditional” Chinese culture left.
The “Four Olds” were old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Launched in 1966 by Mao Zedong to fuel the Cultural Revolution, this campaign urged the Red Guards to eradicate, feudal, and bourgeois elements to reshape Chinese society, resulting in the destruction of cultural sites, books, and violent persecution.
I might add, that’s exactly what the Maoists who run our education system are doing.
and cat ... with fur balls ...
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.
Aren’t they Armenian?
Of course, except they now think that all of that crap they were eating because they were starving are "delicacies" and how dare you say that feces might actually taste better than most of it.
Exactly.
When I was living in Germany in the early 1970s, the place to go for the closest thing to an American-style steak was an Argentine restaurant. If you ordered steak at a German restaurant, it would always come smothered in a sauce.
You could also get pretty good fried chicken at Wienerwald (Vienna forest), a chain of indoor-dining restaurants. However, they fried the whole chicken, not individual pieces as they do here.
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.
Totally agree, and modern American culture sucks.
I made beef and broccoli and egg fried rice last night. It turned out great.
They always had ‘flankensteak’....I called it Franken Steak!............
“...think I will get some American Chinese food for dinner tonight.”
“check local listings” for a Chinese restaurant that specializes in Peruvian style Chinese cuisine; “Chifa:”. Better still, find a Peruvian restaurant! You’ll find a number of mainstays such as Lomo Saltado (stir-fried beef strips), fried rice (arroz chaufa) and arguably empanadas (won-ton wraps) are a few Peruvian adaptations of Chinese mainstays. During eastward migrations, a sizeable number of Chinese settled in Peru. Using ingredients brought along or adapting recipes to local ingredients a new category of Chinese cuisine came about; “Chifa”.
Even without that addition, Peruvian cuisine is of world class potential.
The secret to American cuisine has always been abundance. Historically the U.S. has been blessed with an abundance of high quality, low cost ingredients. And plenty of meat, of all varieties.
All cuisines, including ours, are dominated by logistics. If you were sitting through a Montana winter in 1880, far from the nearest railhead, you did what was necessary. And the U.S. has always had poor areas where destitution was real. But broadly speaking, Americans took what had often been dishes of poverty back in the old country and upgraded them.
What’s not to like? I’ve always joked that the U.S. has the world’s best Italian, Chinese, French, German, Ethiopian, Hungarian, Polish, Caribbean, whatever food in the world because the best, smartest and most ambitious cooks from those countries came here. The dishes they brought with them are indigenous American cuisine just as much as the basic northern European dishes brought by the Jamestown folks and the Pilgrims, because they were all Americanized by old world immigrants themselves.
Bulgogi bibimbap is going to be the next great American dish, right alongside roast beef, fried chicken, shrimp creole, pizza and Szechuan chicken. In my experience, having had both, the American version is usually better. Because it has more meat.
I can honestly say that if someone at my table has been served blue cheese with their meal my dining experience has been ruined.
To me, the stuff literally smells like vomit.
As former world traveler (business) that is very true. For example, Mexican food. Mexico has its regional fare but you don’t find the gloppy greasy mess that you find just across the border in Texas. And then have Mexican between Texas and California and they are different for the locals palate. But it’s all pretty similar. The first international Mexican food I had was in Australia. There was nothing Mexican about it except for the nacho bar that was as exotic as the nacho bar at 7-11. Cheap though and there were roadside bars that had all you can eat which was perfect for cheap eats on a road trip. Mexican restaurants were like stepping in to the set of Three Amigos.
Then Mexican food in Europe. I would stop in them out of curiosity in the cities. The funny part would be getting warnings about how spicy something was. In Warsaw, mayonnaise is spicy to them....I asked for hot sauce and the waitress brought out this ancient bottle of Tabasco someone probably smuggled across the border durning the Soviet occupation and handed it to me like it was radioactive. My girlfriend was astounded when I emptied half the bottle on the flavorless collection of “Mexican” food to give it a little kick.
Anyway. The Chinese in America use what they have for what the customers wanted. Cheap fast filling greasy glop served on rice. Comfort food.
Reminds me of a Black guy I knew in the Air Force who used to cook amazing BBQ spare ribs. He told me when he was stationed in England, he used to go to an off-base butcher shop to buy meat. One day he was in there shopping and noticed the butchers were throwing away the ribs. He asked why, and he was told that they can't sell them because nobody eats them. After that, he would go there every week and have all the spareribs he could carry for almost nothing.
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