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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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The dead giveaway that a Chinese place is authentic: Frog Legs
If we decide to have Asian food for Christmas this year, I’m thinking of making chicken feet. My sil is from the Philippines, and she would love it!
California Nouvelle Cuisine led the way. I introduced some of our Belgian engineering colleagues to it in the 90s. I'd spent a month at their plant in Aalst. The quality of the food was great and so was their beer, but it was so monotonous I was climbing the walls for a burrito before I left.
So when they came to Los Gatos California (a tony former burb in Silicon Valley) to see some process machinery I'd invented, I took them out to a small restaurant in a local glorified strip mall. You should have seen their heads snap back at the first bite of a salad. I said with a wry smile, "Welcome to my country." Then there was the ostrich satay... It went that way from beginning to end. They'd never had anything like it. The response was uniform, "What happened?"
I said, "Everybody in the world came to California and brought their food with them. What they found was great vegetables, fabulous wines, and customers both willing to try something new and capable of paying well for it.
"We fixed it." I went on, "We're Americans. If somebody says there's a problem we fix it." They said, "But what about the bread?!" I replied, "We have micro-bakeries here in town." "But what about the BEER?!?!?" "The brewery is down the street. We'll go there after dinner if you'd like."
California was a place open to anybody who appreciated what they found and wanted to work their a$$ off to afford to stay. Small business made it happen. This could have been Switzerland on steroids. Now it's like something between Mad Max, The Matrix, and Blade Runner. Democrats are killing it, importing angry slugs who want to rip us off.
And a few invasions of Manchuria, China and Indochina.
I wouldn't say it sucks. It's different than any other place and that is good.
What sucks is the whole "regional culture being exported" thing. Southern culture is no longer restricted to the South, Midwest is all over the place, etc. Our regional cultures are just as important as our national culture, and we are losing those.
I remember watching an NHK segment a few years ago where Japanese on the street (in Japan) were offered samples of American types of rolled sushi; their response was that some of it tasted OK, but it wasn't sushi.
Also, hibachi cooking was invented by a Japanese wrestler in NYC, Rocky Aoki, who created a form of Japanese-like cuisine that Americans would eat, and called it red rose (Benihana). Later, he opened a restaurant in Tokyo called Benihana of New York, for the Japanese who wanted to find out what Americans thought was Japanese food.
If you vomit blue cheese, you’re a lucky man. (Do you poop rainbows too?)
But authentic Szechuan spicy beef is really good. When I've ordered it in the US, I would spend five minutes explaining what I'm looking for. They get it close, but not quite.
No more Wok the Dog.
Sum Ting Wong
“Is that beef?”....”Neigh.”
Ditto! Go chop suey !!
Yes. Band was formed in the city where I work, Glendale, CA. Not sure if its true, but I have heard there’s more Armenians living here than in Armenia
There’s an authentic Szechuan place in the BuHi (Buford Highway) area of ATL that we learned about going there with a group with a Chinese immigrant we knew through Georgia Tech.
We went there once later, just the wife, son and I, and we ordered something off of the Chinese menu (there’s also a white people menu). A fried eggplant dish, this stuff was crazy spicy in a unique way.
The waitress looked at us wypepo and said something like “You SURE you want THAT!?”
It was pretty funny, and yes, yes we did. And it was really good again.
I was misinformed.
Rice bugs! Mmmm!
I have to say that my experiences with food in Mexico was a bit different. I found the more up-scale food in Mexico City to be very greasy, whereas the cheaper food in the rural areas was much like Tex-Mex, except there was an astonishing variety of things never seen north of the border. Amoebae were always a concern, however, when sampling food off the street, and I once paid a heavy price for it, losing fifteen pounds in a matter of days. In fact, I am lucky to have survived.
Seriously underrated lyricist that makes it impossible to pick a favorite. However, that song has the best alliteration: “Little old lady got mutilated late last night…”
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