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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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chop suey!!!
Kung Pao!................
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?
I’ve heard it described as bachelor food from all the unmarried Chinese men coming to the west coast in the 1800s. Imagine a hundred thousand American dudes in their twenties dropped off in China for work. Your entree is steak with a side of Buffalo wings.
Rather than being fried in gutter oil, it’s fried in good old American seed oil.
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.
And made sweeter, etc
Absolute nutritional garbage yet many people still wonder why so many Americans are fat and unhealthy
Except adapted to local ingredients. No chicken and steak? Nutria with a side of Buffalo frogs!
Zevon was a genius.
American pizza is no different. It’s its own thing.
Can you still get blue cheese dressing for that?
I’ve been hankerin’ for a bowl of bat soup with a side of pangolin.
And Hamburgers didn’t come from Hamburg..............
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