As Germans became Americans, German food became American food. And when Latin American and Asian food also become American food, it will be a signal that the country has at last embraced a new generation of Americans. This seems like a reasonable explanation for why today, so many Americans look to the French for their parenting advice , the Japanese for their tidying wisdom , and the Scandinavians for everything else.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Actually, it's the other way around. They take the same rice and the same shrimp, make it into a roll, charging an arm and a leg under the guise of it being "Japanese". Look at a smothered pork chops rice and gravy plate lunch. Making me want some Chinese food tonight Def not from the gulf.
I haven't had Chinese in over a year. I think I might have to use a diet cheat on some Chinese. Return to Board. Jump to page. Latest LSU News ». Sports Lite ». What spendy Chinese food could be found, in restaurants few and far between, was suspiciously cast as a white-washed con, or an exoticized accessory at downtown clubs. Hakkasan, for example, never quite escaped its overpriced reputation — even though the food, especially the dim sum, was good.
The restaurant closed last November, a casualty of the pandemic. The city is brimming with unfussy, informal shops like Lau Sum Kee in Kowloon, for example, where the house specialty shrimp-roe noodles have been made in the same traditional method since Thinking back to my first years in New York, there were a number of attempts to meaningfully diversify the mostly inexpensive Chinese restaurant landscape.
I remember excitedly making reservations with friends from Hong Kong, hopeful that the meal would provide some familiar comfort and validation that Chinese food in America could be both good and glamorous.
Market forces, whether profit margins or real estate, are the real difference between success and failure. The point is that the craftsmanship of Chinese cuisine, cultivated over hundreds of years, is worthy of a range of price tags. What is actually good is giving Chinese cuisine — or cuisines — the space to exist along a spectrum: as a bargain-cheap meal, a blow-the-bank artistic pursuit, and everything else in between.
Places like Mala Project and Hunan Slurp are designed and priced more like Chinese restaurants as they might exist today in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong, and Taipei. Suddenly, there seems to be an appetite for Chinese food that might cost a little more than it used to. Even in New York, while there remains an outright vacancy of this kind of dining, the re are so many more excellent Cantonese spots, and Chinese restaurants more broadly, than when I first arrived.
Because Chinese food is so much more than cheap. Mahira Rivers is a restaurant critic and writer based in New York. Beyond Worthy , by Jacqueline Whitney. Sign up for the Thought Catalog Weekly and get the best stories from the week to your inbox every Friday. You may unsubscribe at any time. By subscribing, you agree to the terms of our Privacy Statement.
Allow me to challenge the misconception of Chinese food being so inexpensive: In Japan, authentic Chinese food is expensive and considered haute cuisine. In Germany, Chinese food is just as expensive as other restaurants. And does not taste very Chinese. So there are cheap places, and there are ridiculously expensive places. If you ever went to a wedding banquet or some dinner with a VIP, you can see that Chinese food can be quite expensive. Especially those that involve harvesting exotic animals.
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