A brief history of American Chinese food - Kiến Thức Cho Người lao Động Việt Nam

How we went from chop suey to fine Chinese dining in 160 years

Chinese food in America has come a long way — Photo courtesy of Flickr/Sodanie Chea

For most Americans, a meal at a Chinese restaurant usually means spinning a Lazy Susan full of orange beef, General Tso’s, and kung pao chicken at the strip-mall restaurant down the street, or, for those less fortunate souls, a trip to the actual mall for Panda Express or P.F. Chang’s.

For decades, the cuisine we’ve come to know as Chinese has been a mostly homogeneous brand of American-Chinese hybrid complete with fortune cookies and trapezoidal takeout containers (neither of which you’ll find in China).

There are well over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States – which, Jennifer 8. Lee famously pointed out in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, is more than McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King combined.

Yet somehow, most of those restaurants, though independently owned, have very similar menus and have for decades. But now, for the first time ever we’re seeing a new brand of Chinese-American that’s embracing the American side of that hyphenation and taking the cuisine to the next level.

But how did we get here? Well, it’s a story that stretches back 160 years.

Nội Dung Chính

Chop suey

Chop suey was the first type of American Chinese food — Photo courtesy of Flickr/S Jones

Chinese immigrants first came to America by way of San Francisco during the gold rush. Nearly all of them were from one part of the country: the rural districts of Toishan outside of the city of Guangdong (then known as Canton; hence, Cantonese food). Nearly all of them were men. And nearly none of them knew how to cook – something that, at the time, was primarily a woman’s job.

With only a basic grasp of cooking and plenty of missing ingredients from China, the new cooks-by-necessity found themselves basically throwing together whatever food scraps they had laying around, and chop suey (which basically just means “leftovers”) was born out of some combination of a lack of ingredients from home, a lack of kitchen skills and a need to provide thousands of new immigrants with a cheap meal that was reminiscent of home.

At first, Americans didn’t want to eat at these for-Chinese-by-Chinese restaurants amid a climate of extreme racism and rumors they served cats and dogs. Then, in the late 18th century – just as hipsters were the intrepid adventurers who dared to be the first to explore bitter chocolate and foraged moss – a group of broke New York artists in search of something cheap and exotic discovered that they could impress their friends with the realization that, “Hey, there’s something to this Chinese food.”

By the early 1900s, chop suey restaurants had spread across the country as America began its love affair with Chinese food.

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A new wave of immigrants

A dish you'd expect to find in most Chinese restaurants in America A dish you’d expect to find in most Chinese restaurants in America — Photo courtesy of Flickr/Max Wei

In the heat of a They-Took-Our-Jobs mentality, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and from 1882 to 1943, pretty much all of China was banned from stepping foot on American soil. It was the only law in U.S. history to exclude people specifically from one country (though President Trump recently tried to change that).

Politics aside, this policy also meant that Chinese food in America basically didn’t stretch beyond chop suey for many years. The borders reopened in ‘43, but it wasn’t until 1965 when laws became more lenient, and a new wave of immigrants brought the food that became known as Szechuan (now Sichuan) and Hunan.

Except that immigrants who actually cooked this new, spicier, more flavorful food were mostly from Taiwan and Hong Kong, so it was mostly a weird mashup of Taiwanese food with inspiration from Sichuan and Hunan provinces, made for American palates using ingredients that didn’t actually exist in China. This is how we got the fried, sweet-and-spicy dishes that are basically on every Chinese menu across the country – like mu shu pork, sweet and sour beef, and sesame chicken.

Nixon goes to China

A new wave of Chinese chefs are changing what “American Chinese” means — Photo courtesy of Flickr/Joy

President Trump famously ate well done steak and ketchup on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, which went viral but had no real lasting effects on the eating habits of the general public. But when Richard Nixon went to China in 1972 and had a feast on live television that included, among other things, Peking duck, Americans found a new obsession.

And all of a sudden, Americans were itching to get their hands on Chinese food. It was a seminal moment for making Chinese food trendy once again, and now Americans couldn’t get enough of the new Szechuan and Hunan restaurants that had started opening up.

Because none of this food was quote-un-quote authentic anyway, Chinese immigrants across the country used what they saw working in other restaurants, which is more or less how similar-tasting recipes for dishes ended up in thousands of restaurants across the country.

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A new breed of Chinese chefs

A post shared by Mission Chinese Food NYC (@missionchinesefood) on Jan 10, 2017 at 8:59am PST

In the early 2000s, the proliferation of restaurants serving food from throughout the rest of Asia became popular among adventurous eaters in urban areas. Vietnamese, Korean, Thai and Japanese restaurants started flooding major U.S. cities, offering something new to Chinese food-eaters used to eating the same old dishes for decades.

But in the last few years, a new generation of first- and second-generation Chinese-American chefs have transformed Chinese-American food. Restaurants like New York minichain Xi’an Famous Foods have taken over the quick-serve space once dominated by chop suey joints, now serving super spicy hand-pulled noodles, soups, dumplings and Chinese-inspired ‘burgers.’

A number of restaurants have also taken Chinese food to new heights in the form of super hip fusion that focuses on quality ingredients and expert techniques – arguably led by Mission Chinese Food, which went from a pop-up in San Francisco in 2001 to a now bi-coastal New Chinese mecca in New York and SF.

MCF’s Chinese-inspired menu – and Chinese-inspired decorations – represent a new breed of Asian fusion restaurants that, rather than simply infusing Asian ingredients into otherwise European dishes, attempt to recreate Chinese dishes (often from chefs’ childhoods) with a modern twist. Take, for example, MCF menu items like Kung Pao Pastrami, Malaysian Beef Jerky Fried Rice, and Broccoli Beef Brisket.

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Then there are restaurants like Tuome, that approach fine dining, which is no surprise considering chef Thomas Chen got his chops at Eleven Madison Park and Commerce. Dishes like the deep-fried panko-coated egg with a deviled yoke and topped with red chili oil represent just how far Chinese food has come since the 1850s. As does the octopus leg with brown-butter-and-potato espuma and topped with gingery XO sauce that includes chopped caramelized pork and Chinese sausage, fish sauce and dried shrimp.

With increased trade between the U.S. and China, and inspiration traveling back and forth between Chinese chefs and U.S.-born chefs cooking Chinese food, there’s no telling where the cuisine will go from here.