Letters to the Editor
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I remember China....
And the food was awful to me, really greasy and bland. Korean food was so much better.
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The thing about dives.
Where I live right now, not far away anyhow, there's a restaurant that I'd call regionally famous. No big-name chefs or whatever, but it's the sort of place tourists always go. The food isn't bad, it's a good general representation of this area's style, but the thing is this--it's still tourist food.
The better places to go are the ones that outsiders would call "dives". They haven't kept up the buildings. They have plastic-covered chairs and linoleum floors. They haven't prettied themselves up for the tourists, and they don't spend money on advertising, but that doesn't mean the food isn't good. Sometimes it's amazing, often it's incredibly cheap for the quality you get, and the service is solid.
An outsider isn't going to find these places because they don't advertise in tourist magazines, they don't have big signs to pull people off the interstate, etc. But there are lots of hidden gems. I think what it comes down to, the heart of it, is that some places just make the food more of a priority than the atmosphere. Sure, they could pretty the place up if they charged twice as much, but that would alienate all the locals, thus rendering good food less important because the tourists don't know the difference... and then we see where all this goes again.
It doesn't mean that nicer restaurants can't be good, even amazing, but if you're looking for a good example of ethnic food, popular food rather than haute cuisine, you have to go where the populous goes, and that's usually not to fancy restaurants.
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Chinese Food in China
I was in the city of Kunming in Yunnan province, and I decided to try the local speciality "Over the Bridge Noodles". I have had noodles all over the world, soba, udon, ramen, flat noodles, golden noodles, etc., but I couldn't believe what they brought me. Basically it was spaghetti in chicken broth. I thought they were playing a joke on me, or didn't want to waste the good noodles on the round-eye, but then I saw everyone else was eating the same thing. Maybe this was the source of the original spaghetti noodle Marco Polo brought back from China.
The really popular dish in China seemed to be Hot Pot, which I never got to try, because it is really more than one solo traveler can eat.
The Peking duck I had in Beijing was great, but not too different than what I'd had back in the states.
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In defense of Fujianese cooking
Whoah, whoah--so "upscale" Chinese food=inauthentic/not delicious but Fujianese food, which Ms. Lee dismisses as provincial, is food for hicks and therefore not upscale but not delicious, either? I found this observation rather funny. My husband is from Shanghai and while he has dutifully picked up a love of "Sichuanese" spice that is the trend these days all over China, he will turn his nose up at any other kind of Chinese cuisine including Cantonese in favor of what surely must be the peak of Chinese culinary perfection, Shanghainese-style cooking. Like Fujianese food, it is heavy in the seafood, although freshwater varieties of anything, from crabs to lobster, are preferred over actual "seafood". It is also home to a very distinct tomato-based sauce that bears a remarkable similarity to Hot 'n' Sour sauce. Not surprisingly, my husband rather enjoys American-style Chinese food.
In Fujian's defense: the importance of texture and a fondness for fishy and salty-sour flavors make this a challenging cuisine to appreciate for many outsiders, even other Chinese. It's also possibly a harder cuisine to duplicate outside of China/Taiwan/Malaysia. I recommend Ms. Lee try out some of the Taiwanese spins on traditional dishes like oyster omelettes and goose meat mianxian. I personally feel that Cantonese food is a little overrated and I'll take a heaping pile of Twice Cooked Pork and Tiger-skin peppers, or a hearty bowl of Mutton soup and soggy bread over yet another plate of abalone and bok choy or requisite bowl of gaggingly rich shark-fin soup any day. Of course, all bets are off it's Hong Kong dim sum you're talking about.
The notoriously proud and closed-off Chinese have a surprisingly long history of being culinary early-adopters with delightful results: dishes with corn are a stereotypical part of North-Eastern culture; it is possible to buy Spam in even the most remote "miscellany" store; and a craze for "Flying bread" has brought at least a dozen Indian chefs to restaurants throughout the country. I suspect that Americanized Chinese food owes at least something to this impulse to embrace the new and make it one's own. These days, many popular "American" dishes, including fortune cookies and even General Tso's chicken have made their way back to their alleged homeland.
One Chinese friend, by way of answer to yet another inane complaint about the presence of organ meats on a menu, suggested that part of having an open mind is cultivating an "open" stomach.
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What's Chinese...?
Ms Lee seems to imply that stir-friend broccoli with beef isn't real Chinese food. Same with stir-fried snow peas, straw mushrooms, baby corn and carrot.
But I'm Chinese, born and bred in Singapore, and I grew up on those dishes. They're as much a part of home-cooked Chinese meals here as rice, Ma Po Tofu and minced-pork dumplings (pan-fried or in soup) are.
Hmmmm.
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Bland?
"food was awful to me, really greasy and bland"
China is a big country that encompasses a lot of regions. To say all Chinese food is greasy and bland is ignorant. Each region of China has distinctive cuisine based on the regional agricultural products and climate. And different food calls for different preparation techniques.
Try restaurants that serve different dishes depending on the season. Those, I found, tend to have cooks who still remember what home food tastes like.
If anyone who knows of a good place to find Ma Po Do Fu in Seattle area, please let me know. The dish I had in ChengDu still haunts me to this day.
Zhu Zhu