Man why is American chinese food so fucking good, I mean who would want to eat that authentic shit...

>I mean who would want to eat that authentic
Just had some Qishan saozi mian today. It was quite good. Will try some more northern Chinese food in the future. Maybe some liangpi or roujiamo. Authentic Chinese food's pretty good too. But some do suck dick, like dandan mian and Chonqqing wonton.
But yeah, American Chinese food is pretty great too.

>American Chinese
This makes me curious: Are there American Korean or American Japanese cuisine?

yes

>Taiwan
I think you mean Chinese Taipei

I've been to china and I've had "authentic" chinese food. I don't even know wtf it was, just goups of tofu things, rice porridge, various organ meats, stinky tofu smells like it's cooked in steaming piss, chicken legs with the nails still on. They were selling bbq bugs on sticks at some street in beijing. There was also these wierd crepe things that didn't have meat, they just spread various powders on them and they tasted alright. They also had those shwarma street food stalls but the rotating meat was unbelievably fatty.

>Are there American Korean or American Japanese cuisine?

I would argue that the answer is no until there is a national level (region locked is fine) fast food or takeout chain.

>yfw the chinese can't even make chinese food right
They should be making this:

>American Japanese cuisine

Ever heard of fortune cookies?

what's the best general tso's sauce

this shit is on netflix, i highly recommend watching it, it's actually fascinating

thesearchforgeneraltso.com/

>thank you, chinese god, for this disgusting rancid egg that i apparently love for no reason

Whenever I get back from abroad I always get American Chinese food and a turkey sub within the first few days. They're both really good and nearly impossible to find abroad.

頂きます

oh my!

>dandan mian
baby who cant eat spicy confirmed

The spiciness isn't the issue. It just tasted freaking weird with the peanuts. Also, it was too dry for some reason. I mean, I enjoy Mao-style hongshaorou, and that's Hunan style spicy.
I also ate zhajiang mian (northern Chinese) and it was horrifyingly salty.

Speaking of Taiwan, there's a Taiwanese restaurant in my city. What kind of Taiwanese food should I look for?

>roujiamo
>Chinese invent burgers around 200 BC
I've heard this claim recently. This shit for real?

Because American tastes?

reeeeee

dandan noodles and chinese burgers are so delicious

Teriyaki Boy

I live in Denmark, and when we were on school trip for a week in Bornholm (small island close to Russia), a chinese guy from our class made chinese stew for the class a few times.
Freaking food took him 2 days to prepare, but it tasted so good.. we didn't leave any leftovers x_x and most of us were picky eaters.
The taste was magic, but took so long to prepare and he had to get help from 2 others + a teacher to cook along with him.

I was told afterwards that the good chinese food takes a long time to prepare, but that the fast food they make is bad ...so chinese dining places mostly suck, because their fastfood is not very good and the good traditional dishes they have takes too long to prepare for restaurants to be able to profit from, because it's a gamble if the food they prepare don't get eaten by costumers then it's all a waste of energy and profit loss.

I don't know how much of the information I was given is true in reality, but it fits into my experiences with chinese food.

partially, ok, but wok cooking is a great part of Chinese cooking and it's all about 8 billion BTU flame for 10 seconds

i like to order stuff off of the authentic chinese menu when i go to this one place. they make a beef liver with veggies i enjoy

>x_x
You need to go back.

Honestly, I'm a huge fan of most Asian food including Viet, Thai, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese and even Korean and I pretty much can't stand authentic Chinese food except for a few Canto snack bar staples (e.g. chow mein, yueng chow fried rice, Singapore style fried vermicelli, sweet and sour pork, beef with black pepper sauce, etc).

One glaring exception is Cantonese BBQ. Holy fuck roast pork and bbq pork are good.

Info is not correct, and you have very limited experience with chinere food.

The answer is yes. There are several Korean and Japanese fast food places all over the country. I can go to a place that's basically a Chipotle but with Americanized fast-food style Korean ingredients, e.g. a "kalbi beef" wrap or bowl.

And Americanized Japanese fast food is fucking everywhere. Ever seen one of these places at the mall?

Because you're an uncultured shitstain. And china is a big place, i doubt you have had all the regional fares.

>chicken nugger
I'll pass.

>Person who loves virtually every South East Asian cuisine
>Who regularly eats Viet, Thai, Indo/Malay, Korean, and Japanese
>Who knows "Chinese food" well enough to know what Cantonese food is vs other styles of Chinese cooking

Yes. I'm sure it's just that I am uncultured.

Like said, China is a big place. There's all kinds of things eaten there, for various reasons. Sometimes it's based in traditional beliefs about health and medicine (so is a lot of traditional Western food, but we kind of forgot about a lot of the old reasons), sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's religion (Buddhist food is very different from a lot of other Chinese diets) and sometimes it's just different provenance.

The best Chinese restaurant in my city is known for its banquets with your choice between a handful of set menus. They're pretty heavily seafood-based. This is because the ingredients are expensive and they don't really want to give you the opportunity to fuck up the menu the chef came up with, so you get to pick which flight of dishes you want, but no customization. And I'll be damned if it isn't the best Chinese food I've had. But I'm thinking that picky eaters might not be a fan. They're flinging around stuff like bird's nests and pigeons and abalone.

This is why I don't go to buffets anymore.

>Person who loves virtually every South East Asian cuisine
Do you, though? I'm sure you love the noodles, fried foods, and fresh greens. But how often do you eat prahok, red tree ants, duck embryos, raw blood soups, grubs or tarantulas?

You are.

I'll hazard a guess and say grease,sugar and superior cuts of meat

Cantonese > American Chinese
Especially British influenced HK dishes

...

So nobody here has had authentic Chinese food that's not meme food?

What region? I've never had authentic food from about 20-21 of China's regions. I've only had authentic Cantonese and Schezuan so to any extent I've barely scratched the surface.

just came back from Lanzhou and I had the region's famous beef noodles. plus a plethora of other traditional dishes. I rate it 8/8

Ah thank you.

I have absolutely no clue about chinese food, and how big of a difference there is between the regions there. What that guy from my class made for us during those school trips was extremely good stews ...otherwise everything I've tried at restaurants have been bad, even the "fine" chinese restaurants all serve the same poop as the fast food restaurants here where I live :(

The usual asian restaurant menu is: a few vegtable & fried noodle stuff, sushi, sashimi, fried big shrims, some sort of duck breast that looks oven baked, a few dishes and soups with no clear description of the ingredients & spaghetti bolognese and ham or cheese burgers on the childrens menu.

I am also a picky eater too, so there are a lot of stuff I avoid eating. The things you mentioned: birds nests, pigeons, abalone

lanzhou lamian is pretty good, as good as daoxiao and
By meme food I mean food that everyone knows but is pretty mediocre unless done by a really good chef. Shit like huiguorou, hongshaorou, roujiamo

>as good as daoxiao and
Meant to say as good as daoxiao and youpo

>posts on Veeky Forums
>doesn't understand the concept of memes
pic related.

>x_x

It depends on the region, I think.

In the inland empire region of southern california it's not even made by chinks half the time. Shit is soggy and bland, pinch of salt is good enough.

You gotta go near the coast or the border where they actually cook shit.

I spent a month in guangzhao with my freind's family when i was 12. Saw 1 other white person the entire time. His rich uncle took us to a lot of big banquets. The food was so good.

The best food i remember was a big villa in the country converted into a seafood restaurant, but pretty dingy. The best places in general were dingey. It had private dining rooms in each of the bedrooms and a big swimming pool filled with fish that you selected for them to cook.

I love Pei Wei and Panda Express, I could probably eat it everyday as it quickly kills me.

I have those at weddings
Sure it taste good but the menu is to stuffy and somewhat bland at times

I'd prefer simpler heck better prepared cheaper dishes like
Authentic on point mapo tofu or fish fragrant eggplant and a bowl of white jasmine rice or two
But that's just me famlamlama

Anything with the word teriyaki in it is American Japanese food. Teriyaki sauce is not a thing in Japan. Theres some similar sauces, like what you put on yakitori, but the only teriyaki to actually be found in Japan is a teriyaki burger at McDonald's

Looks interesting. I'll watch it tonight, thanks.

American Chinese is an amazing immigrant creation. It doesn't really bear much resemblance to Chinese regional food. It's just stuff Chinese immigrants came up with to please 20th Century American tastes using the ingredients they were able to get here.

Stuff like chop suey, Gen Tso's chicken, egg foo yung, crab rangoon and beef and broccoli were all created in America. Americans love these dishes because they were invented to please American tastes.

The most fascinating thing about this cuisine to me is that it's completely moribund. It stopped evolving with the introduction of Gen Tso's chicken. Nothing about it has changed since. Chinese immigrants either cook the same Chinese American food we've had for decades, or they open places in immigrant communities doing regional cooking. The two do not seem to cross pollinate at all.

Something adapted better than others: beef and broccoli for example. Chinese broccoli doesn't even look like north american broccoli and tastes quite different but overall the substitution works out well.

>The two do not seem to cross pollinate at all.
I think you answered the reason why within your own post.
But you do have a point.

Most mainstream 'foreign' food styles have experienced additions and additional elements. It's weird what's happened with chinese food.
I would take a guess and say that it's due to being takeout instead of fast food, so there isn't much competition and need to innovate.
A new flavor of chicken ball/nugget isn't likely to give me an excuse to get some chinese food.

Or maybe it's just reached it's stopping point. There aren't exactly major revolutions in seafood because we've pretty much discovered what works and what doesn't.

wtf is that yellow shit?!

I don't know what it is. I was trying to come up with a theory, but I've got nothing. But there has to be some reason why thousands of independently run small restaurants across the country all have the exact same menus that have been set in stone for decades. That wouldn't happen just by chance.

It's got to be centralized somehow. I know most of the staffing for these places east of the Mississippi goes down in employment offices located in the base of the Manhattan Bridge in NYC. Perhaps the equipment and purveyors they use are similarly centrally organized? And if you don't speak Chinese and work in the restaurant business you won't know about it. Like the Chinese bus lines.

Under this centralized system they figured out a menu that works and the system to support it, and as such haven't seen fit to change a thing for decades.

youtube.com/watch?v=gUVwy3GLYsY

What about fake China?

Because it's deep fried sugar.
Might as well eat candy you fat fuck.

>That wouldn't happen just by chance.

Indeed. It's because customers have developed expectations as to what would appear on the menu.

>>It's got to be centralized somehow.
No it doesn't. And it's certainly not unique to chinese food either. Go to a steakhouse and you'll always see the same basic steaks and sides. Go to an Italian place and there will always be lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, etc.

General Tso is Taiwanese. The Burger version is different from the Taiwanese version by being unsurprisingly more sweet and with added broccoli.

>"Mmmm, taste all those flavors of pieces of fat"
I'll take greasy over offal, skin, and fat.

Region is the big issue with Chinese food. Hong Kong Cantonese is pretty similar to American / British Chinese food, it's just some of the backwaters that have fucking horrendous things.

It got centralized because the Chinese formed cliques wherever they go. They would set up associations that tell new immigrants where to set up or work in restaurants and what to put on the menu that would sell. Also added to this is the fact that most Chinese very much lack originality and like to just copy what works. Hence the reason why there are a lot of samey types of dishes everywhere. The newer generation of Chinese-American chefs don't have the patience to listen to these old guys which is why we are seeing more variety of Chinese food and from different regions.

Totally not true.

American Chinese cuisine was developed by Cantonese immigrants in the 1800's so the distinctive cantonese style is one unifying feature. The other main feature is that they didn't have access to a lot of traditional chinese ingredients, so the easiest ways to compensate was to use common western ingredients like broccoli, and use simple techniques such as breading that don't demand exotic ingredients.

The end result is a bunch of fried dishes with chicken, beef, or pork, and a lot of cabbage, broccoli, thinly sliced carrot, pepper flakes, etc...

I'm not talking centralized in a secret mafia or top down corporate set up. But The fact is the Chinese set up their own restaurant supply shops, sign makers, print shops and purveyors wherever they go. Even the Chinese grocery stores operate largely outside the system that stocks most supermarket shelves. They could have standardized the business model and menu of Chinese American places out of efficiency. They don't care that it's the same shit over and over because they're not eating it.
>The newer generation of Chinese-American chefs don't have the patience to listen to these old guys which is why we are seeing more variety of Chinese food and from different regions.
We're not seeing anything new at the Chinese American joints, and we haven't in decades. What you see happening in Chinatowns is that the old guard Cantonese places are being replaced by cooking of the regions the more recent immigrants are from. In the case of my Chinatown it's lots of Fuijian joints offering cheap and relatively healthy food that bears zero resemblance to Chinese American food.
No doubt the foundation of Chinese American food was Cantonese, because the first wave of Chinese immigrants were Cantonese. But they changed the fuck out of it for American tastes. That brown gravy in egg foo yung has no analog in Cantonese food. It's a Chinese take on the brown gravy that most American restaurant plates were swimming in back then. Many traditional Cantonese sauces like black bean and ginger scallion were abandoned in Chinese American cooking.

>They could have standardized the business model and menu of Chinese American places out of efficiency

Could have? I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I don't think that's the case. I love eating Chinese food--both American and authentic. I've been to countless Chinese restaurants. And while there is overlap it's far from a single set menu.

There are a core set of dishes that you'll see at nearly every American-Chinese place. Beyond that there's a lot of variety. I don't see how that's any different from Thai, or Italian, or French, or a steakhouse, etc. At any of those places there are a core set of dishes that you'd expect to find, and then some additional variety beyond that. Americanize Chinese doesn't seem that different to me.

>there's a lot of variety
The menus are really fucking large, so of course there's variety. I'm just saying there hasn't been a new Chinese American dish in decades. Compare that to Italian American food: Pizza has gone in a huge number of crazy directions over the last few decades. Same is true for sub sandwiches. Putting chicken or shrimp in Alfredo sauce is uniquely American, and just a few decades old. Plus Italian American has gotten several shots in the arm from Italy over the years. Pesto has found it's way over and into all kinds of dishes. Tuscan cooking has crept into the formerly Southern and Sicilian only repertoire as well.

That hasn't happened with Chinese American take out food. You can find regional dishes at Chinatown joints, but never at take out places. Take out menus have been set in stone since the late 70's.

I'm still not seeing the distinction. To use your example, yeah, there are all sorts of crazy variations on pizza these days. But you won't find any of them at your typical Italian-American mom 'n pop pizza place. They have the same standard menu they've had for decades. The crazy variations are from hipster food trucks or fusion restaurants, etc.

Same with Sub sandwiches: the major chains play around with silly variations all the time but their core business is the same old standards. And if you go go a Mom-n-pop sub/gringer/hoagie/cheesesteak place they have the same 'ol menu.

Same thing with Asian restaurants: you have your generic Westernized-Chinese places that have the same set menu. Then you have other places that do regional specialties or exotic variations.

And even the older Chinese places are changing. I'm seeing more and more of the traditional but not-quite-appealing-to-westerners dishes show up on the menus of what was otherwise a straight-up 70's Chinese takeaway. The dishes themselves are changing. In the US it was illegal to import Sichuan peppercorns for the longest time so they were simply omitted from the dishes that normally called for them, like Mapo Tofu. Now that they are legal to import they are creeping back into those dishes after being omitted for decades.

the standardized menu is characteristic of many indian american places as well.
It seems like the more "alien" the culture, the more uniform the cuisine. I think it's just helpful to have some familiar items on the menu when the cuisine is foreign enough.

You say that, but some (non-national) chain mexican places still sell some disgusting tasting shit like menudo.

I would expect that any Mexican restaurant would have menudo on the menu. It's that basic.

Yeha, but when was the last time you went to the burrito/taco shack (equipped with drive though or take out) or taco bell and was able to order some?

It's not normal under those situations.

Look for nu ro mien (beef noodle soup), and if you can get la pien(thick handmade noodles).

Also fried pancakes called ton yo Bing, or if you like beef get ton yo nu to Jen Bing. Shit is amazing.

Source: Taiwanese gf and eat with her family once a week.

Chicken don't have vaginas, they have cloacas.
youtube.com/watch?v=wk4ftn4PArg

>But you won't find any of them at your typical Italian-American mom 'n pop pizza place.
You will. Over the last couple decades chicken has gone from weird to being a commonplace pizza topping. Same goes for pineapple. And bizarre sauces like ranch dressing and Buffalo sauce are becoming increasingly common.
>you have your generic Westernized-Chinese places that have the same set menu. Then you have other places that do regional specialties or exotic variations.
In most other cuisines there's cross pollination between the two. New ideas arrive from the regional restaurants and find their way into the Americanized cuisine. This hasn't happened with Chinese American. It may be popular, but it's completely stopped evolving. Instead you just see items from entirely different cuisines like sushi, jalapeno poppers and fried chicken popping up in unreconstructed form. There's no new Chinese American food.

How can I get an asian gf?

Two days ago. Then again, I live in Texas so perhaps my idea of what is "normal" for Mexican restaurants is different than elsewhere in the country? Around here it's standard, both for Americanized Tex-Mex and straight-up Mexican places.

Taco bell or other fast food chains? No, they don't have it.

>the standardized menu is characteristic of many indian american places as well.
True, but this is changing. Southern dishes like dosas have become very popular. The days when Indian American restaurants were all cooking from the same set of mimeographed recipes are long gone. It hasn't hit Peoria yet, but it's happened in major cities.

This place always has the biggest line at the mall I go to the most.( West Town mall in Knoxville, TN)
More than Chipotle and Chik-fil-a.
I can see why because this stuff is my shit, Chicken Teriyaki with Double meat for life desu.

...

Benihana

Lots of American or Mexican/Korean places here in SoCal. I was surprised at how many I could find in like a 5 mile radius of my school

>go to Pandy Express last week
>ask for an order of the new General Tso's Chicken
>employee: "okay, one order of Generel Tee-Ess-Oh's Chicken"
>chuckle internally and wonder if all the employees at that branch call it that

Listen you basic bitch, you don't know shit about asian cuisines. You ESPECIALLY don't know shit about "chinese" food.

I've been the only white dude in enough various regional Chinese restaurants to know I prefer every other major South East Asian cuisine, well, as I said, excepting real Cantonese BBQ.

Not even fucking close.

You're white. I won't go into detail on why that disqualifies you, but it does.