Of course, I do make an allowance that I may eventually be proven wrong, but this is one of the primary reasons why I haven't and find it unlikely to find homecooked dishes comparable to the finer restaurants. I just can't imagine someone able to replicate the above in a home kitchen.

RE: Chop Suey - I had always just assumed this was something in Chinese American restaurants where they just dumped a bunch of leftover stuff they couldn't sell, pour over some sauce, and just call it "Chop Suey." I can't ever recall ever ordering it at a restaurant.

I do amaze at the people who work at the hawker stalls that can handle that kind of heat. I'm the exact opposite. I can handle cold, but not the heats these guys work in.

As for chop suey, yeah, to me, it was always heaps of bean sprouts with a few vegetable bits thrown in. I thought it was overpriced as it was. Leftover ingredients in real chinese restaurants/takeaway are rarely wasted. Bones are used for stock. vegetables are used for the daily soup that is given away (eg, when you first get into a restaurant or with your takeaway). Only if the ingredients aren't good are they tossed out.

My family owned several Chinese restaurants growing up and many of our family friends did so as well. There's not so much a cookbook but a lot of it is handed down as people come through the kitchens. My parents came to the US for school and worked in a Chinese restaurant, then ended up opening some. Many of their friends from that restaurant went on to open their own as well. Then people who worked for my parents and their friends subsequently opened their own and so on. Most of them had no restaurant experience prior to coming to US so it's not like they're using an old family recipe. Some of the chefs working in our kitchen did cook in China so they had the technique down but they had to be trained on the different blends of sauces.

Everything was tailored to American palates. These days people seek out authenticity and there are so many regional variations which is amazing. But back in the '70s, 80's, there wasn't a big enough market for it so everything was Americanized.

Someone earlier commented that there are really just a few base sauces and it's true. Basically you have a white sauce, a dark sauce, and most fried things get sweet and sour. As a kid I had to work in the kitchens so learned to make a lot of this in bulk. A lot of it was made with what could be bought here so sweet and sour sauce was made from canned orange juice and lemonade concentrate plus sugar - probably not how it was originally done overseas.

Since first posting this how ever many year ago, I did a little more reading up n the topic of both this and Italian American cuisine. We currently have a craze in America that everything has to be authentic, in that somehow in these other countries there is one prototype dish stored in a museum somewhere that everyone in that country learns to copy.

The reality is most authentic dishes were the result of years of people modifying and making do and customizing something to fit their nutritional needs, budget, food availability, and personal tastes. There is no one recipe, and there is no one national dish - what is ubiquitous in one part of the country is almost unheard of elsewhere.

Instead of decrying Chinese food we get in America as "inauthentic", really we should be calling it Chinese-American. It is the cuisine that Chinese people brought to America when they came over, adapted to what was available here, what people wanted to eat here, and how people ate here. They were often not fancy dishes create by world class chefs, but what people made everyday to eat everyday. Thus Egg Foo Young really isn't so much a dish one would find in any restaurant, but really an adaption of how certain people from southern China would cook up leftovers in egg. Add to that influences from Hawaii, and an adaption of American gray, which was prominent here, and thus you have the American version of the dish. It's not a Chinese dish, it's a Chinese-American dish.

I think it started in Europe and their PDO designation. Although I'm not sure how it is enforced. For example, champagne or various cheeses or scotch.... And it just spread from there (waiting for someone in China to make a PDO for congee)

That said, it depends on what you're after in food and what you're calling "authentic". A good example are "Singapore noodles"... it's only known outside of Singapore... Inside Singapore, if you ask someone who has never been out of country, they'll just stare at you blankly. I think it originally came from HK by adding a bit of indian curry powder to a seafood/char siu and veggie (thin) rice noodle dish. Not even sure WHY they named it after Singapore. Just like any "Malaysian" rice dish or "char kway teow" is really a regular fried rice or fried rice noodle dish with belacan mixed in. (For those of you in the know, I kid you not).

Personally, I've been known to improvise ingredients just to get a dish done/out (eg. homemade rojak comes to mind. Can't find "hae ko"/"petis udang" in any supermarket) Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes horribly wrong.

Food evolves and is influenced. The Chinese diaspora certainly has birthed many versions of "native" cuisine, morphed and influenced over the years by the local ingredients, culture, and tastes. Even in a place with a majority ethnic Chinese population such as Singapore, there's certainly variations of dishes versus what might be found today in mainland China.

I actually find it interesting to try variations of Chinese food around the world. My SO and I like to call it "bad Chinese" that we secretly love. It's really fun to see local spins on Chinese cuisine.

The one thing I don't enjoy is the overuse of similar sauces. I don't like heavily sauced food in general, as it tends to mask the ingredients. Secondly, when multiple dishes all taste the same, that's not very interesting. Some of the best food I had was Vietnamese food in HCMC, where you could literally pick out the taste of each fresh ingredient/herb in the dish, no matter how little was actually in the dish.

I'd agree with this, of course.

I've always felt that the Cantonese culture has no peer when it comes to the sheer richness of its cuisine. A saying I've heard on the mainland, but can't remember precisely goes something like this: ideally, one would be born in Suzhou or Harbin (can't recall which one, because the people there are the most beautiful), eat like a Cantonese (the finest cuisine), and retire in Hangzhou (most scenic and tranquil). While, of course, each region's cuisine has its unique appeals, it appears to me that most mainland Chinese probably would agree the Cantonese one reigns supreme.

PS - While I'm fluent in Cantonese, my Mandarin is very poor--the above paraphrased translation was from the latter, but I think I've got the gist of it.

Those people have obviously never been to Monterey Park or Palo Alto.:D

LOL...probably not.

Not sure if you recall this, but way back during the mid to late 90s, there was this westernized HK cuisine craze that sprung up all over Monterey Park. It was called "kong sik tsai chan," and really offered some interesting dishes that I found to be excellent comfort food. One I recall was named ABC Cafe? There were a bunch of them, and all of them were pretty good for their purpose.

This is a pic from from one of my my memorable meals in China.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...f6194d76d8.jpg

I don't know about that. Cantonese cuisine is/was likely the most widespread in the 80s and 90s but if you were to ask mainlanders, a very large chunk would say Sichuan or Hunan cuisine (there's a reason mala is such a common term). If you were to ask the diaspora, then Cantonese would likely be the most well known (assuming they can differentiate). There's actually a Netflix series which highlighted regional cooking styles in China. I think it was called :Flavorful Origins". It was narrated in mandarin with english subtitles. I know there were at least two seasons of it.

I find this very funny, the idea there is a master cookbook or there is such a thing as "Chinese food" at all.

I remember going to an Indian restaurant with a friend who was basically Indian (well, Pakistani but went to school in India). He would ask them what is good. I asked why he didn't know it. He explained there are so many types of Indian foods it is impossible to know them all.

In China I recall a Chinese person coming into a noodle place in Shanghai and asking if this dish had soup. Everybody looked at him like he was crazy. It is obvious that that dish is a dry noodle dish. That guy was Chinese but from some place else so didn't know it. China is so big and varied and they eat very different food in the north vs center vs south so there is no "Chinese food" just like there is no "Indian food".

There is a good book about a journalist who journeys through Canada, trying all their Chinese restaurants, called Chop Suey Nation. It might shed some insight into "American Chinese food" if you are interested.

On the topic of Chinese food, why is it in California you don't have a lot of chefs from China?
In Houston it seems like a lot of the cooks are just people's parents from China (well, I don't actually know that but at least one I met was). But in California I don't see that much anymore. I know before it was. You see these skinny Chinese men who go out to smoke a cigarette during their break.
A lot of the people in kitchen are now Hispanic. I would presume labor is just as cheap hiring someone from China who doesn't speak English? Or maybe not?

The problem I have is finding places with good hand-made noodles. In northern China every place has wonderful dough (for noodles, dumplings). In the US not so much.

I recall in Singapore, in a food court, there was this place that did hand-made noodles. Delicious! People who cooked there were from China.

Interesting. This seems like something I'd enjoy immensely, and may look for it. Start with episode 1? Or, would you recommend just a top 3 or 4 approach? Two seasons sounds like there's a lot of episodes.

I loved those. There are still some of these around although they tend to combine "western" dishes with standard HK cafe foods. I prefer the latter options on the menu.

When I was a kid in the 70's and we'd visit our grandparents in Taiwan, my grandmother would take us to "western restaurants" for food that she thought we were missing. My brother and I figured we would be having burgers, fries, etc. Instead, we basically ended up at a Chinese restaurant that served something akin to a pepper steak on a hot plate and gave you a fork and knife. Evidently the fork and knife were the key part of the "western" dining experience :D