Chinese restaurants reconsidered

One recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself the sole customer of the "China Taste" restaurant in Rockville, Conn. Located in a strip mall off Interstate 84, it's an old-style American-style Chinese restaurant heavy on the fried rice dishes. With 15 minutes left before lunch specials expired at 3 p.m., I took the path of least resistance and chose pork fried rice for $6; the teenage server, Li, returned from the kitchen with a gigantic mound of the stuff, plus egg drop soup and a bowl of crispy fried wontons.

Looking around, the place was well-worn and unpretentious and I somehow felt rather warm and cozy, like I was at home, surrounded by the usual clutter. A lot of the prep for the evening dinner hours was apparently being done out in the dining room: silverware cleaning, soy sauce refillings, etc. The placemat was one of those "year of the animal" things, but it covered the years only up to 2002 and no further. Somewhere there must be a warehouse full of these, I imagined.

And that got me thinking. How much of this place is really what you might find in China? Almost nothing, I figured: what I was seeing (and eating) was the sum of a century and a half of adaptation to American tastes and prejudices and habits, starting from the days in the 1860s when large numbers of Chinese laborers were brought to this country to work on the western part of the transcontinental railroad, and Chinatowns began springing up in places such as San Francisco, and eventually most cities of any size.

For all that time, the restaurant business (and the laundry business, for a long time) was a natural, but restaurants had to adapt to American tastes. Sure, some eateries in a Chinatown in, say, Boston or San Francisco could still be authentic due to the size of the Chinese customer base. But in a place like my hometown of Nashua, N.H., the one Chinese family running the local restaurant in the 1930s and 1940s (a guy named Sam, who sold my father his first car, I understand), the menu had to be adapted to suit local tastes. And so the whole experience gradually morphed into something of a caricature of what a Chinese restaurant was: MSG-laden meat-heavy dishes in places with weird decorations and traditions that had little or nothing to do with the real China. One example: fortune cookies, totally unheard of in China, and which all seem to come from someplace in Brooklyn. (Undoubtedly one of the last outposts of actual manufacturing in NYC.) Also, I just read that several staple ingredients in "American-style" Chinese food, such as onions, broccoli, and carrots, aren't even grown in China!

So I got to wondering. With the rise of the middle class in China, and with an increasing amount of disposable income there, wouldn't it be possible for American-style dining out to become popular in China? And wouldn't it be interesting if truly American food had to be modified to be appealing to local tastes? Over time, the whole thing would morph into a caricature of America, and it might say a lot of how we're perceived as a nation and as a people.

For instance, in terms of payment, instead of cash, payment at the new "American-style" restaurant could come in the form of temporary credit cards. As part of the experience, you'd pay by maxing out your credit cards, something commonly done here in the U.S.A., right? All part of the American experience, just like fortune cookies are Chinese!

The way things are going, with the United States running a ridiculously high trade surplus every year by importing everything from China, and with China quickly becoming rich and investing for the long-term in its infrastructure while we let ours rot, who's not to say that American citizens won't eventually be emigrating to China in hopes of a better quality of life?

Well, if it ever comes to that (and I'm just jokily supposing here, folks), then maybe we'll have the same thing there as we have here: American families will set up "authentic" restaurants in Shanghai, with dishes like southern pit barbecue and New England clam chowder, and soon they'll pop up all over the country, though outside the big cities we'll have to adjust the menus to accommodate local tastes: chicken feet in the clam chowder, for instance, or hot dogs with bok choy and bean sprouts, for instance.

And instead of fortune cookies, the end of each meal can come complete with a fake voting ballot or maybe a losing lottery ticket, both of which might be considered emblematic of the American experience.

And heck, if the restaurant thing doesn't work out, we can always try the laundry business.