Andrew Coe
Chinese restaurants, over 46,000 of them, dot every city, town, and suburban mall across the United States. The foods of China have woven themselves into our culinary fabric, but how well do we really know Chinese food?
I ask this question not just because I happen to love Chinese cuisine. I also wrote a culinary history called Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2009), which is in many ways a long litany of misunderstandings at the Chinese dinner table. Americans have been eating Chinese food for 226 years—we first visited China in 1784—but our pace of learning about one of the world's great food traditions has been painfully slow. It took us a century to fall in love with it—and even then we ate chop suey, which we considered the "national dish of China"! We didn't realize that there was such a thing as Chinese regional cuisine until the publication of Buwei Yang Chao's seminal cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, in 1945, and it didn't dawn on us that the Chinese-American food we liked wasn't what the Chinese ate until Nixon's 1972 trip to China. Even today, the vast majority of our 46,000 Chinese restaurants specialize in dishes that a visitor just off the plane from Beijing would not recognize as Chinese.
So what impedes our deeper understanding of one of the world's great cuisines? A good place to explore this question is Flushing, Queens, with its crowds and cacophony of signs in Chinese, Korean, and English. Here we can unearth regional cuisines most of us have never heard of, like the food of Shandong province, which has just appeared in Flushing over the last year or so. It turns out that Shandong isn't just any regional style but one of Chinese cuisine's foundation blocks, the food of the Han Chinese heartland near Beijing. That combination of being totally new (to us) yet still essentially Chinese makes Shandong cuisine an ideal proving ground to test our chopsticks, to judge how adept we are at bridging the culinary gap.