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Hmm, restaurants from Japan have opened locations in SF though. E.g. Hinodeya, Mensho, Tsuta. Did you feel even those weren't authentic? Similarly, Crystal Jade (RIP) re Chinese food.
They only do fat broth, when I was in Japan broth would be much lighter I found, here I die after a bowl of ramen.
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Hmm, restaurants from Japan have opened locations in SF though. E.g. Hinodeya, Mensho, Tsuta. Did you feel even those weren't authentic? Similarly, Crystal Jade (RIP) re Chinese food.
They only do fat broth, when I was in Japan broth would be much lighter I found, here I die after a bowl of ramen.
I can remember specifically a very small hole-in-the-wall place in Yokohama that seats maybe 8-10 people (although I suppose that's par for the course for ramen shops). You could choose how rich you wanted the broth to be.
There are many different preparation styles.
Maybe "The Mandarin" was authentic, I don't think I went there, but having lived in SF for 11 years I never found any authentic asian food in SF. I found some in Fremont. There's plenty in San Gabriel, Alhambra, and other places on the north east side of LA but SF, nothing. No authentic Japanese, no authentic Chinese, no authentic Vietnamese, no authentic Korean, no authentic Taiwanese, no authentic Malay/Singapore/I…
What? This statement is so hyperbolic. - Pho in general in the US is pretty close to Pho in Ho Chi Minh. i.e. Turtle Tower doing Chicken Pho is pretty good and close. - Dim sum is dim sum. The places in Chinatown serve a Ha Gau or Siu Mai and largely the same in Hong Kong... how is it not authentic? - Japanese... Nigiri, sashimi is.... authentic? To say there's zero authentic Japanese seems too. Seriously, sashimi ho…
Similarly, the rustic side of Malaysian, and Singaporean Chinese cuisines is due to them having origin as food of laborers.
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They only do fat broth, when I was in Japan broth would be much lighter I found, here I die after a bowl of ramen.
Not like there is a single type of broth in japan. There are really light and really rich thick ones in japan too.
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What? This statement is so hyperbolic. - Pho in general in the US is pretty close to Pho in Ho Chi Minh. i.e. Turtle Tower doing Chicken Pho is pretty good and close. - Dim sum is dim sum. The places in Chinatown serve a Ha Gau or Siu Mai and largely the same in Hong Kong... how is it not authentic? - Japanese... Nigiri, sashimi is.... authentic? To say there's zero authentic Japanese seems too. Seriously, sashimi ho…
That style of pho is OK I find, I couldn’t find what I got in hanoi. I was on a quest for a good dimsum in SF and tried a bunch of places until I gave up, maybe I should try these places. Japanese is not just about sushi unfortunately.
"Good dimsum" != "authentic dimsum". That's all I'm trying to get at with the parent comment.
For the bad dimsum restaurants in SF, I could point you to a dimsum place in HK that's equally bad as long as the flavor profiles match.
There are lots of bad restaurants in HK. Does that make them not authentic? Of course not, so quality does not equate to authenticity.
The original article is talking about authenticity because that was a real problem. The flavors were changing as they came to America, by a lot.
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The weird thing about Chengdu is that they don’t have kungpao chicken, which is actually just Beijing-style Sichuan food. You can have inauthentic Chinese food even China.
https://youtu.be/-AZ87qyHQ88 The video is a Sichuan master chef showing the cooking procedure. He speaking of Sichuan accented mandarin. Gongbao jiding is traditional Sichuan dish. You might simply did not see that on menu at chengdu. Sichuan has 80million people, chengdu 16million, it’s expected to see highly clustered food style even in a city.
There are dishes that resemble it that are authentic Sichuan (eg laziji), so you are more likely to find something similar with a different name.
I’ve been through much of Sichuan province, though much of that (Eg Daocheng) was actually Tibetan where Sichuan food was considered transplanted by default.
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https://youtu.be/-AZ87qyHQ88 The video is a Sichuan master chef showing the cooking procedure. He speaking of Sichuan accented mandarin. Gongbao jiding is traditional Sichuan dish. You might simply did not see that on menu at chengdu. Sichuan has 80million people, chengdu 16million, it’s expected to see highly clustered food style even in a city.
宫保鸡丁 was invented by a Beijjng chef serving a mandarin on assignment in Sichuan, they had some visitors but didn’t have much time to prepare something, so they came up with that at the last minute, which impressed the visitors and became popular “back home.” Truly the definition of transplanted food (like how lemon chicken is popular in the states as canonical hunan food but is not anything of the sort). There are di…
A beijing chef cook in Sichuan, using the local cooking style and technique, are still considered a Beijing dish, that's what you implied here.
I am not saying it's wrong. But that's not how Chinese people think about the dish...
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Hmm, restaurants from Japan have opened locations in SF though. E.g. Hinodeya, Mensho, Tsuta. Did you feel even those weren't authentic? Similarly, Crystal Jade (RIP) re Chinese food.
They only do fat broth, when I was in Japan broth would be much lighter I found, here I die after a bowl of ramen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
宫保鸡丁 was invented by a Beijjng chef serving a mandarin on assignment in Sichuan, they had some visitors but didn’t have much time to prepare something, so they came up with that at the last minute, which impressed the visitors and became popular “back home.” Truly the definition of transplanted food (like how lemon chicken is popular in the states as canonical hunan food but is not anything of the sort). There are di…
So you are saying a dish should be named after the chef who cooked it? A beijing chef cook in Sichuan, using the local cooking style and technique, are still considered a Beijing dish, that's what you implied here. I am not saying it's wrong. But that's not how Chinese people think about the dish...
It wasn’t named after the chef, but his boss of course.
The fact that some food is more popular outside of the regions they represent isn’t really weird. You see that a lot with Chinese food inside and outside of China.
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So you are saying a dish should be named after the chef who cooked it? A beijing chef cook in Sichuan, using the local cooking style and technique, are still considered a Beijing dish, that's what you implied here. I am not saying it's wrong. But that's not how Chinese people think about the dish...
That’s the story the Chinese go with, and it seems pretty reliable since it happened relatively recently during the Qing dynasty. It wasn’t named after the chef, but his boss of course. The fact that some food is more popular outside of the regions they represent isn’t really weird. You see that a lot with Chinese food inside and outside of China.
I wonder how many non Chinese people holding the same analytic rigorous as yours, claiming a story as authoritative over other interpretations, which were held by actual Chinese...
That’s manifested in popular culture, like in the well received, yet awkwardly dismissive to many Chinese people, movie “The farewell”. It has this line of thought that the life of a Chinese belongs to his/her family, and so the old granny were deprived of knowing her cancer diagnose. A hilariously nonsensical idea.
People were hiding from cancer diagnosis, because cancers were thought to be death sentence, and for many who were deemed financially impossible to afford the treatment, or is in a terminal state that death was inevitable, people were hidden from that to help them live a relatively less stressful last stage of their life.
The nonsense of “life belongs to family” is such a fitting story goes by Chinese, according the western perspective...