Chinese
Food Sucks
To the American gourmand, at least.
“High Plain, Lo Mein” by Kymberly Day
No Chinese restaurants in NYC have a Michelin star. The only Michelin-starred Chinese food establishment in the country is in San Francisco. While qualification for a Michelin star does rely on Western performances of sophistication and fine dining, the lack of critical acclaim for Chinese restaurants, especially when compared to the nineteen Japanese and ten Korean Michelin-approved eateries, reflects the more significant issue of Chinese cuisine’s place in the US imaginary. This goes beyond haute cuisine ratings. America’s history of dehumanizing and building a regressive image of Chinese people frames many Americans’ inability to see Chinese food beyond being an unhealthy, uncivilized form of consumption.
When thinking about New York City’s best Chinese cuisine, images of Szechuan Mountain House come to mind. Their thinly sliced pork belly and cucumber draped over homemade chili oil, wooden branches, red lanterns, and Xuanshan bamboo roof create a portal to Sichuan in the middle of the East Village.
Restaurants like Flushing’s Deng Ji Yun Nan Guo Qiao Mi Xian flash through memory—the aroma of ginger root broth flooding its warmly lit dining space, the patter of running water echoing like spring rainfall in China’s Yunnan province. Diners won’t forget the first time their servers bring Yun Nan noodles to their table. Served on a small wooden bridge alongside quail eggs and sliced tofu skin, the hot rice noodle soup is delectable in all senses.
According to the Michelin Guide, when evaluating a restaurant, the panel looks for quality products, mastery of flavor and cooking technique, the chef’s personality reflected in the cuisine, value for money, and food consistency. New York City is home to many Chinese restaurants that meet these standards, yet go unrecognized.
Chinese restaurants like Szechuan Mountain House and Deng Ji Yun Nan Guo Qiao Mi Xian exist only faintly in the popular American consciousness, as most Americans have little exposure to Chinese cuisine beyond takeout restaurants. Ianne Sandoval, who worked at Chinese hole-in-the-wall Quality Chef in the Bronx, shares, “Most Americans, when they think of Chinese food, think of the kind of restaurant I worked at. If someone heard I worked at a Chinese restaurant, they’d say, ‘Oh, like Chinese takeout.’ It’s the type where you pick up the food, leave, and go eat with your family or at work.”
Authentic Chinese food in America is strongly tied to this image of fast-food Chinese American restaurants, where as Ianne describes, “Chicken wings and french fries are their best sellers.” General Tso’s chicken and beef with broccoli have provided many Chinese American immigrants the means to start a small business and build a life here. For them, gaining critical acclaim is not a particular end goal. But the scents of grease and sweet and sour sauce weigh down the American perception of what Chinese cuisine can be, leaving little space for rich pops of roasted Sichuan peppercorns or simmering ginger in traditional lotus root soup. The need for critical recognition is most apparent in NYC, where there is so much Chinese cuisine beyond takeout.
The Chinese restaurant industry in the US made $23.9 billion in 2022 alone. Fast-food Chinese takeout began during the California Gold Rush in 1849 when Chow Chows emerged to feed Chinese laborers quickly and efficiently. Such eateries expanded with the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad between 1863 and 1869, which utilized a 90 percent Chinese workforce. Despite the centuries between now and then, anti-Chinese legislation, stereotypes, and negative racializations of Chinese food have barred the cuisine from designations like a delicacy.
Anti-Chinese rhetoric shaped the American view of what Chinese people and culture could be and stained American 19th-century legislation. The 1875 Page Act banned Chinese women immigrants on the pretense that they were prostitutes. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act further banned all Chinese immigration and barred Chinese American residents from citizenship. The 1892 Geary Act required all Chinese American citizens to carry proof of residence permits at all times or face deportation. Chinese people were portrayed as evil, mischievous, and uncivilized beings who might contaminate the white population like a plague.
Following the implementation of these Acts, the West Coast and Hawaii actually saw outbreaks of bubonic plague, smallpox, and tuberculosis. Due to limited scientific knowledge, predominantly white health officials unfairly targeted Chinatowns as “laboratories of infection,” accusing the residents of “willful and diabolical disregard of our sanitary laws.” In Hawaii, on January 20, 1900, an order was issued to burn down all homes where plague deaths occurred. The fire quickly spiraled out of control and consumed one-fifth of the buildings in Honolulu, impacting over 5,000 individuals, half of whom were Chinese.
Anti-Chinese immigration laws were the first of their kind in American history. They fostered xenophobic sentiment towards all Asian ethnic groups while singling out Chinese people as exemplary. Today, many diners consider Japanese omakase and Korean BBQ more elevated than Chinese dishes. Anti-Chinese rhetoric is kept alive more deliberately than for any other East Asian nationality and for many reasons. The American-Chinese trade war since 2018 is ongoing. The China Threat theory states, “Counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.”
This rhetoric justifies the way American consumers see Chinese people and culture, evident in the ongoing speculation that Chinese people are “wild” consumers, which began during the 2003 SARS epidemic and resurfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise of these diseases is coupled with the rise of criticism of the Chinese consumer. Outcry over the Chinese eating rats, snakes, and dogs has created a fresh image of the inhumane Chinese.
In her chapter “Wild Consumption: Relocating Responsibilities in the Time of SARS” from the 2015 book Privatizing China, Mei Zhan writes, “The Chinese, in indulging their appetites for exotic ‘wild animals,’ transgressed proper barriers between human and animal, the domestic and the wild, culture and nature. The story of zoonotic origin did not blame nature itself for the SARS outbreak; what was wrong was the Chinese people’s uncanny affinity for the nonhuman and the wild.” Once this image of the regressive, nonhuman Chinese person appeared, it never left.
Growing up in the United States as a child born in Wuhan in 2002, I have been asked whether I eat dogs, snakes, and spiders. I’ve been asked to admit participation in being less than American, which is to say, participation in being less than human. This was before COVID-19. If I mention being from Wuhan now, such questions don’t arise. I’d like to think it’s because my peers are now educated enough not to let these stereotypes persist and not because they hear Wuhan and assume the worst.
Language like “exotic” and “wild” has remained at the forefront of virology research in Wuhan since 2020. The New York Times quotes Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University, saying, “The samples from the market that had early COVID lineages in them were contaminated with DNA reads of wild animals.” The word wild is repeated throughout scientific research papers, although what constitutes a wild animal exists in a double standard. A Pacific salmon is no different than a raccoon dog in its wildness. Yet, what is considered wild to one person may not be so to another. This is not an argument of whether these diseases are zoonotic, but an observation that one person is allowed to be civilized while the other is not— one food is safe while the other is not.
During COVID-19, NYC’s March 17 restaurant closure order, followed by its June 8 Phase One reopening order, saw NYC’s culinary scene recover during the height of the pandemic. However, as a Harvard research paper details, “While restaurants in all cuisine groups show[ed] signals of recovery in June, Chinese restaurants suffered the largest drop in visitors in the first four weeks of the restaurant closure order.” An entire country, through the rise of rhetoric like China Virus and Kung Flu, was reduced to an image of the wild, the uncivilized, the inhuman, in mere months. Cuisine is a reflection of a country, and so NYC Chinese cuisine suffered the same diminishment.
The monosodium glutamate (MSG) controversy reflects an additional damaging stereotype. Born from a 1968 letter written to the New England Journal of Medicine that raised health concerns around MSG—the writer reported feeling numbness after eating Chinese food—MSG became popularly recognized as unsafe. This led to the term Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, listed in Merriam-Webster from 1993 to 2020 as “a group of symptoms held to affect susceptible persons eating food heavily seasoned with monosodium glutamate.” In fact, the conjecture of MSG’s unsafety was debunked in 1996 by multiple health evaluations from the Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA) and the Scientific Committee of Food (SCF). However, the dictionary would not revise this definition as outdated and scientifically unsubstantiated until 2020. By then, the damage was done. Chinese restaurant menus still include promises of “no MSG” in their cooking to appeal to the American consumer who has not yet learned to question this stereotype.
David Chang, founder of Momofuku, wrote for The Guardian about how “avoidance of MSG is an expression of Western ignorance, or worse, racism, drawing on stereotypes of Asian countries as dangerous or dirty.” It is not hard to see Chinese cuisine as inferior when health specialists and authoritative dictionaries have defined it as such.
Ianne reflects on her experience working in the business from 2021 to 2022, “Two to three times a day, someone would ask about MSG or request we don’t put MSG in their food.” Even though the myth was disproven in the 90s, Chinese restaurants in the United States have not been able to wash the sin of MSG away.
I asked one of my coworkers, a preacher at the altar of healthy eating, if she liked Chinese food. Immediately, she replied that she didn’t. She said, “Chinese food is dirty.” Often, buzzwords like cheap, dirty, and unhealthy tarnish Chinese food’s reputation in America. While remembering her interactions with customers, Ianne explains, “I had some people who would tell me, ‘this is the only clean Chinese restaurant I’ve been to.’” It is as if that is an accomplishment for Chinese cuisine—being clean, being civilized.
Food is a powerful means of communication. It informs us of culture, people, and history. To be labeled as Chinese is to carry the weight of America’s historic sinophobia. While reversing such rhetoric and racializations is a long, constant fight, it can begin with something as small as a conversation—between friends, between family, between colleagues. Maybe you can have it over dim sum.
Eat your day through New York City’s Chinese food scene:
Breakfast/Brunch
Kong Sihk Tong—this hole-in-the-wall restaurant located on Bayard St. “takes you through the vibrant streets of Hong Kong one dish at a time." Recommended dish: Golden Lava French Toast
Lunch
456 New Shanghai—highly controversial, the best spot for xiaolongbao might have to be 456. Recommended dish: No.1 Steamed Pork Buns
Dinner
South of the Clouds—named after the translation of Yunnan, bringing the best dishes from this southwestern Chinese province to the heart of Greenwich Village. Recommended dish: Signature Yunnan Crossing Bridge Soup
I am no professional. The best restaurant is the one you’ve been to.