Sea Urchin

[TalnSG]

Originally Posted by steven

Chinese food is vastly more popular in the UK than it is in the US I think;
That may be true on the whole... but I think that in California that may not be the case. Especially in San Fransisco! Even in southern CA, though, there were a ton of Chinese restaurants.

Not only is Chinese food prevalent in California, but throughout the U.S. Almost every little town has at least one restaurant, and usually more. When I was a child in England, almost the only option was eating with family friends who were Chinese. If you weren't in a large city like Birmingham or London, you were out of luck.

Unless there has been a sudden avalanche of Chinese restaurants in the U.K. since my last visit in 1999 (or they are mostly around Liverpool, which I seriously doubt) there are FAR less options for Chinese food in the U.K.

On my last visit I recall searching for them and being surprised by how few there were. The other difference I discovered was that at least in London, there seemed to be a preference for Cantonese over other styles. There were many more Thai and other more SE Asian restaurants, but not traditional Chinese.

Just as a little useless tidbit of info, some Chinese study abroad students (who have been to Japan) said that Californian Chinese food was more faithful than Japanese Chinese food, which I found ironic considering the distances between the countries. I've heard this from Japanese people who have been to China and California before, too. I'll never know for sure until I go to China, though (if I ever go).

That is a surprise - and a pleasant one. Maybe more of the California cooks are actually chinese descendants or trained with them. In Dallas we have a misture of some very authentic ones and then the other cheap, Americanized ones.

[steven]

Just for the record,

"Chinese food is vastly more popular in the UK than it is in the US I think;"

was quoted from Columbine, so you might want to ask him about the status of Chinese food over there now.

I don't know about other parts of the US, so I usually only refer to California, as it's quite a huge country (as I'm sure you know living in Texas of all places haha). As far as the cooks go, I'm pretty sure a lot of them are straight up Chinese. That or American/Chinese. Something cool about California is that a lot of people move there and really latch on to their culture (because there are often a lot of people who share that culture who also live in California). That has good and bad points, but I don't want to get into a discussion about the bad stuff. The food, however, is one of my favorite results of that. You will also see a lot of Mexicans cooking Chinese food as they seem to cook everything. I think it's just a matter of the Chinese owners showing the Mexicans how to cook it, and then they just go to town. We also have some chain Chinese food places, which aren't too different, but just taste a little cleaner, and less authentic (I don't mean that in a bad way, by the way).

Seriously though... not to be rude, but Chinese food in California has to be one of the most unhealthiest things you can eat. People probably think it's healthy, but it isn't (especially in the amounts that it comes in). If you're starving, go to a Chinese restaurant in California because they'll hook you up for like $5... it's like they're trying to get rid of the food when they give it to you. Looking back it's quite a contrast to serving sizes in Japan.

To be quite honest, if someone said to me, "Chinese noodles", I'd probably think first of chow mein (or however it's spelled). That may very well be what Columbine was talking about when he said "course egg noodles", but I can't say for certain.

Unfortunately, however, Ramen has taken over as a cheap college food in America... we have things like top ramen and cup of noodles, etc. Those are what most people probably think of when they hear ramen. We had some real Japanese ramen places around my area, though.

I don't know if any of you guys have been to southern California before, but it's a trip. I grew up there, so I'm used to it, but if you go to a swap meet (some people call them flea markets) or a place like that, you're likely to see people from countries all around the world. I took a picture to show Japanese people before I came to Japan... maybe I can post it on here some day. In that one shot there were all kinds of different clothes and all kinds of different people. It's not like what you see on Disney TV or whatever... it's not just black and white people. That's something very unfortunate about Japan. I think they have an idea that every American is white with blonde hair and blue eyes. That may be true for some areas in America... but it's quite a different story where I came from. I think a lot of Japanese who went to America seem to have gone sometime in the 80's during their great economic years... so that may very well have been the case back then, but recently it's a different story.