Chinese American food is really quite bad

Chinese food might be the best cuisine in the world. I think most people would say Italian is better, and honestly of all the world competitors I think Italian is the only one that might be better. But I think Chinese wins in the end. I think no national foodways are more varied, more interesting, more loaded with incredible and satisfying flavors and textures and techniques and styles. I don’t think any people use meats and vegetables and sauces more adeptly and deftly and complexly. They really do eat some of the weirdest stuff in the world there. Like throughout China they eat pretty much every conceivable part of the animal you can imagine. Oh what, you like chicken livers? Your southern grandmother taught you how to fry them and eat them with garlic mayonnaise? And all your Boston friends think it’s really weird to eat chicken liver? In one Chinese cookbook I have there’s a recipe for “lamb face salad.” They literally eat the faces of lambs over there. And in the main it’s all just riotously good.

But Chinese American food is not good. It is in fact really bad. The stuff you get at the mall food courts and strip malls and little standalone box restaurants—it’s all pretty bad. That style of food is nominally Cantonese or Guangzhou, but of course it’s become Americanized and standardized and run through an inconceivable number of westernized dilutions until it’s what you get today: Gloppy, soggy, overcooked, flavorless except for a dull, broad, flat wallop of stale umami. The fried rice—it doesn’t taste like much of anything except maybe the fake smoke flavor they threw in there to try and approximate wok hei. General Tso’s chicken, it’s just a corn syrup sauce dumped over rubbery, gristly bits of pale chicken meat. “Bean curd family style,” aka jiachang doufu, that’s one of the great simple dishes of world cuisine, and it comes out of these restaurants tasting like someone cooked chalkboard erasers in bleached molasses. It’s not good.

I have found there are three sorts of apologists for this kind of food. One type of person will argue that it’s really actually not that bad at all, not great food but still fun and satisfying. But this is not true. Food should be delicious, interesting, well-made, thoughtfully prepared. Chinese American food is none of these things. I don’t know why I would want to spend money on something that tastes bad and is comprehensively unpleasant to eat. You might argue that I shouldn’t be so snooty. But nobody has any problem being choosy about other stuff. Imagine if there were a particular brand of socks that when you bought them were already full of holes, filthy and crusted with dirt. Would it make sense to buy them? “It’s fine, they’re not the best socks but they get the job done.” No they don’t! Why spend money on bad products you know are going to be bad? Make it make sense to me.

A second camp of people will try and make distinctions between restaurants, e.g.: “Sure, the Chinese food joints in the strip malls aren’t good, but the one standalone place out by the county line is actually really good, they do things differently there.” I haven’t found this to be the case. If they’re serving the ubiquitous Chinese American fare, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be lame. Unless you’re going to a single restaurant run by an intensive Chinese chef serving a bunch of stuff you’ve never heard of and can’t pronounce, it’s going to taste the same: Flavorless but for a vague stale soy sauce-y taste, oversauced, wet, bad. There’s really just very little difference between restaurants of this type, in the same way there’s really little difference between fast-food restaurants or mainstream Mexican places. Mass-produced, low-value food tends to taste bad. It’s just the way it is. Restaurant owners will get away with it as long as you let them. It’s not a secret and it’s not a scandal, it’s just the way of the world.

A third, comparatively rare subset of defenders are the children of Chinese immigrants who grew up in the restaurants making this type of food. If you listen to enough food podcasts—and boy do I—you’ll here folks in this demographic waxing nostalgically and warmly about the type of food their parents were making back in the 1970s and 80s and 90s. “It’s not really Chinese food,” they’ll say, “but it’s still so good.” I’m not going to whitesplain to a bunch of Chinese guys why they’re wrong about this, even though they are wrong, but I’ll just say that nostalgia really does a wonderful job covering up a multitude of sins, particularly when it comes to food. I mean, I bet you remember with glowing warmth those little corn dogs you used to get in the school cafeteria, right? Well, news flash: They sucked, real bad. So does American Chinese food, even if you grew up eating it while listening to the rhythmic bang-bang-bang of a wok on a 100k BTU burner.

If you want truly good Chinese food, seek out the small restaurants run by people who actually kinda care about making good Chinese food. Better yet, learn to start making it yourself. It’s an intensive, demanding, cerebral sort of cuisine, and as a home cook you’re never really going to master it in a meaningful sort of way, even if you work for years at it. But you can still produce stupendous food at home, with much-higher quality ingredients, much more cheaply, if you just give it some effort. Don’t be fooled by those faded food models and those dim memories of Chinese nights when you were a kid. This food is bad. Don’t waste time on bad food! Seek out good food and you’ll be happier and healthier.