The restaurants in Chinatown hid their best dishes away on Chinese-character menus that Westerners would never see. When I tried to order something more challenging than a boneless chicken stir-fry or crispy aromatic duck, the waiters would urge me to desist and point me in the direction of those dreary set menus that no Chinese person would ever order from.
Waitstaff across Chinatown would tell me how Westerners usually made trouble when they were given the kind of dishes Chinese people liked best. They would moan about bones and cartilage, send shell-on prawns back to the kitchen, be shocked by chicken that was a little pink along the bones, and accuse staff of trying to cheat them by serving cheap, fatty pork.
One veteran Chinatown waitress told me there was a recurrent problem of non-Chinese customers making spurious complaints after they’d finished their meals and refusing to pay for dishes they’d found unacceptable. I witnessed it once at the table next to me in one of my favorite Chinatown restaurants. A well-dressed young English couple had finished their dinner and were complaining that the food wasn’t worth the price on the menu. After arguing with their waiter, they flounced off, saying they’d left as much money as they thought the meal was worth. Later I chatted with their waiter, who was quietly overcome with hurt and rage: “They wouldn’t do this in a French restaurant, would they? Why here?”
Worn down by the boorish behavior of tyrants like these and usually struggling anyway with the English language, most waiters had given up trying to sell proper Chinese food to Westerners. Ordering a good Chinese meal requires experience and knowledge of the food; there’s an art to creating a harmony of dishes suited to the place, the season, and the company.
I started reading this with the full expectation that I’d be disappointed, but Dunlop knows her shit. I’ll keep bitching about the new wave of Western fixation on Sichuan cuisine (China is huge; there are as more types of cuisine in China than in Europe), but I was pleasantly surprised by her recognition of the latest wave of Chinese comfort food, whether that’s Taiwanese rice and pork or baozi.
I’ve been thinking about Chinese food the last couple of days, partly due to Fresh Off the Boat. I’m still wary of the gentrification of Chinese food, maybe my strongest connection to my the culture of parents’ homeland besides my family themselves. I spent most of my life quietly keeping the contents of dinnertime to myself and away from my non-Asian friends, having been told my whole life that the parts of animals that I ate and the way that I ate them was wrong or dirty or uncivilized.
That’s changed over time. Now there’s lots of gawking, lots of explaining and posturing to do when there’s food around non-Chinese folks, lots of tour guiding, and I’m exhausted. Once I took some friends to dim sum and they reacted so poorly to chicken feet (a staple of dim sum; if there’s no chicken feet, then what’s the god damn point of going to dim sum???) while I falsely grinned and tried to shrug it off. People are curious, but only to the point where it’s still conveniently within a range of normal. They want Chinese sauces, but not the whole steamed fish that comes with it. They want baozi but they reject mantou and century egg porridge. They want hot pot but not the tripe or the rice noodles. No thank you; I’ll just eat dim sum with my family instead. Chinese food is too great to be huffy while eating it.
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