What's In A Name? With A Couple of Cantonese Favorites It's Not What You Think

I love the pineapple buns you get at Cantonese bakeries, (known in Cantonese as bo lo bao, literally pineapple bun).  This is in part because I really like the flavor of pineapples.  So imagine my chagrin when after years of eating these I find that there's no pineapple content at all to a pineapple bun.  (I always thought the pineapple was the powdery yellow stuff on top of the bun.)   The term pineapple bun describes the look of the bun, craggy on top like the surface of a pineapple, and has nothing to do with the ingredients.  (Actually the naming is similar to the Cantonese chicken tail bun, a sweet bun made with coconut which clearly has no poultry content.  The name chicken tail bun is an adaptation of "cocktail bun", which is an amalgam of ground up day old buns, coconut and sugar.)  The only thing that makes me not feel completely silly is that very few people are aware of the lack of pineapple in pineapple buns.  Oh well.

More recently one sees Hong Kong style restaurants serving dishes called French Style Shrimp and French Style Fish.  These are dishes served in the manner of the very popular French Style Filet Mignon found at most Hong Kong style restaurants in the Los Angeles area these days.  This is a slightly spicy, slightly sweet. slightly savory dish served on a bed of shredded lettuce and garnished with tomato slices at each end of the dish.   The presentation of French Style Filet Mignon is pretty much uniform in all the Chinese restaurants, and French Style Shrimp and French Style Fish are cooked in the identical manner--spicy, savory, sweet with shredded lettuce and sliced tomatoes.  But what the restaurants who serve French Style Shrimp or Fish seem to have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) is that French Style refers to cutting up the meat into small cubes.  It does not refer to the accompanying ingredients and manner of preparation.  And French Style Shrimp and French Style Fish are definitely not cut into little cubes.   What's next?  French Style Rice?

Why I Don't Use Chopsticks

Having garnered some attention as the person who has eaten at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants, a great deal of focus has been paid to the fact that I can't use chopsticks.  This has generated some negative response in the form of "Well if you like Chinese food so much, why don't you learn to use chopsticks?"  Well the answer lies not in not wanting to use chopsticks, but not being able to use them.

They say the proper way to hold a pair of chopsticks is to hold them the same way you hold a pencil.  That's fine, but I never learned how to hold a pencil the right way.  My mom told me that when I was in the first grade, the teacher spotted the fact that I held the pencil incorrectly.  But alas, it was too late.  She could not undo what I had started and was unable to correct my pencil holding style.  Consequently, my fingers do not have the muscles needed to operate chopsticks. Indeed, I can't even use the spring operated chopsticks mentioned in the L.A. Times article for the same reason.  And believe me it's no fun travelling to Asia and having to remember to bring a fork to every meal, just in case the local restaurant didn't have any.  Interestingly, that has not been an actual problem except for once, in of all places, Los Angeles.

Note that the inability to hold a pencil properly is more than an annoyance.  In holding a pencil the way I do, writing becomes very painful after a short period of time.  Indeed, when I sat for the bar examination in the pre-computer days, I had to do hand exercises for weeks before the bar exam to prepare for the three day writing marathon.

Is. P.F. Chang Really A Chinese Restaurant?

One topic which commonly starts a food fight on internet message boards is whether P.F. Chang can really be classified as a Chinese restaurant.  You see it on Chowhound where somebody makes a comment about P.F. Chang which is followed by indignant responses that P.F. Chang does not serve Chinese food.  Likewise you also see comments on Yelp to the same effect.  Now P.F. Chang certainly doesn't serve authentic Chinese food, but neither do Americanized Chinese restaurants.  Can we say that P.F. Chang is so far afield that even if classifying Americanized Chinese food as still being Chinese, it still doesn't qualify?

Based on my personal experience I would agree that P.F. Chang fails the minimum requirement for being classified as a Chinese restaurant.  I remember walking into a P.F. Chang in San Diego, ordering the lemon chicken, and thinking that while the dish it was good, it certainly wasn't Chinese.  In the case of the lemon chicken, it wasn't breaded like the "authentic" Americanized version of that dish, the sauce wasn't sugary sweet, nor was it gloppy as the dish is typically made.  It was as if they took the name of a real Chinese dish and did their own take on it.  There's nothing wrong with that, except that continuing to call it Chinese is definitely a misnomer.

Confirming that P.F. Chang really doesn't serve Chinese food is one of my friends who hates Chinese food.  A couple of times a year I hold a gathering for a sizable group of people who worked together in the 1980s.  Typically I hold the event at a Chinese buffet because people straggle in and out at different times and this lets people choose the food items they prefer.  But this friend never shows up at these events even though she knows most of the attendees, because that's how much she dislikes Chinese food.  Oh, but there is one "Chinese restaurant" she will eat at--P.F. Chang.

There are any number of other factors which further reinforce the feeling that you're not eating Chinese food.  First of all, there is no P.F. Chang.  Rather the chain was started by Paul Fleming (the P.F.), who did bring in a Chinese consultant, Philip Chiang, that they could name the restaurant after.  Likewise, unless it's by happenstance, the person in the kitchen cooking your food isn't Asian.  While it is debatable whether one has to be Asian to be able to cook Asian style food, it does add credibility knowing somebody Chinese is in the kitchen. 

Then, look at the menu.  First of all, an extensive wine list is something almost never seen at a real Chinese restaurant.  Some Chinese restaurants do have a well stocked bar with hard liquor, and many offer beer, but few serve wine, particularly since wine really doesn't pair with Chinese food.  (Hmm.  Tofu with white wine, sea cucumbers with red?)  Then there's the dessert section full of chocolate goodies, cheesecake, and other Western desserts, never ever seen at a Chinese restaurant.  Not to mention that the main menu is peppered with Southeast Asian and other Pan Asian, non-Chinese items.  And when have you ever seen tuna served at a Chinese restaurant?

So while different people may have different definitions of what exactly constitutes a Chinese restaurant, I have to agree with those who conclude P.F. Chang really isn't Chinese.

They Did What To The Books We Donated?

Proudly, I was one of the founding members of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California way back around 1975.  And what began as gross roots movement by amateur historians has turned into a respected historical society with a number of original publications to its credit.  The latest is a book called Portraits of Pride, Volume II, a $40 coffee table style book over almost 300 pages with biographical profiles of prominent Chinese Americans, mostly from the Los Angeles area.   As with the predecessor book from 8 or 9 years ago, Portraits of Pride, thousands of copies of the book have been earmarked for donation to public libraries throughout the country.

Unfortunately, I have not had to time to actively participate in Society affairs during the past 30 years.  Indeed, I hadn't had time to procure a copy of the new book, either at one of the monthly society meetings, or at the sporadically open society Heritage Center in Chinatown.  So finally I decided that my best bet to buy the book would be through Amazon.com.  But strangely, while Amazon carried the first volume, it didn't seem to stock the new, second version.  However after doing some digging,  I found that while they had no new copies of the book, they had a large number of used copies, which seemed a little odd.  Upon closer examination, I also saw  a number of the used copies were marked "like new" and even "in original shrink wrap."  So I purchased the latter copy for $7.50.  The seller was listed as the Morgan Hill (CA) public library.  So that's what libraries do with donated books!

Fuzzy Math In Washington D.C.

While everybody knows Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States, few realize that Washington D.C. is also the capital of fuzzy math, particularly as practiced by that city's politicians.  A couple of tax proposals introduced by our Congressional representatives this past month are stark indicators of how the numbers work in Washington D.C.

Perhaps the most mind numbing example of the practice of fuzzy math is the Democratic proposal  to delay the sequester for the rest of the  year.  The cost of the sequester delay was $100 billion, to be split between alternate spending cuts of $50 billion and tax increases of $50 billion.  The announcement from the bill's authors proudly proclaimed that the $50 billion tax increase would be funded almost entirely by implementing the Buffett rule, which would take taxpayers whose income is largely taxed at 15 percent due to high concentrations of dividend income and capital gains, and subject them to a 30 per cent tax rate.  This sounds like a neat and easy method of putting the burden of the sequester delay on the very few super rich.  And aside from the "no tax increase, nowhere on nobody" purists, this might sound like a reasonable solution.  Except for the fact that the Buffett rule in fact affects very few taxpayers.  While it makes wonderful news headlines, there are not very many Warren Buffetts or Mitt Romneys who pay such a low overall tax rate.  In fact, there are so few of them that would be affected by the passage of a Buffett rule, that enactment of the Buffett rule would only raise a paltry $5 billion a year in tax revenues.  So how do they come up with $50 billion in revenues from this proposal?   Why by counting ten years worth of Buffett rule revenues in their equation. Yep.  Only in Washington can you balance the budget by offsetting one year (well, really ten months) worth of spending cuts against ten years of revenue increases.

The other example of fuzzy math is a proposal by Senator Levin of Michigan to close a tax loophole that doesn't exist.  Now in Washington D.C., politicians generally stay clear of raising tax rates, but have no qualms about closing "tax loopholes", even though most of those "loopholes" were consciously enacted by Congress to encourage selected economic behavior.  For example, dollarwise the biggest corporate tax "loophole" allows an accelerated depreciation writeoff of plant and equipment, which was specifically designed by Congress to encourage businesses to buy more plant and equipment.  Other loopholes encourage alternative energy sources, such as ethanol or wind energy.  In any event, the object of closing a tax loophole is to raise government revenues.  The loophole that the good senator wants to close is the one that permits corporations to take a bigger tax deduction for stock options granted to employees than the deduction which is allowed in computing the company's earnings reported to shareholders.  Again, this sounds like a potentially reasonable way to increase tax revenues.  Except that when an employer gets a tax deduction for stock options, there is a equal and corresponding amount of compensation income recognized by the employee for tax purposes.  In other words, closing this tax loophole raises zero dollars in revenues for the government.  Or as Billy Preston said, nothin from nothin leaves nothin.

So when the talking robot in "Lost In Space" said "that does not compute" we know it was talking about our politicians in Washington D.C.  I'm thinking we should take all our politicians and spay and neuter them so they won't beget any more.

Good Things Happening in Manhattan Chinatown

Like most observers of Chinese food in New York, I have dismissed the quality of Chinese food in Manhattan Chinatown as compared to that in Flushing, Brooklyn, or even to some of the Chinese restaurants in Manhattan outside of Chinatown.  And while there still are no longer any real destination Chinese restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown, there are signs based on recent openings of several good and interesting Chinese restaurants that things may be turning around  there.

Most of these new options are flying under the publicity radar and represent a departure from the traditional restaurants of Manhattan Chinatown, creating their own little niches   A good example is Cha Chan Tang at 45 Mott Street.  This may already be the busiest and most popular Chinese restaurant in Chinatown.  Yet there has been virtually no mention of Cha Chan Tang in the food press or even the food message boards.  This may be in part due to the fact that Cha Chan Tang serves Hong Kong style cafe food, which might not rate the level of discussion among foodies that other types of food might.  On the other hand, Cha Chan Tang's menu has an entire section of fabulous Yunnan Fish Broth Noodle Soup selections, which clearly deserves widespread attention by itself.

A lot of the negative opinions about food in New York Chinatown arise from the fact that it hasn't kept up with the evolution of Chinese food in the 21st Century in both Asia and North America.  However, one new restaurant bucking this trend is Mottzar Kitchen at 70 Mott St.  Influenced by master New York chef Joe Ng, Mottzar has a creative Hong Kong style menu that includes smoked salmon in eggplant tempura,  black bass  avocado crackers, egg white with crab meat, goose web with sea cucumber, teriyaki lamb chops and lobster with truffles.  Still, the reaction to Mottzar seems not to be that favorable.  First of all, is the pricing, perhaps as much as 50 percent more expensive than what locals are used to paying in Chinatown.  Also some of these newfangled dishes are probably a shock to a community that had not experienced the gradual evolution of Hong Kong style food in the past 10 to 15 years that people in Hong Kong, Canada and California have.

Another under the radar Hong Kong style cafe is Full House Cafe at 97 Bowery.  Full House Cafe incredibly has over 400 items on their menu (don't be fooled by the fact that dishes on its menu are numbered up to 564), including around 40 dim sum items.  Indeed their dim sum (menu, not carts, of course) is as good as any in Manhattan Chinatown.  But you can't call it the best dim sum restaurant in Chinatown since dim sum constitutes only 10 percent of the menu.

Then there's Lee Chung Cafe, located at 82 Madison St.   Lee Chung Cafe is located in the grittiest part of Chinatown, where even newly opened restaurants look like they've been in business for 40 years.  In contrast, Lee Chung Cafe is modern and airy, and would fit in quite well on Mott St. or Canal St. or even Valley Blvd. in San Gabriel, but is certainly out of place where it is located.  Its eclectic menu includes Hong Kong style street food and numerous boba drinks for the younger set.  When I went there they were serving ramen soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, Burmese fish soup, croissants and Hong Kong style toast, but who knows what's on the menu today?.

Noodle Village at 13 Mott St., another jam packed restaurant, serves various noodle dishes and perhaps the best clay pot rice in Chinatown.  Cutting Board, 53 Bayard, serves Chinese style Italian food, as well as lobster rolls and lobster topped beef sliders, and brings a fresh twist to Chinatown. Spicy Village at 68B Forsyth Ave., formerly known as He Nan Flavor, introduces Henan style food to Chinatown.  Notable dishes include various meat pancakes (essentially flatbread sandwiches), big plate chicken, and hand pulled noodles.  The restaurant has been discovered by the hipster crowd, too, and I don't know if that's a good thing or not.   Then there's Diamond Hill Cafe at 147 Canal St., which for want of a better description is the "Asian Chipotle," offering build your own burritos and tacos with Chipotle like condiments but Asian fillings.  Biting into my tofu burrito, I thought to myself "tastes like Chipotle."  Also worth noting is the reopening of Yogee Restaurant as 85 Chinese Restaurant at 85 Chrystie St., whose closing down a few months ago I had previously lamented.

Last mention should go to the over the radar Xi'an Famous Foods  at 67 Bayard St., this is a marvelous story of a restaurant lifted from the obscurity of the basement of the working class Golden Mall on Main Street in Flushing into the East Village and Brooklyn, as well as Manhattan Chinatown.  Despite their crossover success, there's no doubt that their lamb noodles and lamb burgers are good and authentic. 

So if you want to hold a banquet in Manhattan Chinatown, I'm still not sure what to tell you.  But for a good and interesting meal, the choices are expanding. 

Raise Los Angeles Sales Tax Rate to 9.5% To Pay For City Employee Raises? I Don't Think So

While California launched the anti-tax movement with the passage of the Proposition 13 limit on property taxes back in the 1970s, the recent passage of Proposition 30 shows that Californians will take a thoughtful approach to selectively increasing taxes.  Consequently, along those lines a potential half cent sales tax increase in the city of Los Angeles  to close a massive budget deficit seemed like it could be a reasonable measure.  That is until today's Los Angeles Times article indicating that most of the revenue raised would be used to fund pay raises for Los Angeles city workers.  Pay raises???  In light of the recent attention on bloated public employee pensions throughout California, we have scheduled pay raises coming up for Los Angeles city workers?

Now it's understandable that city workers would like a pay increase, given that their wages have not gone up recently.  However there is one overriding factor that makes a pay increase ludicrous in these tough financial times.  In the city of Los Angeles, the minimum annual pay for full time city workers is $40,000 a year.  That's minimum pay, not average pay.  (A recent report did show one Los Angeles city employee earning a little under $40,000, but I presume that has since been remedied.)  Not to demean the individual, hard working employees of our city, but I would presume that there are some city of Los Angeles employment positions that would equate to minimum wage jobs in private industry.  Consequently it is alarming to see that minimum pay for city of Los Angeles workers is more than double the minimum wage in private industry.  Indeed, that same report noted window washers working for the city of Los Angeles earning in excess of $50,000 a year.

It is obviously clear why Los Angeles is facing such a budget shortfall, with bloated employee pensions and bloated employee salaries.  So who would come up with the idea of solving the gap by raising the sales tax, as opposed, maybe, to cutting labor costs.  Obviously, only government officials who are beholden to the city public employee unions, and not the taxpayers of the city of Los Angeles.