Chinese Restaurant Mysteries Part III - Ace Burgers

Since it's been almost exactly 10 years since I've written up a Chinese restaurant mystery dealing with a puzzling Chinese restaurant event the time is ripe for another such article which just solved itself.   One year ago, Tianjin Feng Wei opened up on Valley Blvd. in Alhambra in the depths of the pandemic, one of  perhaps just a handful of new Chinese restaurants that opened up in the San Gabriel Valley after the pandemic hit late last winter.   Any new Chinese restaurant opening at that time was puzzling, and Tianjin Feng Wei's opening was doubly puzzling because they opened up in an abandoned restaurant storefront that had been vacant for five years, and known as a graveyard for Chinese restaurants with 10 different Chinese restaurant occupants over the years.  

As it turned out, Tianjin Feng Wei was a gem.  Their Tianjin style pork buns were fantastic and raved about by online commentators.  Their beef bing was excellent, not as good as the version at Beijing Pie House, but when Beijing Pie House failed to survive the pandemic Tianjin Feng Wei became a go-to source for beef pies for many people.  And a number of their other dishes were excellent too.  But then suddenly this past March there was a notice that the restaurant would be temporarily closed for a week.  Fine, it's not unusual for small restaurants to go on vacation.   But upon reopening a week later, while the building signage still said Tianjin Feng Wei, the sign in the window and the menu now said Ace Burgers!  

Of course Chinese restaurants get sold all the time, quite often with a new name and a new style of cooking.  But in this case the quick flip of a popular new restaurant was unusual, as was the speed in opening the new style restaurant.  The latter was quickly explained by the fact that the restaurant was not sold, but merely rebranded by the owner with an entirely different menu.   So the change in cuisine could just be a business decision that the new menu would be more successful than the old one, though that didn't seem to be probable, since they had the only Tianjin pork buns in town.  And adding to the puzzle was the fact that Ace Burgers did not sell burgers.  Rather, the new menu consisted of chicken sandwiches and fried chicken.

Fortunately all this has just been explained by social media stars the Fung Bros in their new video on latest food trends in the San Gabriel Valley, and who once were so nice to refer to me as the "OG Chinese foodie" (whatever that means.)   As it turns out, McDonald's in China has created a spicy chicken sandwich which is the rage of not only China, but all throughout East Asia.  Likewise, KFC has created a similar product with their spicy chicken wings.  Consequently, Ace Burgers has a menu that strives to duplicate the popular chicken dishes served by McDonald's and KFC in China.  And why the name Ace Burgers if they don't serve burgers?  Because in China, chicken sandwiches are known as chicken burgers.  And now the flip to Ace Burgers makes perfect sense.

Guide To My Video Appearances (Revised December 2023)

Recently I thought it would be a good idea to have a central location for the various video appearances I have made during my Celebrity Diner period.  However that goal proved more elusive than I had imagined as a combination of technical issues and copyright law prevented the use of any single hosting site for the videos I wanted to post.  It took a combination of YouTube, Facebook and Dailymotion postings to find a home for the videos I wanted to upload.  Consequently, this write-up turns out to be the one-stop repository I wanted, providing the various links to the uploaded videos.

Goldthread Video Documentary Interview With Clarissa Wei. Back in 2012 when Clarissa Wei did her LA Weekly article about my Chinese restaurant list that went viral around the world, I figured that was the lightning strike that gave me my 15 minutes of fame.  Surprisingly I received an unrelated additional 15 minutes of fame the next year where Frank Shyong wrote his Los Angeles Times Page One article on my Chinese restaurant eating adventures.  And in 2014 there was a third 15 minutes of fame when I appeared in the Chinese food documentary, The Search For General Tso.   As a result of these three episodes I had reached a comfortable level of recognition in the Chinese food journalism community such that I could write my own articles related to Chinese restaurants in America and occasionally be contacted by food journalists for interviews and quotes.  In 2016 I received a message from a budding filmmaker named Sarah Coakley who thought my story was interesting and wondered if I would be interested in being the subject of a short film documentary.   I was a bit dubious and a quick search did show film industry connections, though no projects of her own.  I never received any followup and I don't think she ever actually produced anything, but that was OK with me since I had already experienced more time in the spotlight that I had ever dreamed and being the subject of a documentary seemed far fetched.  Little did I know that the biggest and best was yet to come.  

In late 2018 I was contacted by Clarissa Wei, who was now a senior producer for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post English language daily newspaper's video arm called Goldthread 2.  She said she would be coming for a visit back to Los Angeles to shoot a few short videos and thought it would be nice to do a sequel to her 2012 interview with me on a different medium for a different audience.   That sounded interesting and fun, so I met her in February of 2019 in the San Gabriel Valley and we shot scenes in Monterey Park, San Gabriel and Temple City.  After two months of post-production work, Goldthread released the video in April of 2019 and it was an immediate hit under various titles including "Obsessed" and "The Restaurant Collector."   I had all of 500 Instagram followers at the time of release, a number I was quite proud of since I really hadn't done anything to promote a following.  Within two weeks of the Goldthread release, the number jumped to 1,500 followers.  And mind you it's not like there was a link or anything from the Goldthread video to my Instagram page.  These people had to track down my Instagram page to follow me.  But perhaps the bigger surprise was that the video has gone through waves of new viewers in the ensuing four years.   The video has now been viewed 1.3 million times on various platforms.  Surprisingly the number of YouTube viewings has been a relatively small portion of the total, only 40,000 views at the time of release, and another 200,000 plus views in 2021 when the video broke into YouTube's autoplay rotation for several weeks.  Rather, the bulk of the viewings have been on Facebook, where the original Goldthread posting has been supplemented by several discussion thread links posted by members of the powerhouse Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits and its nearly 2 million members.  As a result, the repeated viewings of the video raised my Instagram count to over 3,600 by the fall of 2021.  (Subsequent exposure on BBC, noted below, raised the Instagram count to 17,000.)  Oh, and this is essentially the documentary about me that didn't get made in 2016.  The Goldthread video can be found on YouTube here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMuSEuuZTeM

The Search For General Tso.  While nobody has told me directly, I presume I was interviewed for the Chinese food documentary The Search For General Tso because of Clarissa Wei's 2012 print article.  My recent blogpost Me And General Tso capsulizes my involvement with the movie.  Uploading a copy of the movie proved to be an extremely daunting task and being successful was nearly miraculous.  The first issue was finding a digital copy of the movie.  Surprisingly there were numerous postings purporting to let you see the movie for free, but they were all scam sites designed to get you to download suspicious software.  The biggest miracle was finding the movie online with no strings attached.  Of course, that was only part of the solution since the copyright police is always on patrol, so while the movie might be here today it could be gone tomorrow.  So the next issue was making a copy of the file.  Fortunately I have software that captures streaming video and it was able to download the movie.  But uploading the movie was also a big challenge.  Due to various limitations, running from copyright filtering to file size limitations, YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo could not be used to park the video file.  However, I discovered that Facebook was one site that allowed the upload of large files, and I posted it here.  https://www.facebook.com/Chandavkl/videos/10158826336196477

WHYNOT-WAINAO Melting Wok San Gabriel Valley interview.  This was deja vu all over again as I reprised my walking tour/sit down Chinese restaurant format as in the Goldthread and Hong Kong Daily Apple News videos with some overlap in locales.  Actually, I met with producer Rachel Chen from Washington DC after receiving an email addressed to "Mr. David Chandavkl" in Los Angeles Chinatown September of 2022 at Pearl River Deli to discuss the premise and logistics of the video shoot for the Los Angeles segment of what became the Melting Wok videos.   The return visit for the video shoot was originally scheduled for December of 2022, but then postponed until April of 2023, when I was interviewed by Taiwanese American food personality Tzu-i Chuang Mullinax.  With an extended post-production period, the video was released on the day after Christmas in 2023.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrIJjU3hpjk

Warner Bros. Family Style Chinese Buffet Episode.  The background on how I became a Warner Bros. cartoon character in 2020 sharing billing with actor/comedian Jimmy O. Yang (whose last name really is Auyang) are in my prior posting describing the production of the Stage 13 video.    https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7wezh6   Because of the HBO/Warner Bros. affiliation, it was streamed on HBO Max for a period of time.  Technically that made Family Style a TV show and theoretically gives me a television credit.  Note that when HBO Max became the sole outlet for the show the former links to YouTube and the Stage 13 websites became inactive.

Los Angeles Times Off Menu.  Another video with hundreds of thousands of views was the one with Los Angeles Times food columnist Lucas Kwan Petersen in 2019 where I described how historic housing discrimination against minorities in Los Angeles led to the establishment of a giant suburban Chinatown in the San Gabriel Valley.  Fortunately my segment is at the front end of the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEghvcaBi5c

BBC World News Television Interview.  Companion piece to a written English language article on the BBC website in November of 2021, which had been preceded by a BBC article in Chinese, the interview probably reached the greatest audience of anything I had been involved with.   The content was not wildly different from past articles and interviews but being on BBC was an unprecedented platform, constituting an unexpected fifth strike of lightning, and an overnight addition of 13,000 additional Instagram followers.  However, this televised interview was really secondary to the website article, which became the most viewed item on the BBC site, and which led to a hastily arranged live appearance on BBC World News on Thanksgiving Day. https://twitter.com/i/status/1464073116280229890

Hong Kong Daily Apple Video Documentary Interview.  Essentially a Chinese language recreation by the Chinese language Hong Kong Daily Apple newspaper of Clarissa Wei's 2018 video, shot in late 2019 with Daily Apple reporter Gabrielle Chang before the pandemic and modified and released in the fall of 2020 to reflect the effect of the pandemic.  Note that with the government shutdown of Hong Kong Daily Apple the original article and video are no longer online on any Daily Apple website, but if you want a PDF copy of the article please contact me. The video is at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7wp6ya

China Global Television Network.  In one way this is the most flattering video involvement for me, part of China Global Television's Tso'l Food hosted by Gerald Tan.  The premise of this series is to show viewers Chinese food from communities around the United States.  When I was contacted by the show they had only done episodes from Washington DC, where China Global has their United States headquarters.  When they asked me whether I would be available to do an interview with them, I assumed that Los Angeles was their next stop on the map, since Los Angeles has the best Chinese food in America.  However during our video shoot in Los Angeles, he told me that he and his crew planned their visit to Los Angeles only when I accepted their invitation to appear, and if I had not accepted they would not have come to Los Angeles!  https://america.cgtn.com/2021/11/12/tsol-food-la-char-siu

Subsequently, a separate Tso'l Food Los Angeles episode was released on Chinese New Year's Day 2022 in which I do an introduction for each of the businesses visited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jy0EQcInoE

Interview with Australian Channel 7.  Appearance in the wake of Clarissa Wei's original print article.  Little did I know that Australian Channel 7 had a TV studio in Century City, three blocks from my office at the time, and which is where I was interviewed by the Australian hosts.  Some background on that live TV broadcast  which occurred at 5pm Friday afternoon in Century City but was around 7am in Sydney are in my prior posting.   https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7vulrr

TriBeCa Film Festival Appearance.  In connection with the premiere of The Search For General Tso at the 2014 TriBeCa Film Festival, I was part of the post screening Q&A. An interesting sidebar to this session was that when director Ian Chaney called me onstage to participate in the Q&A I figured I would be basically a stage prop with all of the questions directed to Chaney.  So as soon as I got on stage I wanted to get my two cents in right off the bat and thanked Chaney for creating a film that went beyond the food history and told "our story," i.e. of discrimination and abuse faced by the Chinese in America.  Imagine my surprise when some time later when the General Tso movie went into release, I came across an interview with Chaney where he described his nervousness at the start of the Q&A at TriBeCa, presumably because he didn't know what the audience reaction to his film might be, and he specifically recounted how my opening comment had put him at ease as it validated what he had done. This 30 second clip gives a flavor of what it was like.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-oh1_tDjo

KCET Asian Food and Culture Show.   In 2013 I appeared on a KCET special highlighting Asian foods and cultures along with Clarissa Wei.  It was kind of dumb in that it discussed Asian food in Los Angeles, but Asian culture in Asia as highlighted by excerpts from episodes of the Globetrekker TV series.  I was on the set (Lunasia Restaurant in Alhambra) for several hours for just a couple minutes of air time as described in this prior post, and lost my copy of the video when my TiVo crashed.  All I have is Clarissa's video of my Chinese restaurant list, and a shot of Clarissa's television showing the program.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qy_yajF1K0

 

 

Closing of Chinese Friends Restaurant in Los Angeles Chinatown.   Right before Chinese Friends Restaurant ended its 50 year run in 2022, I received a call from the Los Angeles Chinatown business group asking if I wanted to have one last meal there.  Little did I know that they were doing a video on the closure and asked me about the significance.  

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch0GKDujAvf/

Third party video based on Frank Shyong's Los Angeles Times profile of me.   As a celebrity diner I've gotten a far more detailed look at some very strange things on the internet that most people are not aware of.  One is this video which was inspired by the 2013 Los Angeles Times column one article about me.  It is a high quality, polished video which starts with a mention of the article, then throws in a movie clip of Ashton Kutcher ordering Chinese food, followed by a bunch of related and unrelated topics.  What the ....?  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7vumxs

Robot reading BBC article about visiting almost 8,000 restaurants.   If the previous video above wasn't the strangest one of the bunch, the YouTube video of a robot reading the BBC English language article about me certainly is.  Perhaps if the robot were sophisticated and could pick up the nuances of the English language this would make sense.  But it doesn't.  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x867nla

Followup Goldthread Video.   My subsequent appearance on the Goldthread show plugging Clarissa Wei's Goldthread documentary.  You have to skip to about the 31 minute mark to find me.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mOVc1Hrvho