Chinese Food at USC--Filling In The Blanks

 

Years ago I wrote a number of articles in various publications on how since around 2010, college and university campuses in the United States had become hotbeds of authentic Chinese food, due to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of students from Mainland China.  College towns whose only experience with Chinese food consisted of chop suey, egg drop soup, and moo goo gai pan were suddenly hosting significant number of Chinese students, many from the interior Mainland, even bringing Chinese dishes to local restaurants not to be found in Los Angeles Chinatown.

Amid this new wave of Chinese food in the United States, there was one anomaly, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  USC had the second greatest concentration of Mainland Chinese students in the United States, yet in the adjacent commercial areas to campus, there were no authentic Chinese restaurants to be found.  The best explanation for this strange dichotomy was that there were already enough Chinese restaurants in the general Los Angeles area, so no restaurants dedicated to this audience were needed.  Indeed Los Angeles being the undisputed leader for Chinese food in the entire United States, and particularly the regional foods that would appeal to the mainland Chinese student body at USC, existing restaurants were sufficient to serve the needs of the Mainlanders even though the restaurants were not proximate to campus.

But still, not every Chinese student could find their way to the San Gabriel Valley for every meal, and Mainland Chinese students are unlikely to become attached to the local American cuisine as most of them will be headed back to back to China after they complete their USC studies.  It took a while for me to fill in the blanks, and I partially did in my articles from the 2017-2018 era, discovering the existence of Chinese food trucks based in the San Gabriel Valley parked outside of campus, mostly on Jefferson Bl., west of McClintock, with names like Tasty Wok Express and Fluffy Tacos (the latter obviously a former taco truck bought by a Chinese operator who didn't bother to repaint the truck). 

 

 

I also found that food delivery services like 626ToGo would deliver meals from name brand San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants to anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area  for a delivery fee of about $1 mile, a pittance to the wealthier segment of the Mainland Chinese student community, or groups of students who pooled their orders.

Subsequent to the articles I wrote, a number of real Chinese eateries did open up near campus, such as Northern Cafe, Qin West, some boba parlors and more recently in the new USC Village, Street Food.  This may have something to do with the subsequent disappearance of the food trucks on Jefferson, after USC Village opened up, though the Tasty Wok Express truck has recently returned to a new spot on Jefferson Blvd.  

 

I also learned that certain restaurants in Koreatown attracted USC Chinese students, most likely appealing to Northeast Chinese students whose homes were near the Korean border, and hence shared a commonality of food style. A few Koreatown restaurants, such as Pixiu Mala Hong Tong, serve Sichuan style mala soup pots and dry pots, so I'm fairly certain these are some of the USC student destinations. 

 

 

I also heard that the since shuttered Lao Sze Chuan in Glendale was a magnet for USC Chinese students.  And I still haven't figured out why no restaurant appealing to USC students ever opened up in Los Angeles Chinatown, which still has only a slight representation of non-Cantonese Mainland food.  

The one thing I am just hearing about now, however, is that a large provider of Chinese food back when I wrote my articles was through the type of WeChat groups that I later wrote about that launched a service called Yunbanbao, that brought Chinese food to Wall Street in Manhattan.  At that time there was a service called Chef Town which solicited bulk orders from USC students who wanted name brand San Gabriel Valley Chinese food.  Assuming Chef Town operated like Yunbanbao does now, the students would sign up the previous day to have their food delivered at a particular drop off time and location on or near campus. This would result in lines of Chinese students queuing up in random places to pick up their orders from unmarked delivery vehicles, to the puzzlement of observers who didn’t know what was going on.

 

With so many Mainland Chinese students on the USC campus, there had to be a way for them to get their Chinese food fix.  Unlike most other college campuses nationally, where restaurants opened up near campus, the answer here was much more complicated and largely under the radar.