In perusing the various food message boards, a recurring request
which makes me a little sad is the one from first time visitors to
places like San Francisco, Manhattan or Toronto asking for
recommendations for a great Chinese meal in Chinatown. I get sad
because in most North American cities having a historic core Chinatown,
the best Chinese food tends not to be in Chinatown, but in outlying
areas where tourists are unlikely to visit. And indeed, in most of
these Chinatowns the Chinese food pales greatly in comparison to the
suburban food. As a result, Chinatown is often not the place to find
that great meal.
Now one might wonder why, as a rule, Chinatown Chinese food is inferior
to suburban food. Initially, we need to categorize Chinatowns into two
groups. First are the historic core city Chinatowns, founded in the
19th and early 20th century, located in or near the downtown area of a
major city. These would include still existing Chinatowns in places
like Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Oakland, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Seattle,
Portland, and in Canada, Vancouver and Toronto. The term also refers to
now extinct Chinatowns like in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Denver, Sacramento,
San Diego, Fresno, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Jose, Detroit, Cleveland
and many other smaller cities in the West.
Then there are the more modern, non-tourist "Chinatowns" that
developed in the late 20th century, which might not be much more than a
commercial area that started out as a Chinese shopping center and
surrounding businesses, such as in Richardson (Dallas), Texas, North
Miami Beach, Chamblee (Atlanta), Georgia or Las Vegas, or on the other
hand, may be a full-fledged Chinese community, such as Flushing, New
York.
Having made this distinction, we may now categorically say that if a
metropolitan area has a historic core Chinatown, and in addition has a
major suburban Chinese community, you're better off not going to
Chinatown in search of memorable Chinese cuisine. But why is this the
case? In large part it goes back to the fact discussed in my previous
Menuism piece on
Americanized Chinese food:
that the first century of Chinese immigration to America was almost
exclusively from the rural Toishan area of China outside of Canton.
Consequently, every historic American core city Chinatown was founded
by Toishanese migrants and initially featured the Cantonese-style food
of this rural immigrant group. As the prior article noted, the food
that the Toishanese brought to America was not the best food to begin
with. Then, as the 20th century wore on, historic core Chinatowns
became tourist attractions, necessitating the alteration of Chinese
food served in Chinatown to suit tourist tastes. Indeed, many Chinatown
restaurants totally catered to non-Chinese patrons, and such
restaurants exist to this day.
Then came the event that changed the face of Chinese food in
America: the loosening of immigration laws which now permitted
immigration of Chinese into the United States (and Canada) from Asia,
after decades of prohibition. The change in immigration laws was
especially propitious since the surviving Chinatowns were in serious
decline. Indeed, Los Angeles Chinatown of 1965 was exclusively a
tourist trap, with only a handful of Chinese residents actually living
in the immediate area, as both storekeepers and workers would pack up
and leave the neighborhood after business hours.
The new wave of immigration invigorated Chinatown with fresh blood,
with the first wave being largely from Hong Kong. For these urban
immigrants, the existing Chinatowns were nevertheless a logical initial
stopping off point due to sufficient similarities with the existing
Toishanese culture. Also racial residential segregation, while in the
process of fading away, still affected housing choices for the initial
wave of new immigrants to the United States. With Chinatown reshaped by
new residents, obviously the food also changed with the introduction of
the more modern Hong Kong-style Cantonese cuisine. Chinatown, though,
continued to be burdened with its status as a tourist attraction so
Americanized tourist food also continued to thrive there.
The Hong Kong immigrants were later followed by Chinese immigrants
from other locales, first from Taiwan, then Chinese mainlanders (a term
often used to describe non-Cantonese, non-Taiwanese Chinese from
China), and ethnic Chinese from other Asian countries. But a funny
thing happened when these later immigrants came to the United States.
For the most part they bypassed Chinatown, and settled elsewhere, for
two main reasons. First, residential segregation subsided and new
housing alternatives were available to these newcomers, many of whom
were persons of means. Secondly, these later immigrants, even those
from Hong Kong, had relatively little in common with the working class
Cantonese-influenced Chinatowns. Consequently, to this very day, all of
the historic core Chinatowns remain decidedly Cantonese in flavor, with
a healthy dose of food dumbed down for tourists.
So if you go to Los Angeles Chinatown today, you will find that of the
dozens of Chinese restaurants, there are only a handful that are not
Cantonese, none of which would be classified as "authentic." Likewise,
in San Francisco Chinatown with well over a hundred Chinese
restaurants, a similar survey also yields mostly Cantonese restaurants,
though there is
one authentic Shanghai-style restaurant
and a couple of authentic Sichuan style eateries in that Chinatown. New
York's Chinatown is more diverse due to different recent immigration
patterns, but the Cantonese influence remains heavy and the general
caution about Chinatown dining applies here, too.
Meanwhile, the wealthier and non-Cantonese Chinese immigrants were
setting up shop in communities like Monterey Park, California,
Flushing, New York, Rockville, Maryland, the Sunset District of San
Francisco, Richmond, British Columbia, and Scarborough, Ontario, far
away from the core Chinatown. As things have evolved, innovations and
new styles of Chinese cuisine are found here, not in Chinatown. So
places like these are the real destinations for those in search of a
great Chinese meal.
But not every core Chinatown city has an equivalent Chinese
community outside the central core. Consequently, in cities like
Chicago, Philadelphia, and to a lesser extent, Boston, Chinatown may
still be the place to go for that Chinese meal you have been looking
for. And in cities which never had (or lost) an historic core,
tourist-attracting Chinatown, such as Las Vegas, Denver, Houston,
Austin, Dallas and Miami, the areas which are now sometimes referred to
as "Chinatown" would indeed be a good bet. But otherwise, think twice
about where you want to go for that great Chinese meal.
