Fujianese Style Food Returns To The San Gabriel Valley

So if you asked the typical person on the street in the United States what part of China or Asia produces the lion's share of Chinese restaurant ownership in the United States, very few people would correctly guess Fujian Province.  On the other hand, if you asked any person in California whether they had ever eaten Fujianese style food or at a Fujianese owned restaurant, 99 percent of the people would probably say no.  

As I originally wrote in Menuism a few years back, the Chinese American restaurant world is divided generally into halves--roughly west of the Mississippi River and east of the Mississippi River.  The reason is that in the past 35 years there has been a massive migration of people from Fujian province to Manhattan Chinatown who engage in the restaurant business.  And then these Fujianese migrate outwards from Manhattan Chinatown in all directions through a massive bus system, that permits the heavily undocumented Fujianese population to travel around the country, despite not having the identification to ride airlines or trains.  The extent of their travels roughly parallels the Mississippi River, since that's as far as a bus from Manhattan can get in a long day's drive.

With the Chinese restaurant industry being so mom and pop oriented, hard information on the workings of the Chinese restaurant was hard to come by, until one recent pivotal event.  That is when H F Foods Group, A Fujianese American food service company, filed an initial public offering to sell stock in their corporation.  H F Foods was the dominant Chinese restaurant supplier in the Southeast, and provided previously unknown information about what was going on, including the fact that Fujianese mom and pop Chinese restaurants constituted 80 percent of their customer base.   

So that explains why there is such Fujianese influence in the east, south and midwest, and virtually none in California, except for a longtime Fuzhou grocery store in Monterey Park.   Depending on who's in the kitchen, there might be one Fujian style restaurant in Los Angeles, Foo Chow in Chinatown, best been known for being a filming location for Jackie Chan's Rush Hour movies.   However a few months ago a new restaurant, Zhang Sheng Xian opened up in Rosemead, though at the time it was not evident that they were a Fujianese restaurant.  Rather, they had a wild assortment of dishes which had people suspecting that they were purveying specialty Taiwanese dishes.  Indeed their "characteristic bamboo tube rice" clearly screamed Aboriginal Taiwanese food to anyone who had visited the Aboriginal tourist haunts in Central Taiwan.  Plus the menu included several other Taiwanese dishes, along with Shanghai dishes which are popular with Taiwanese diners.

But, on the other hand...  There was a real puzzle here.  If it were a  Taiwanese restaurant, why would the menu use simplified Chinese characters as used on the mainland, rather than traditional characters used on Taiwan.  And there were at least a couple of Fujianese dishes on the menu, most conspicuously peanut butter noodles.  Oh and one commenter noted that that was a Eastern Guangzhou vibe to the place.  

So not knowing what was going on I returned recently with a Taiwanese friend.  Already the bamboo tube rice was gone, though apparently it really didn't provide a visible superior product to normal cooking to warrant a price premium. And my friend started talking with the staff, and he said they self-identified as a Fujianese restaurant.  But also noted that he felt a Guangzhou vibe too, so perhaps it's a western Fujianese restaurant.  In any event, the one and only in the San Gabriel Valley