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.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Thursday, February 14, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Apple Reports Greatest Earnings In The History Of The Tech World
Apple released its long anticipated 4th quarter earnings last evening. In
the words of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "No technology company has ever reported these
kinds of results". Everybody should have followed my blog advice last fall to buy Apple stock when the iPhone 5 came out, and you'd be rich by now. No wait, I didn't recommend
buying Apple stock at that time. And if you did buy Apple stock at the time you
would have lost your shirt and your pants, too. You see, Apple stock was $640 a share at the time,
and yes it did reach $700 per share for a brief time shortly thereafter. But
since then Apple stock has been falling like a rock, down today another 50 points to its present level
of $455.
As I stated before, you can't buy stock in a company merely because you
like the company, they make great products, and you think the company
will make a lot of money. The reason is that a company's stock needs to be
evaluated with reference to its current price valuation. How can you say Apple stock is a
good buy today if you don't know if the current price is 200, 700 or 1000? Yes, Apple
appeared to be on top of the world when the iPhone 5 came out and the stock was
$700, but that $700 value carried a market expectation of sales volume that
turned out to be overblown. Of course, at the time analysts were confidently predicting a quick rise to $1,000 a share. I wonder where those analysts are today.
On the flip side, I also mentioned that despite
the pounding that Facebook stock had taken down to $20 a share from its high of
$40 and its highly tarnished image, that it could possibly be a worthwhile buy at that
price. And while it did fall a couple of dollars lower, it has recovered nicely
to $31. So this proves again that you can't buy stocks in a vacuum.
Of course, maybe now it's time to buy Apple. But be wary of the old stock market saying "Never try to catch a falling knife."
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
The Best Chinese Probably Isn't In Chinatown (My Huffington Post Article)
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.
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.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The Biggest "Loser"--USC Football or Lakers Basketball?
It was just a few months ago when the Los Angeles Times wrote an article on how this was the golden era for sports in the city of Los Angeles. And the crowning jewels according to the article were the USC football team and the Los Angeles Lakers, both poised for championship seasons. And indeed, the assessment seemed perfectly logical. Yet moving forward just a few months, it is clear that we have two stunning episodes of underachievement, with each being more unbelievable than the other.
Certainly no one could quarrel with the preseason expectations for the USC Trojans. At the end of the 2011 season, the Trojans were playing as well as anybody in the country, though losses to Arizona State and Stanford eliminated them from national championship contention in 2011. Initially the prospects for equaling or bettering that record were not bright given that star quarterback Matt Barkley was NFL draft eligible and projected as a top 10 pick. But USC received an early Christmas present when Barkley stunned the football world by announcing he would return for the 2012 season to complete "unfinished business" which everybody understood to mean a national championship for USC and a Heisman Trophy for Barkley. With Barkley and 17 other returning starters, and a roster full of four and five star players out of high school, USC rocketed to the top of the 2012 national championship race.
Winning the Pac 12 south division was a foregone conclusion, USC being made a 1-6 favorite (i.e., the other five Pac 12 south schools were given a combined probability of winning the division of about 15 percent), and 2-5 favorites to win the Pac 12 championship itself. Armed with a preseason #1 ranking, the season itself seemed like a mere formality. USC did start of the season with six wins in their first seven games, good enough to still be in the national championship hunt past midseason. But there were strong hints from the very beginning that something might be amiss. Yes, they won their first game over Hawaii 49-10, but some observers already started to question if USC was that good given how poor of a team Hawaii was. A 42-29 win over Syracuse the next week added to the doubts, and the third week's 21-14 loss to a Stanford team which was eventually to have been shown to be playing the wrong quarterback at that time. But USC finished the season with five losses in its last six games, including an ignominious 21-7 loss to a Georgia Tech team that came into the game with a losing 6-7 record, setting the record for most losses in a season by a preseason #1 ranked squad.
Likewise, the Los Angeles Lakers were everybody's favorites to win the 2013 NBA championship. Las Vegas oddsmakers reported that money was being poured in buckets on the Lakers to win it all. 2012's decent Lakers team was fortified by the addition of Dwight Howard and Steve Nash, giving the Lakers not just an all star lineup, but a Hall of Fame one. Yes, the Miami Heat were formidable competition too, but it was going to be a two team race all the way.
While there were early signs of trouble, they were initially dismissed. Yes, the Lakers did lose all eight of their preseason games, but as everybody knows, preseason games whether in the NFL, NBA or MLB are fairly meaningless. Coach Mike Brown said he was playing not to win these exhibition games, but to get the players used to each other, a perfectly reasonable explanation. It wasn't until the Lakers started the regular season off 1-4 that the alarm bells went off. Nevertheless it was surprising that the Lakers fired Coach Brown at that time, and equally surprising that they did not hire Phil Jackson, who was ready to come out of retirement. Rather, they hired Mike D'Antoni instead, and while he has sort of turned the team around, they are still under .500 at this time. Indeed, things are so bad that the Los Angeles Times just carried an article indicating the unlikelihood of the Lakers even making the playoff this year.
Obviously there has been lots of speculation as to what went wrong for USC and the Lakers. USC's performance is more headscratching since their team was made up of veteran talent that had proved itself in the past. Most of the fingerpointing goes to Coach Lane Kiffin, whose hiring was highly criticized by many alumni, who appeared pacified after 2011's closing performance, but may have been right after all. Still there's no explanation why Matt Barkley seems to have regressed so much from 2011. The Laker problem seems a little more explainable, a combination of injuries, lack of defense, and poor chemistry, since two new key players have been added to the team. In any event, the experience of USC and the Lakers merely proves the old saying "That's why they play the games."
And interestingly, despite the tank jobs by USC football and the Lakers, the sports scene in Los Angeles isn't that gloomy. As thing turn out, the Los Angeles Clippers are playing as well as people had expected the Lakers to play, if not better. And while USC did not win the Pac 12 south football title, that honor did go to UCLA.
Certainly no one could quarrel with the preseason expectations for the USC Trojans. At the end of the 2011 season, the Trojans were playing as well as anybody in the country, though losses to Arizona State and Stanford eliminated them from national championship contention in 2011. Initially the prospects for equaling or bettering that record were not bright given that star quarterback Matt Barkley was NFL draft eligible and projected as a top 10 pick. But USC received an early Christmas present when Barkley stunned the football world by announcing he would return for the 2012 season to complete "unfinished business" which everybody understood to mean a national championship for USC and a Heisman Trophy for Barkley. With Barkley and 17 other returning starters, and a roster full of four and five star players out of high school, USC rocketed to the top of the 2012 national championship race.
Winning the Pac 12 south division was a foregone conclusion, USC being made a 1-6 favorite (i.e., the other five Pac 12 south schools were given a combined probability of winning the division of about 15 percent), and 2-5 favorites to win the Pac 12 championship itself. Armed with a preseason #1 ranking, the season itself seemed like a mere formality. USC did start of the season with six wins in their first seven games, good enough to still be in the national championship hunt past midseason. But there were strong hints from the very beginning that something might be amiss. Yes, they won their first game over Hawaii 49-10, but some observers already started to question if USC was that good given how poor of a team Hawaii was. A 42-29 win over Syracuse the next week added to the doubts, and the third week's 21-14 loss to a Stanford team which was eventually to have been shown to be playing the wrong quarterback at that time. But USC finished the season with five losses in its last six games, including an ignominious 21-7 loss to a Georgia Tech team that came into the game with a losing 6-7 record, setting the record for most losses in a season by a preseason #1 ranked squad.
Likewise, the Los Angeles Lakers were everybody's favorites to win the 2013 NBA championship. Las Vegas oddsmakers reported that money was being poured in buckets on the Lakers to win it all. 2012's decent Lakers team was fortified by the addition of Dwight Howard and Steve Nash, giving the Lakers not just an all star lineup, but a Hall of Fame one. Yes, the Miami Heat were formidable competition too, but it was going to be a two team race all the way.
While there were early signs of trouble, they were initially dismissed. Yes, the Lakers did lose all eight of their preseason games, but as everybody knows, preseason games whether in the NFL, NBA or MLB are fairly meaningless. Coach Mike Brown said he was playing not to win these exhibition games, but to get the players used to each other, a perfectly reasonable explanation. It wasn't until the Lakers started the regular season off 1-4 that the alarm bells went off. Nevertheless it was surprising that the Lakers fired Coach Brown at that time, and equally surprising that they did not hire Phil Jackson, who was ready to come out of retirement. Rather, they hired Mike D'Antoni instead, and while he has sort of turned the team around, they are still under .500 at this time. Indeed, things are so bad that the Los Angeles Times just carried an article indicating the unlikelihood of the Lakers even making the playoff this year.
Obviously there has been lots of speculation as to what went wrong for USC and the Lakers. USC's performance is more headscratching since their team was made up of veteran talent that had proved itself in the past. Most of the fingerpointing goes to Coach Lane Kiffin, whose hiring was highly criticized by many alumni, who appeared pacified after 2011's closing performance, but may have been right after all. Still there's no explanation why Matt Barkley seems to have regressed so much from 2011. The Laker problem seems a little more explainable, a combination of injuries, lack of defense, and poor chemistry, since two new key players have been added to the team. In any event, the experience of USC and the Lakers merely proves the old saying "That's why they play the games."
And interestingly, despite the tank jobs by USC football and the Lakers, the sports scene in Los Angeles isn't that gloomy. As thing turn out, the Los Angeles Clippers are playing as well as people had expected the Lakers to play, if not better. And while USC did not win the Pac 12 south football title, that honor did go to UCLA.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
When Chinatown Dominated the Los Angeles Chinese Food Scene
These days it's a very rare occasion for us to eat in Chinatown. The Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley is so much superior, and unless you're traveling during rush hour, it isn't that much further away. But there was a time when Chinatown was the place to go for Chinese food, and I don't just mean the time period before the Chinese started moving to the San Gabriel Valley. As I previously discussed, the first noticeable movement of Chinese residents into Monterey Park occurred in the early to mid-1960s. The Chinese population in the Los Angeles area began to swell in the late 1960s as the change in U.S. immigration policies took effect. Yet, it wasn't until the mid to late 1980s that the San Gabriel Valley overtook Chinatown as the preferred locale for Chinese food.
As discussed before, the first traces of Hong Kong style Chinese food landed in Los Angeles Chinatown in the 1960s, shortly after the new Chinese immigrants started to arrive from Hong Kong. In contrast, my recollection is that modern authentic Chinese food did not come to the San Gabriel Valley until the 1976 opening of Kin Kwok on Garvey Ave. in Monterey Park. Other notable San Gabriel Valley openings in the late 1970s included Nam Tin, in Monterey Park, probably the first banquet sized restaurant to open, and House of Louie, also in Monterey Park.
Meanwhile, things were hopping in Chinatown. 1979 marked a significant step forward with the opening of the Food Center, the street to street, all food mall that opened between North Broadway and Hill St. Patterned after "Sihk Gaai" in Hong Kong, the Food Center was stuffed top to bottom, end to end with new restaurants offering the best Chinese food in the metropolitan area. And these weren't Hong Kong Low or Lime House restaurants. These were brand new restaurants, with the large anchor spaces taken by Szechwan Palace and Great Shanghai, pioneering restaurants for their genre in Los Angeles.
This is not to say that the San Gabriel Valley wasn't evolving. The first Hong Kong style seafood restaurants opened up around 1980. Sea Palace, which opened up in Monterey Park in 1980 may have been the first in the San Gabriel Valley. Other Hong Kong style seafood restaurants followed in Monterey Park, such as Sea Dragon, Champagne Restaurant and Fortuna Seafood. But these were matched in Chinatown's Food Center by Hong Kong Jade Garden and Manning Seafood, later followed by Diamond Seafood, and Regent Seafood on Main St.
But it was Chinatown which brought us the first superior Hong Kong style seafood restaurant in 1984 with the opening of A B C Seafood. Replacing the venerable but boring Lime House, this was the first knock your socks off Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. This was the quality of Chinese restaurant that Angelenos used to drive to San Francisco to find, or even fly to New York City, only better. For more than a decade, Chinatown's ABC Seafood would represent the best Chinese food in Los Angeles, if not the entire United States. And in the ultimate ascendancy of Los Angeles to claim the title of having best Chinese food in the U.S., the opening of A B C Seafood was the initial round.
Ironically, the success of A B C Seafood in Chinatown also ultimately led to the San Gabriel Valley eclipsing Chinatown as the locus of Chinese food in the Los Angeles area. A B C Seafood was a rollicking success but its fewer than 30 table capacity limited its potential Consequently, a sister restaurant christened N B C Seafood opened up in palatial sized premises in Monterey Park just two years later in 1986 in the space formerly occupied by the Golden Shark buffet, likely providing the tipping point for the San Gabriel Valley to become the premiere Chinese dining area in Los Angeles. This was followed by the opening in the late 1980s of several shopping centers housing dozens of Chinese restaurants on Valley Blvd. in San Gabriel, including large numbers of non-Cantonese style restaurants, which would turn the city of San Gabriel into the epicenter of Chinese food (amazingly until around 1983 there were no authentic Chinese restaurants in the city of San Gabriel); the opening of the first large Chinese mega shopping center in Rowland Heights in 1990, setting the eastern San Gabriel Valley up as a major player in the world of SGV Chinese food; the opening of Ocean Star Seafood in 1992 amidst unbelievable hype as the ultimate Hong Kong style food palace; the mid-1990s ascent of the SGV as the locus of the best Chinese food in the US, as Angelenos completely stopped driving to the Bay Area on weekends to get better Chinese food, and Bay Area eaters started coming down here to get their Chinese food fix; and the 2002 opening of Vancouver's Sea Harbour restaurant in Rosemead, marking the start of high level Chinese dining and widening the gap between Los Angeles area Chinese food and the rest of the country.
As discussed before, the first traces of Hong Kong style Chinese food landed in Los Angeles Chinatown in the 1960s, shortly after the new Chinese immigrants started to arrive from Hong Kong. In contrast, my recollection is that modern authentic Chinese food did not come to the San Gabriel Valley until the 1976 opening of Kin Kwok on Garvey Ave. in Monterey Park. Other notable San Gabriel Valley openings in the late 1970s included Nam Tin, in Monterey Park, probably the first banquet sized restaurant to open, and House of Louie, also in Monterey Park.
Meanwhile, things were hopping in Chinatown. 1979 marked a significant step forward with the opening of the Food Center, the street to street, all food mall that opened between North Broadway and Hill St. Patterned after "Sihk Gaai" in Hong Kong, the Food Center was stuffed top to bottom, end to end with new restaurants offering the best Chinese food in the metropolitan area. And these weren't Hong Kong Low or Lime House restaurants. These were brand new restaurants, with the large anchor spaces taken by Szechwan Palace and Great Shanghai, pioneering restaurants for their genre in Los Angeles.
This is not to say that the San Gabriel Valley wasn't evolving. The first Hong Kong style seafood restaurants opened up around 1980. Sea Palace, which opened up in Monterey Park in 1980 may have been the first in the San Gabriel Valley. Other Hong Kong style seafood restaurants followed in Monterey Park, such as Sea Dragon, Champagne Restaurant and Fortuna Seafood. But these were matched in Chinatown's Food Center by Hong Kong Jade Garden and Manning Seafood, later followed by Diamond Seafood, and Regent Seafood on Main St.
But it was Chinatown which brought us the first superior Hong Kong style seafood restaurant in 1984 with the opening of A B C Seafood. Replacing the venerable but boring Lime House, this was the first knock your socks off Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. This was the quality of Chinese restaurant that Angelenos used to drive to San Francisco to find, or even fly to New York City, only better. For more than a decade, Chinatown's ABC Seafood would represent the best Chinese food in Los Angeles, if not the entire United States. And in the ultimate ascendancy of Los Angeles to claim the title of having best Chinese food in the U.S., the opening of A B C Seafood was the initial round.
Ironically, the success of A B C Seafood in Chinatown also ultimately led to the San Gabriel Valley eclipsing Chinatown as the locus of Chinese food in the Los Angeles area. A B C Seafood was a rollicking success but its fewer than 30 table capacity limited its potential Consequently, a sister restaurant christened N B C Seafood opened up in palatial sized premises in Monterey Park just two years later in 1986 in the space formerly occupied by the Golden Shark buffet, likely providing the tipping point for the San Gabriel Valley to become the premiere Chinese dining area in Los Angeles. This was followed by the opening in the late 1980s of several shopping centers housing dozens of Chinese restaurants on Valley Blvd. in San Gabriel, including large numbers of non-Cantonese style restaurants, which would turn the city of San Gabriel into the epicenter of Chinese food (amazingly until around 1983 there were no authentic Chinese restaurants in the city of San Gabriel); the opening of the first large Chinese mega shopping center in Rowland Heights in 1990, setting the eastern San Gabriel Valley up as a major player in the world of SGV Chinese food; the opening of Ocean Star Seafood in 1992 amidst unbelievable hype as the ultimate Hong Kong style food palace; the mid-1990s ascent of the SGV as the locus of the best Chinese food in the US, as Angelenos completely stopped driving to the Bay Area on weekends to get better Chinese food, and Bay Area eaters started coming down here to get their Chinese food fix; and the 2002 opening of Vancouver's Sea Harbour restaurant in Rosemead, marking the start of high level Chinese dining and widening the gap between Los Angeles area Chinese food and the rest of the country.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Why Aren't There Great Chinese Restaurants In New York (Reprint of My Menuism Article)
I was commissioned recently to write an article detailing my choices for the 10 Best Chinese Restaurants in the United States, when I quickly realized I had a problem. No, it wasn’t that I felt unqualified to draft such a list, since I have eaten at thousands of Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco, hundreds of Chinese restaurants in New York City, and a representative sampling of the best Chinese restaurants in Chicago, Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Honolulu, Dallas, and any other city having a decent sized Chinese community. The problem was that when I compiled my list, all 10 restaurants were in California — seven in Los Angeles and three in San Francisco, which didn’t look like the national list it was supposed to be. The article ran anyway, with the editor spinning the title to ask if all of the best Chinese restaurants were in California.
The response was immediate: Californians, particularly those who were familiar with New York Chinese food, in complete agreement, while many New Yorkers gave me the Bronx cheer and accused me of being biased towards my hometown food. That accusation is easily refuted by the fact that if I were to do a 10 Best list for Chinese food in North America, all my choices would come from Canada, either Vancouver or Toronto, and none would come from California. Note that many New Yorkers who had actually eaten the Chinese food in Los Angeles and San Francisco agree on California’s superiority, with most New York naysayers admitting they had not eaten in the San Gabriel Valley in suburban Los Angeles, home to the best Chinese food in California (and the country). A prominent food blogger for one of New York City’s newspapers referred to New York Chinese food as “crappy” compared to Los Angeles. So I believe the premise that New York clearly trails Los Angeles and San Francisco in the quality of Chinese food is a reasonable one.
So what is the reason for this gulf between California and New York Chinese food? After all, New York Chinese food did surpass San Francisco as America’s Chinese food mecca back in the mid-1980s, while we in Los Angeles would actually talk about specific Chinese restaurants we would like to try in New York. And the Chinese population in the New York area is comparable to, if not larger than, the Chinese populations in Los Angeles or San Francisco, so community size doesn’t seem to be the difference.
The real reason for the chasm between New York and California Chinese food is demographics. I have often said that New York Chinese food is stuck in the 1990s. Make no mistake — 1990s Chinese food was very good and there are many, many very good Chinese restaurants today in Flushing, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. But Chinese food has evolved significantly in the past decade and that evolution has largely bypassed New York. One major demographic difference can be seen in comparing the Chinese populations in New York and Los Angeles. As first brought to my attention in a Business Week article two decades ago and reinforced by a book and New York Times articles written by Jennifer 8 Lee, Chinese immigration to New York for over two decades has in large part originated from Fujian province. The Fujianese are largely working-class people, and many of them are undocumented. Check out Manhattan’s Chinatown, particularly the portion off East Broadway, and you can see this densely packed area is largely minimum wage territory. Obviously, the entire New York Chinese community isn’t working-class, but there is a heavier weighting in that direction.
In contrast, the Chinese population in Los Angeles skews more to the upper-middle class. Not to say there aren’t working class Chinese here, and indeed there are plenty. But there hasn’t been the large working-class immigration from China to California like there has been in New York. (There are virtually no Fujianese immigrants here). Rather, for over 30 years the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles has been marketed in Asia as the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Wealthy Chinese investors would buy houses in the San Gabriel Valley and send their families to reside while themselves continuing to live abroad. Meanwhile, a heavily professional technical upper-middle class Chinese community has spread across the San Gabriel Valley. Indeed the economic strength of the Chinese community is shown by the fact that there has been little residential real estate price erosion here during the great recession, and prices in the most expensive San Gabriel Valley city of San Marino are at historic highs. This is a community that demands and can afford the best Chinese food.
Furthermore, the San Gabriel Valley has spawned what the press has dubbed the “626 Generation”, referring to the San Gabriel Valley’s telephone area code. These are the upper-middle class twenty- and thirtysomething Asians who have developed a food-centric culture. For this generation weaned on the Food Network, good eating is king. They dine out a dozen or more times a week in local Chinese restaurants, and then head to the local boba shop for drinks and dessert.
One other demographic factor distinguishes California Chinese food from New York. If one takes what are often considered to be the best Chinese food centers in North America — Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco — and compares them to New York, there is one stark reality. The Chinese food in all four of these cities has a heavy Hong Kong influence, while New York does not. Chinese food continues to evolve and improve, and a major hotbed of this evolution is Hong Kong. While eating in Hong Kong knocks the pants off any Chinese food on this continent, there is enough of a presence to continually raise the bar in these Canadian and California Chinese communities.
The response was immediate: Californians, particularly those who were familiar with New York Chinese food, in complete agreement, while many New Yorkers gave me the Bronx cheer and accused me of being biased towards my hometown food. That accusation is easily refuted by the fact that if I were to do a 10 Best list for Chinese food in North America, all my choices would come from Canada, either Vancouver or Toronto, and none would come from California. Note that many New Yorkers who had actually eaten the Chinese food in Los Angeles and San Francisco agree on California’s superiority, with most New York naysayers admitting they had not eaten in the San Gabriel Valley in suburban Los Angeles, home to the best Chinese food in California (and the country). A prominent food blogger for one of New York City’s newspapers referred to New York Chinese food as “crappy” compared to Los Angeles. So I believe the premise that New York clearly trails Los Angeles and San Francisco in the quality of Chinese food is a reasonable one.
So what is the reason for this gulf between California and New York Chinese food? After all, New York Chinese food did surpass San Francisco as America’s Chinese food mecca back in the mid-1980s, while we in Los Angeles would actually talk about specific Chinese restaurants we would like to try in New York. And the Chinese population in the New York area is comparable to, if not larger than, the Chinese populations in Los Angeles or San Francisco, so community size doesn’t seem to be the difference.
The real reason for the chasm between New York and California Chinese food is demographics. I have often said that New York Chinese food is stuck in the 1990s. Make no mistake — 1990s Chinese food was very good and there are many, many very good Chinese restaurants today in Flushing, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. But Chinese food has evolved significantly in the past decade and that evolution has largely bypassed New York. One major demographic difference can be seen in comparing the Chinese populations in New York and Los Angeles. As first brought to my attention in a Business Week article two decades ago and reinforced by a book and New York Times articles written by Jennifer 8 Lee, Chinese immigration to New York for over two decades has in large part originated from Fujian province. The Fujianese are largely working-class people, and many of them are undocumented. Check out Manhattan’s Chinatown, particularly the portion off East Broadway, and you can see this densely packed area is largely minimum wage territory. Obviously, the entire New York Chinese community isn’t working-class, but there is a heavier weighting in that direction.
In contrast, the Chinese population in Los Angeles skews more to the upper-middle class. Not to say there aren’t working class Chinese here, and indeed there are plenty. But there hasn’t been the large working-class immigration from China to California like there has been in New York. (There are virtually no Fujianese immigrants here). Rather, for over 30 years the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles has been marketed in Asia as the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” Wealthy Chinese investors would buy houses in the San Gabriel Valley and send their families to reside while themselves continuing to live abroad. Meanwhile, a heavily professional technical upper-middle class Chinese community has spread across the San Gabriel Valley. Indeed the economic strength of the Chinese community is shown by the fact that there has been little residential real estate price erosion here during the great recession, and prices in the most expensive San Gabriel Valley city of San Marino are at historic highs. This is a community that demands and can afford the best Chinese food.
Furthermore, the San Gabriel Valley has spawned what the press has dubbed the “626 Generation”, referring to the San Gabriel Valley’s telephone area code. These are the upper-middle class twenty- and thirtysomething Asians who have developed a food-centric culture. For this generation weaned on the Food Network, good eating is king. They dine out a dozen or more times a week in local Chinese restaurants, and then head to the local boba shop for drinks and dessert.
One other demographic factor distinguishes California Chinese food from New York. If one takes what are often considered to be the best Chinese food centers in North America — Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco — and compares them to New York, there is one stark reality. The Chinese food in all four of these cities has a heavy Hong Kong influence, while New York does not. Chinese food continues to evolve and improve, and a major hotbed of this evolution is Hong Kong. While eating in Hong Kong knocks the pants off any Chinese food on this continent, there is enough of a presence to continually raise the bar in these Canadian and California Chinese communities.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)