Eastern US College Town Style Chinese Dining Comes To West Los Angeles

Many of you have read my articles discussing how the massive number of Mainland Chinese students coming to study at US colleges in the past decade has changed the face of Chinese dining in the United States.   Cities big and small proximate to colleges and universities with a sufficient Chinese student enrollment have been introduced to authentic Chinese food, as restaurants have popped up to meet this demand for Chinese food.

Interestingly, Chinese restaurants serving these Mainland Chinese students in smaller US towns such as Harrisonburg, VA, Storrs, CT and Iowa City, IA have developed their own style which you typically do not see in non-campus town Chinese restaurants.    There are two separate distinguishing characteristics that mark these restaurants.  Because the Mainland students come from different areas of China, these restaurants often serve multi-regional Chinese food, as opposed to focusing on, say, Sichuan or Shaanxi style food.  Secondly, none of these restaurants can (or wants to) survive on Mainland student business alone, so they also have classic Americanized Chinese dishes on their menu for the locals and non-Chinese students.  As I previously wrote, this can lead to a menu which gives a panoramic view of the entirety of the history of Chinese American dining.

While not as pronounced as some of the examples in eastern college towns, the newly opened iFood Chinese in the shopping center on the southeast corner of National Blvd. and Sepulveda Blvd. in West Los Angeles is the best example I've seen locally.  For fans of classic Chinese American favorites, there is orange chicken, wor wonton soup, broccoli beef and honey walnut shrimp.  For the health minded Westside locals watching their cholesterol count, there are chicken potstickers and chicken xioalongbao (try to find either of those in the San Gabriel Valley).  For Sichuanese natives there are nine varieties of dry pots.  Taiwanese can revel in fried pork chops and Taiwanese style salt and pepper shrimp, and for the Shanghai crowd there's giant ground pork meatballs.   And for us Cantonese there's West Lake Beef soup and cold chicken with green onion.  What a lineup!

iFood Chinese is located at 3120 S. Sepulveda Blvd., right next to Von's.

Stumbling Across Chinese Food In Dubai and India

As previously noted, being able to sample any kind of Chinese food while part of a tour group is an iffy proposition as you are largely restricted to eating at the stops provided by the tour organizer.  In this regard, because our trip to Dubai and India was organized by the Chinese operated Ritz Tours, out of the San Gabriel Valley, I was hoping there would be some Chinese food choices, given tour packagers in China and in Chinese-American communities often provided mostly Chinese meals even in tours to non-Asian destinations.  However, while I could imagine Chinese meals in tour destinations such as Europe, I doubted that Chinese meals would be provided for Dubai and India, and my inquiry to the tour company confirmed that there were no Chinese meals scheduled.

We actually arrived in Dubai two days before our main tour so we could stop by the adjacent Emirate of Abu Dhabi on a local tour.  At lunch time we were taken to buffet lunch at Al Asalah Heritage Restaurant.  They had a nice selection of dishes there, including something like beefy mashed potatoes, chicken, fish, beef, beans, Indian dishes, and interestingly, chow mein and basmati fried rice.  I thought the presence of chow mein was an interesting demonstration of the universality of that dish.  After we returned to Dubai in the evening,  I decided to read about the Abu Dhabi buffet restaurant  on the internet, and to my surprise it was classified as a Chinese-Lebanese-Indian restaurant!  That explains the chow mein at the buffet table and perhaps shows the universality not of chow mein, but of Chinese operated buffets in non-Chinese guise.

The next day was a free day for us in Dubai so we headed to the Mall of the Emirates, one of the two great shopping malls in Dubai.   This visit was very illuminating as to the state of Chinese food in this part of the world.  At Chow King  I had the chicken siu mai, a rarely encountered dish in the United States, where siu mai is almost exclusively made with pork.  Also it was interesting that "Chinese fried chicken" had a different meaning in this part of the world, too.

 But the status of Chinese food really gained perspective when I passed the Dubai branch of Din Tai Fung and took a look at their menu.   All of your favorite porky items, like xiao long bao, wonton, dumplings, shu mai, and potstickers were all made with chicken instead.  With chicken, and a lesser extent turkey, used to substitute for pork in both Chinese and non-Chinese foods, I could do very well eating in a Muslim society.  (As a sidelight, not only was Din Tai Fung represented in Dubai, but Hakkasan also has a branch, though in a fancy hotel, so topflight authentic Chinese food is well represented in Dubai.)

The first true clue that there would not be a Chinese food drought on the tour came on the first day of our official tour.  At the fabulous Atlantis The Palm resort, the Kalidescope $50 lunch buffet contained a whole selection of Chinese food.   Again, most fascinating to me was all of the chicken based items that we normally don't see in the United States.  Topping the list was the bbq chicken bao--a bao identical to the steamed bbq pork buns we get back home, but with chicken substituted for pork.  Other items included regular chicken buns, chicken xiaolongbao, and chicken siu mai.

After our relatively short stay in Dubai it was on to India and our first stop of Delhi.  When we went downstairs for our first buffet breakfast at the J. W. Marriott, it was clear that this hotel did a fair amount of trade with Chinese guests, as there was an entire section of Chinese food including cook to order noodle soup (including fish balls and chicken balls), gai bao, chicken siu mai, garlic chili chow mein, and other dishes.    Dinner at the hotel restaurant had even more Chinese items than at breakfast, including  roast duck, pork and chicken, sweet and sour water buffalo (below), and oyster sauce lamb.

And for those of you wondering what water buffalo tastes like, well it's just like .... beef.

The hotel meals in Agra and Jaipur did include a few Chinese selections (including candied wintermelon in Agra), but nothing like the ones noted above.  The Marriott in Jaipur had a token nod to Chinese guests, Chinese noodle soup at breakfast and dinner, and strangely, something called moo goo gai at dinner.  However Moo goo gai was nothing like the similarly named ancient Chinese-American dish of sliced chicken in a white sauce, but rather as you can see below, was chunks of chicken in a savory sauce.

We did have one last shot a Chinese meal when we returned to Delhi for the flight home, as the tour guide took us to Lazeez Affaire, a combination Indian and Chinese restaurant.  However, the menu they gave us had no Chinese items on it so we just ordered Indian food.  However later looking at the Chinese menu it’s just as well as we didn’t order from that menu, which included such dishes as chop suey, pad Thai, sushi and tom yum soup, and which also entailed an excessive length of time to cook.  

Fake Canto Food Comes To Los Angeles Chinatown

For the first century of Chinese presence in the  United States, most all Chinese residents in America were Cantonese in origin (and of this group, predominantly from the rural counties in Toishan).  As a result, all Chinese food in America during this time period was Cantonese/Toishanese.  However, the big news in the 21st century has been the impact of Mandarin speaking Chinese immigrants to the United States, almost completely flipping the Cantonese/non-Cantonese mix of Chinese food in Chinese American communities. 

Indeed, the demographic disparity has gotten so out of line that the 21st century has seen the rise of what is now sometimes referred to as the "fake Canto" restaurant, a term coined by food blogger Tony Chen.  Fake Canto restaurants are those opened up in Chinese communities by Mandarin speaking non-Cantonese immigrants from mainland China.  Well before the advent of fake news, these fake Canto restaurants were opening up, occasioned by the lack of sufficient real Cantonese restaurateurs in the particular locality.

Fake Canto restaurants originally arose in the eastern United States in Chinese communities where there were few, if any local Cantonese restauranteurs available to satisfy the local demand for dim sum and Cantonese banquet facilities.  These included communities that never had a Chinese community, prior to the 1960s reform of the US immigration laws, such as Atlanta, Dallas and Orlando, or communities where the Cantonese community had all but died out, such as St. Louis.  

The fake Canto phenomenon had initially been limited to the East, Midwest and South, where Fujianese immigrants have dominated the Chinese restaurant industry since the 1990s.  However, fake Canto has now taken a new step forward, now showing up in localities that do have an existing Cantonese presence, such as Manhattan Chinatown.  

Now comes clearly the most startling episode of fake Canto restaurants where in December of 2017, East Garden restaurant opened up in Los Angeles Chinatown.  This is truly startling since Los Angeles Chinatown is the culinarily the last greatest bastion of Cantonese food in the country.  While most every new Chinese restaurant in the nearby San Gabriel Valley serves Mainland non-Cantonese food, there is only one such restaurant in Los Angeles Chinatown, Qin West.   So with Los Angeles Chinatown so top-heavy with Cantonese food, why would anyone open up a fake Canto restaurant?  Another Mainland Chinese restaurant would make more sense in Los Angeles Chinatown, particularly with the nearby pool of Mainland Chinese students attending USC.  Yet, fake Canto has come to Los Angeles Chinatown.

Fake Canto, does not necessarily imply a lesser quality product.  The food at East Garden is pretty decent. 

The egg tofu with mushrooms was one of the best versions I’ve eaten.

The honey garlic short ribs, a variation of a dish more associated with pork chops, was also quite good.

But a major tipoff that we were talking fake Canto was the appearance of pork rolls, a dish never seen on Cantonese menus, and most commonly seen in Taiwanese restaurants described as chicken rolls.

Besides this and other non-Cantonese items on the menu, East Garden’s fake Canto giveaway is that the staff only speaks Mandarin.  Another clue was that the beef chow fun was cooked spicy, and had no “wok hei” to the flavor.  And in the company’s logo, the Chinese name uses the Mainland simplified characters, not the traditional characters.

East Garden is in Chunsan Plaza, downstairs from Ocean Seafood.

 

Blame Housing Discrimination, Or Why I Don't Remember The Los Angeles Snowstorm of 1962

Since I'm in Dubai and missing the current major LA rainstorm and mudslides, It's probably appropriate to mention other weather events that I either missed or forgot.  Back  2003 there was the freak hailstorm in South Los Angeles caused by an almost unprecedented stationary storm that led to a foot of hail on the ground in some places, which was erroneously described by many as snow at the time.  Unfortunately I was in Dallas at the time and missed the event, though I did save the Dallas newspaper describing that event.  Then there was the actual snow in Los Angeles in 1962 which is a complete blank in my mind.

A couple of years ago the KCET website ran a piece on the few recorded instances of snowfall in Los Angeles.  My son asked me if I remembered the most recent episode listed, which was in early 1962 when I was 13 years old.   I had always thought 1949, when I was an infant, was the last time snow fell in Los Angeles and was shocked to read that it snowed in the San Fernando Valley in 1962.   I was puzzled by my lack of any memory of this event, particularly since I always had an interest in weather.  For example I remember 6 consecutive days of rain in 1962, and being evacuated  from our neighborhood in the Crenshaw district because of flooding in 1954 or 1955.  (Not everybody in Los Angeles had storm sewers back then.)   And as a second grader I kept a daily diary which included the temperature for the day.

On reflection, my lack of recollection of the 1962 snow was due to the fact my geographic world was so small back then.  Yes, in the 50s my dad would take us on Sunday afternoon rides to outlying places like Zuma Beach, Newport Beach, Anaheim or El Monte. But those were like mini-vacations to distant places for us since we never took real vacations as he worked so hard, 6½ days a week every week.   The rest of the time we stayed within a relatively narrow swath in central Los Angeles, from the Crenshaw district in the west to downtown Los Angeles where my dad worked, to El Sereno where some family friends lived.

The reason why  we were so confined is that for Chinese-Americans, Los Angeles was still semi-segregated housing wise in the 1950s and into the 1960s.  Most Chinese Americans of that era lived in Central, South or East Los Angeles, and all our friends and relatives lived there.  Yes, there were Chinese living in a nice central LA area like Silver Lake, but communities such as Arcadia, San Marino, South Pasadena, Glendale, Inglewood and Palos Verdes were totally off limits  to minorities, including Chinese-Americans, well into the 1960s.  Indeed, I thought it was a really big deal in the late 50s when one of my uncles bought a house in someplace called Gardena and then another uncle bought a house in Mar Vista, followed by my grandfather's buying a house in the Athens district near the border with Gardena in the early 1960s,

Our geographic confinement was probably best expressed by the fact that before I went to UCLA in 1965,  I told people that I hadn't been west of La Brea Ave. more than 5 times in my life (which probably was just a slight exaggeration) and had only visited the San Fernando Valley 5 times or less (probably not an exaggeration).  So snow in the Valley in 1962 isn't something that would register with me at that time.

Obviously being the subject of any kind of discrimination is no fun.  But to have felt its effects does provide an interesting perspective on one's life.

Mysteries of the Internet

Ever since Clarissa Wei wrote the first article about me, and launching a secondary career of writing about Chinese restaurant subjects, I have been regularly Googling myself (using the search term "David Chan Chinese restaurant") to see if people have been talking about me or my articles.  In so doing I have come across a number of inexplicable anomalies, such as incoherent brief references to past articles in foreign websites, Google search summaries that clearly mention me where the quoted text does not appear at all in the linked website, a linked website automatically forwarding to an unrelated random website, and on my own blog, the listing of referring websites from other totally unrelated, random websites.

However, I recently came across the most puzzling anomaly of all.  The Google search on my Blackberry Android pulled up a link to a website "energyconstrucciones.com" and what appeared to be a discussion of one or more Chinese restaurant articles I have written.  Typically this kind of hit links to a site which does contain "David Chan" and "Chinese restaurants", but not complete sentences, and also mentioning numerous other random people.  However, while still not a polished article, the references were semi-coherent and mostly about me.

The entire "article" was over 2,000 words long, and made reference to numerous articles about me and by me from a number of different publications, from Clarissa's initial article five years ago to an article that quoted me just a few days ago.  Indeed there were references to so many different articles that it was almost like somebody was stalking me.

But then here is where things get really weird.  The same Google search on my old Blackberry pulled up the same hit--but the link sent me directly to a porn site.  And then, the same Google search on my laptop did not provide the corresponding hit at all.   But when I went to the energyconstrucciones.com website on my laptop, it sent me to a website offering some kind of possibly sketchy software download.

My guess is that there are scammers out there targeting people who Google themselves either to drive traffic to particular website, or perhaps worse, to infect their computers.  But exactly what is going on is a real mystery that I doubt if I will ever solve.

Dim Sum Shop Opens Up In West Covina

Besides falling behind San Francisco when it comes to high end dim sum, Los Angeles also trails San Francisco and New York insofar as channels for dim sum sources are involved.  In Los Angeles, you're pretty much limited to medium to large size dim sum palaces.  You can dine in for dimsum at a place like Sea Harbour in Rosemead, or find one of the other sit down dim sum restaurants which has a take out annex such as Longo Seafood in Rosemead or CBS Seafood in Chinatown to get your dim sum to go.

In contrast in San Francisco there are a large number of small dim sum purveyors which stock behind the counter dim sum, which you can order for takeout or eat on premises at tables provided for your convenience.  Yeah, there are a couple of those here in LA, but most locals probably can't identify one of these offhand.  There's also the New York model where a sit down Cantonese restaurant will have behind-the-counter dim sum which you can order for takeout, but you really can't sit down and eat it there.

All of which makes this month's opening of Sheng Hui Dim Sum in West Covina, a seemingly small, innocuous eatery, potentially more significant than one might imagine upon first glance.  It's a model different from anything else mentioned above, a small sit-down dim sum restaurant.   You sit at the table and order from the menu. There's no wait staff, just the cook in back and his wife up front. Certain items are sitting pre-made behind the counter in the familiar metal trays and brought to your table.  Likewise other items are resting in a heated case.  On the other hand, some items are cooked to order and brought to your table.   Most items are $2.88 and the selection is relatively small, comparable to the small Bay Area take-out/sit down eateries.  Dim sum at Sheng Hui compares extremely favorably to the best of the cart places in the San Gabriel Valley.  Their pineapple taro  (below) and pineapple egg yolk dim sum are a revelation.  They apparently also at times stock some fanciful paste filled steamed buns (e.g., rabbit, piggie, panda), but they weren't available when we went there.

Sheng Hui Dim Sum is at 2889 E. Valley Blvd., in a part of West Covina wedged between Rowland Heights and Walnut.

Is Longo Seafood Waking Los Angeles From Its Dim Sum Slumber?

As indicated in my summer LA Weekly piece on the recently opened Xiang Yuan Gourmet in Temple City, the Los Angeles area has not welcomed a new dim sum contender to challenge the existing stalwarts in nearly a decade.   While Los Angeles continues to generally widen the lead over the rest of the United States in purveying the best Chinese food in the country, the Los Angeles area dominance in dim sum which was so wide a decade ago has completely evaporated. The San Francisco Bay area is now the US king of dim sum with its powerhouse lineup including Dragon Beaux, Koi Palace, Hong Kong Lounge #1, the unrelated Hong Kong Lounge #2, and Lai Hong Lounge.  In the words of Chinese restaurant industry maven Robert Lu (known as the irrepressible "ipsedixit" for nearly two decades on Los Angeles area food message boards), Los Angeles area dim sum "has largely stagnated in terms of innovation."  In contrast, the Bay Area has stepped up with new and better varieties of dim sum to catch, and now pass Los Angeles in the past three years or so.  Shades of much of the 20th Century, when Angelinos used to travel up to San Francisco to get a better brand of Chinese food, and it's deja vu again insofar as dim sum is concerned.

However, the worm may be starting to turn, first with Xiang Yuan Gourmet, but especially now with the opening a few weeks ago of Longo Seafood in Rosemead at 7540 E. Garvey Ave.   Game changing dim sum at this street location would be wholly unexpected.  Not that there's anything wrong with this location per se, given that it has hosted at least 10 different dim sum eateries in a three decade period.  It's just that over this period, it has been home to so many undistinguished dim sum restaurants that finding high quality dim sum in this building would be nearly unimaginable.  With the exception of Donald Lam's Seafood City, the first dim sum restaurant to occupy this spot and which reigned here in the mid-1980s, dim sum at this location had been known more for value pricing and not gourmet quality. 

But with the arrival of Longo Seafood, everything has changed.  In hindsight, there were small clues that something was happening here.  Where replacement restaurants at this location previously took just days or maybe a few weeks to open up, this location was closed for the better part of a year while renovations were in progress.  And it wasn't that the remodel was dragging along slowly, as there was clearly continuously activity.   This all made sense when the restaurant opened earlier this fall, revealing a sleek, total and upscale upgrade to the location, highlighted by its gigantic chandelier and similarly gigantic TV screen.  Longo Seafood is definitely one of the nicest Chinese restaurant dining rooms in the San Gabriel Valley.

Of course good decor is nice, but everybody's interested in the food, and the crowds have been enthusiastic, sometimes filling the restaurant by 11 am even on weekdays.  No surprise given the existence of dim sum items not ordinarily seen in Los Angeles, such as lobster rolls at eight pieces for $19.99, black truffle shumai (below) at six pieces for $15.99, and foie gras shrimp dumplings also at six pieces for $15.99.

Steamed rice rolls are not the rectangular cheung fun typically seen at dimsum, but as seen below are elongated rice noodle twists served on regular plates with varieties such as wagyu beef, vegetable and truffles, shredded duck, and using red rice rolls, spareribs.   With their extensive dim sum menu it'll take several visits to get a complete reading on Longo Seafood, but certainly it's so far, so good.