Pandemic Silver Lining - Chinese Restaurant Leftovers May Be Healthier For You

In talking with many of my Asian-American friends and family in my age group, I have found that a significant portion of them are diabetic or pre-diabetic and have to alter their diets accordingly.  And for people who live most of their lives eating meals centered around rice, and to a lesser extent, noodles, this is a very painful experience, since Chinese cuisine really isn't Chinese food without these carb loaded foods.   Indeed it is widely known that instead of greeting someone with the words "How are you?"  Chinese may say "Sihk faan mei?" which literally is "Have you eaten?"  Perhaps not as well known is that the word "faan" means rice.  But on the glycemic index, where a rating of 100 means ingesting a particular food is equivalent to eating pure sugar, with some white rice varieities having a glycemic index approaching 90,  eating rice is an unaffordable luxury for many of us.

Turning to the pandemic, the main storyline for restaurants is that survival has meant pivoting to a takeout model.  And with people hunkered down at home, takeout is not necessarily for one's next meal, but going out once or twice a week and ordering several meals to be refrigerated or frozen. But in a strange twist of fate, to the extent you refrigerate your takeout Chinese meal for another day's consumption, you may be able to have your rice (or noodles) and eat it, too.

Even with the backdrop of many of us having to limit or avoid our intake of rice and noodles, there were some anomalies.  For example, fresh rice noodles like chow fun or pho have a low glycemic index putting them in the safe eating range.  Also, Chinese-American folklore claims that fried rice is better for you than plain rice.  While these statements were surprising, I had never bothered to discover any rationale and accepted these as anomalies.

But then I heard something that has turned out to be life changing.  Supposedly, when refrigerated, cooked rice becomes a low glycemic food, infinitely more palatable for diabetic and pre-diabetic eaters.  The operative concept is that of "resistant starch."  Scientifically, this means in this altered form, the affected carbohydrate no longer breaks down and releases glucose into the bloodstream.  Some foods are naturally high in resistant starch, such as beans, lentils and whole grains.  But there's the whole other category of foods which release high levels of glucose into your bloodstream when freshly cooked and eaten hot, but form resistant starch when cooked and refrigerated.  Besides rice, this includes noodles and potatoes.

Of course the obvious question is what happens to a cooked and cooled resistant starch when it is subsequently reheated?  Does the heating make them villains again?  Apparently for rice and noodles, reheating the food does not alter the resistant starch status.  There seems to be some disagreement about reheated potatoes, but I've been eating them too.

So what about fresh rice noodles and fried rice?  What makes eating these items freshly cooked them so palatable with a low glycemic index?  Well with fresh rice noodles I've been told that their production involves taking cooked rice, cooling it, and then grinding it up and mixing it with starches and other ingredients.  This renders the ultimately minted rice noodle a low glycemic, resistant starch product.  However, there may be a caveat to that because I saw a recent report out of Hong Kong which indicated that steamed rice noodle rolls (cheung fun) had a very high glycemic index.  I also know that in the past few years a new style of rice noodle  (distinctively softer and wrinkled) had been invented using stone ground rice flour, so I'm wondering if these are processed differently not to include an initial cooking and cooling of the rice flour, but going directly from the rice flour to rice noodle stage.  So quite possibly the old style cheung fun, whose rice wrapper was very similar to the fresh chow fun noodle, could be low glycemic, while the new style one is not. 

And how about fried rice?  Well as all Chinese cooks know, you should use leftover rice for fried rice, not freshly cooked rice, because fresh rice produces a soggy product, while leftover, refrigerated rice has had time to dry out.   When I was a kid, everybody knew restaurants used leftover rice for fried rice, maybe even getting leftovers off the diners tables after they left.  These days, I don't know if Chinese restaurants are permitted to reuse rice like this, so to be safe (from a resistant starch point of view), you might want to refrigerate and reheat your fried rice, too.

There are other benefits to resistant starches besides the lower glycemic index, so much as to garner the coveted "superfood" tag.  In any event my interest is in the effects on blood sugar, and I'm now able to enjoy more Chinese rice, dry rice noodle, and wheat noodle dishes than I could have imagined a year ago, just by eating them as leftovers. 

Of course as to anything to do with diet and health there are multiple opinions out there and you need to evaluate these on your own.  To me, the fact that fresh rice noodles (as well as converted rice) have undisputedly low glycemic indices which can be explained by the reprocessing inherent in these products is compelling.  And I have the A1C results to show that resistant starches really do work for me.

Chinese Restaurants Battle Through The Pandemic

In my May article on this blog and in my expanded Menuism article on the same topic, I painted a rather pessimistic picture of the effect of the pandemic on Chinese restaurants in the United States through a combination of xenophobia, what turned out to be prescient caution in the Chinese-American community about dining out, as well as a high concentration of mom and pop operated enterprises.  

Things were particularly dark and stark in Los Angeles Chinatown, where during April a good two-thirds of the Chinese restaurants had closed down, and those that remained opened greatly pared their food offerings.  Dim sum lovers in Chinatown were especially distraught as only a handful of varieties were available at the two remaining dim sum outlets, Tian's Dim Sum and Keung Kee, likely the two least known dim sum providers in Chinatown.  The two large dim sum palaces, Ocean Seafood and Golden Dragon, closed down right off the bat, and eventually were followed by Won Kok Restaurant, Long's Family Pastry, Lucky Deli, CBS Seafood, ABC Seafood (which remained open for steam tray but not dim sum) and others.

Meanwhile in the San Gabriel Valley, things turned out not to be as bleak as feared, with a clear majority of the Chinese restaurants managing to adapt to a takeout model, including, surprisingly, some hotpot restaurants.  And in May, many of the Chinese restaurants that had temporarily closed began to reopen, both in the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles Chinatown.  This trend continued throughout June, having reached a point where people are lamenting the failure of individual specifically named restaurants to reopen, which while tragic in each such instance, is nothing compared to what we had imagined was going to happen.  Not that long ago people were bracing for a closure rate of 50 percent for Chinese restaurants (and indeed, at this point the national permanent closure rate for restaurants in general has been estimated to be 25 percent).  But the survival rate among San Gabriel Valley and Chinatown Chinese restaurants at this point in time looks encouraging, despite the permanent loss of some restaurants including the original Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, King Hua in Alhambra and Plum Tree Inn in Chinatown, and the conspicuous failure of some of the other larger size restaurants to reopen as of this date.

Equally interesting is the fact that even though dine-in restaurants have been permitted in Los Angeles for a month now, very few Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley or Chinatown have taken up this option.   I only know of a handful of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley that were open for dine-in on Father's Day, and even now I don't know if the number is more than a dozen and a half.  But with the well justified caution that the Chinese American community showed at the start of the pandemic, continued caution at this point in time certainly is not out of hand.

How I Became A Writer

As I remember hearing some anonymous person saying many years ago, my most outstanding trait is clearly my humility. So even as people tell me what a good writer I am, such as the comment by a novelist and television journalist, "David is doing some of the best, most idiosyncratic food writing in the country right now," I try to stay humble about this.  And for good reason, because I don't know how a became a good writer, having started out in life as a very poor writer.

Indeed, I think back on my Advanced Composition class at Dorsey High School and I wonder what magic transformation occurred.   I think that the only reason I was even in Advanced Composition was that they used a tracking system such that all the perceived better students took the same classes together, be it English, Science or Social Studies.  I remember one composition was so bad that the teacher read it in front of the entire class, fortunately without attribution, as an example of an awful composition.  Not only was my writing poor, but I couldn't produce anything more than a couple pages long, and only in the formulaic structure that they taught us.

My writing troubles continued at UCLA where you had to write a composition before the beginning of your first semester to see if you were required to take "Subject A", a.k.a. "Dumbbell English" if your composition wasn't good enough.  I failed.   I remember just a couple of things from the first day of Subject A.  The instructor was a 60ish woman named Catherine Wheat, and she already knew one of the other students, Mr. Johns, a burly African-American with a southern accent.  It didn't take long for me to figure out he was a football player who had previously flunked the Subject A class.  What I didn't realize until later was that he was a Senior, and in fact had completed his football eligibility in the previous semester, so I guess we have to hand it to him to keep plugging in class even though his football career was over.   And on the first day, everybody got a second chance to write another composition and waive out of Subject A.  I think the topic was a letter of advice to someone planning to go to college, so I wrote my imaginary letter to my second cousin Carl, who was a grade behind me at Dorsey.  So guess what?  It was good enough to waive out of Subject A, and indeed the instructor read my essay aloud to the class before being excused from the class.  In hindsight I'm thinking that the conversational nature of this composition might have been the difference in my flunking the original composition but waiving out.

Nothing during my undergraduate years at UCLA would indicate anything that would have improved my writing skills.  I think I only wrote two term papers in my four plus undergraduate years, as I took mostly business and economics courses.  And my only "C" grade as an undergraduate was in English 1.  Yet something happened to my writing skills during those years.  The second of my term papers was written in my very last semester at UCLA, for the pioneering "Orientals In America" class.   As I have written in the past, that was a transformative class for me, and my term paper was a history of the Chinese in Los Angeles, which the organizers of the class also ran in the pioneering Asian American movement publication Gidra.  The thought didn't occur to me at the time (and indeed first hit me while writing this essay), but it must have been relatively well written from them to have chosen my paper for publication.

It wasn't actually until  a year later that I consciously had any clue that I might somehow be turning into a good writer.  I had a summer internship at the Big 8 CPA firm Touche Ross & Company (which subsequently became part of the merged Big 6-5-4 CPA firm of Deloitte & Touche) during the summer between my graduation from UCLA Business School and beginning UCLA Law School.  As a summer intern I was obviously at the bottom of the audit team totem pole, and was responsible for writing up the engagement's summary of procedures and observations.  In so doing, the senior on the job, Chris Massey, a former swimmer at USC and subsequently longtime Big 8 CPA firm partner in Los Angeles, told me that I wrote excellent memos.  (He also told me how USC was going to smash UCLA in football that fall, and I could only nod my head.  Final score:  UCLA 45, USC 20.) 

So somehow even before starting law school, and without doing much formal writing, I was beginning to develop writing skills.  After that it was a matter of improving those skills.  It's hard to go to law school and not become a good writer, as law school is all about writing and making convincing arguments.  Meanwhile, I was following up on my published article on the history of the Chinese in Los Angeles with similar pieces even while I was still in law school, and continuing when I started working for the CPA firm of Kenneth Leventhal & Company.  And even though I had to stop writing historical articles in the early 1980s due to professional and family responsibilities, my job at Kenneth Leventhal, which eventually merged into Ernst & Young, was really a writing job.  Essentially I would write legal tax memos analyzing and applying tax law to specific factual situations, but most often as an advocate for the client, as opposed to the impartial position of a judge.  As such, I realized that I was writing in a storytelling format, perhaps influenced by the historical writings I had previously done on the side.  And whether it was writing a tax memo, a historical article, or a restaurant article, use of a storytelling type of framework results in a product that is very pleasing to readers.

Solving The Broccoli Beef Mystery

Even as Chinese food in the United States becomes more and more authentic, there also seems to be renewed interest in Americanized Chinese food, as indicated by the invitation I received to be interviewed about Americanized Chinese food on the Jim Jefferies podcast, which I declined as it involved going into a radio studio during the lockdown.  As I have explained in the past, there were two separate and distinct sources to today's Americanized Chinese food.  There's the category of food which was rooted in the Toishanese immigration to the United States, from the time of the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century until the late 1960s repeal of discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws in the United States.  Basically this was rural Cantonese food as adapted to ingredients available in the United States, as well as to the taste buds of the American public.  In this original category one finds classics such as chop suey, egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and wor won ton soup, which most of America erroneously believed representative of food eaten throughout China.

However after the change in American immigration laws, Chinese people of different backgrounds began to come to the United States.  In the 1970s these were the urban Cantonese from Hong Kong and the Mandarin speaking Taiwanese, most of whom themselves had evacuated the Chinese mainland to Taiwanese as the mainland fell to the communist regime.   Taiwanese chefs, many of whom had arrived in Taiwan from Hunan and Sichuan provinces two decades previous, arrived in New York and starting serving what they remembered as Hunan and Sichuan food.  But since they were serving these dishes to native New Yorkers, not natives of Hunan or Sichuan, of whom there were very few in the United States at that time, new styles of Americanized Chinese dishes became featured--mu shu pork, General Tso's chicken, and sizzling rice soup to name a few.  

While we're now used to seeing a mashup of Cantonese and non-Cantonese dishes at Americanized Chinese restaurants these days, the difference between the two was originally like night and day, except perhaps for the presence of white rice at both styles of restaurants.  Furthermore, since during the first half of the 20th century, there was little migration from China, and what migration there was consisted almost exclusively of friends and relatives of the Toishanese already here, Chinese restaurant menus during this period were remarkably stable.

Which leads to my mystery of broccoli beef.  This dish is not found on Americanized Chinese restaurant menus in the early 20th century.   Yet, it had become a standard dish in Americanized Chinese restaurants before the second wave of Americanized Chinese food in the 1970s.  Plus as a mild stir fry mixture of meat and vegetable, it clearly fell into the Cantonese style of cooking.   So why did this dish arise during a period of time where there was little evolution in Chinese food in America?

As it turns out, there was a simple reason there was no broccoli beef in the early 20th century.  It was because there was no broccoli, period, in the United States at that point in time.  Broccoli did not arrive in the United States until 1920s when it was brought by Italian immigrants.  And it didn't become a mainstream vegetable in the United States until the 1940s.  So it was an evolution in American food, rather than anything specifically due to Chinese food or the Toishanese community, that led to the introduction of the classic broccoli beef.

My First Celebrity Sighting

For something that happened over 60 years ago, I can vividly remember my first celebrity sighting.  It was around 1957 that I saw the legendary Buster Keaton, song and dance man Donald O'Connor and glamour girl Ann Blyth make personal appearances in the Thrifty Drug Store in the shopping center on the corner of La Brea Ave. and Rodeo Road, now known as Obama Blvd.  I particularly remember O'Connor being introduced and coming out in a brightly lit area with a fair number of spectators ringing the scene.  (Thanks to a parallel thread I started on a neighborhood message board, that was in the area normally occupied by the Thrifty diner.)

While I have thought about this event occasionally over the years, it never occurred to me to figure out the nature of that event.  I mean why those stars and at that location?  I guess one reason is that there really wasn't any way to get an answer, except maybe to ask my parents while they were alive.  But like so many other things, as I once wrote a few years ago, unknowable facts in the past become easily answered in the internet age.  And a simple Google search today for "Buster Keaton Donald O'Connor Ann Blyth" revealed instantaneously that Donald O'Connor and Ann Blyth starred in "The Buster Keaton Story" which was released in 1957.  So that appearance by the trio was a promotional event for the release of the movie.

It took a little more searching to figure out why they appeared at that particular location.  We moved into the adjacent Crenshaw area in 1952, and even then it was a largely a minority neighborhood, predominantly African-American, but with a relatively large concentration of Asian-Americans and a few holdover whites.  I could see such event at the nearby Crenshaw Center (now Baldwin Hills Plaza) which featured department stores and specialty shops, and whose 1947 opening indeed was star studded with Mel Torme, among others, celebrating the opening of this shopping center so newsworthy that it was covered in Life Magazine.  But the La Brea/Rodeo shopping center only contained Thrifty Drug Store, Alpha Beta Market, and a small arcade area that included a small barber shop, maybe a shoe shine stand, and a couple of other stores.  However after a little digging I discovered that the Thrifty drug store was the largest location of that chain in the country at the time and was reminded that the property was also home to Thrifty's corporate headquarters.  And when the complex opened in 1952, there was a star studded celebration that included Anne Baxter and Tony Martin.

So who knows what other big name celebrities may have passed through that modest looking shopping center over the years.. 

Chinese Restaurants Take A Pounding From The Pandemic

Obviously these are tough times for everybody, rougher for some than others.  Particularly hard hit is the restaurant industry due to the precarious economics of the business, where a restaurant operation can expect net profit of 3 percent on sales even in good times.   Even more precariously situated are restaurant workers, as restaurant wages are often 25 percent or more of restaurant costs, so it doesn’t take much of a decline in restaurant revenue in such a low margin industry to trigger labor cutbacks.

However, Chinese restaurants have been hit by a triple whammy during this pandemic.  Not only have they been buffeted by the general economic disaster as amplified in the restaurant industry, but they have suffered additionally for being Chinese restaurants.  This is because COVID 19 originated in China, and from the beginning has been associated with things Chinese, as indicated by unfortunate terms such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”  Immediately as the virus spread through China, business at Chinese restaurants in the United States, and indeed throughout the world, began to sink even before the rest of the world economy and other types of restaurants became impacted.

Startled by this unwelcome rise of xenophobia, the food community attempted to fight back.  Food bloggers around the country attempted to whip up support for neighborhood Chinese restaurants.  An organization called No Appetite For Ignorance started a campaign to support Chinese restaurants around the world by having Chinese food personalities, including the greatest Chinese food expert of all, Fuchshia Dunlop, highlight their favorite Chinese restaurants.   (You can check out my own recs here.)

Unfortunately this did not stanch the bleeding, and indeed one Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up, Kim’s Restaurant, had to shut its doors due to anti-Chinese harassment after serving the neighborhood for over 40 years.  Meanwhile, things got ugly at Taste of China Restaurant in Chesapeake, Virginia.  The restaurant owner saw her car vandalized with anti-Chinese graffiti and “Go Back To China” written on it.   People have run into the restaurant screaming anti-Chinese epithets and pouring water in the premises.  Fortunately both of these episodes had happy endings.  At Kim’s Restaurant, upset customers tracked down the restaurant owner and presented him with a ten page printout from the neighborhood online message board from customers decrying the anti-Chinese harassment and saying how much the customers missed the restaurant.  After seeing the extent of neighborhood support, Kim’s Restaurant reopened.  Meanwhile, the customers of Taste of China organized a takeout tailgate in the restaurant’s parking lot, overwhelming the restaurant with orders.  Unfortunately, the reported episodes of anti-Asian Covid 19 related bias have numbered in the thousands (not counting people calling up Chinese restaurants to order bat dishes) and most of the endings are not so happy.

Of course the early body blow to the Chinese restaurant industry can’t be blamed completely on anti-Chinese xenophobia.  Admittedly, Chinese-Americans themselves started abandoning Chinese restaurants even before the corona virus was making a conspicuous presence in the United States.  I remember exchanging Chinese New Year’s greetings with one of my old Chinese friends this past January.   But when the subject of our annual Chinese New Year lunch meeting came up, he told me that he was not going to set foot in a Chinese restaurant until the whole corona virus thing blew over.  And while Chinese New Year restaurant gatherings were not largely affected at the end in January, business at Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, which cater almost exclusively to Chinese diners, fell off throughout the month of February as Chinese-Americans went into a shelter-in-place before being ordered to do so by government officials.   I remember having lunch with another friend, a former Chinese restaurant owner, at the end of February and he estimated that business had already dropped by roughly 30 percent at San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants, at a time where dining out in the greater community had yet to decline.

Things started to crash a week into March when we drove up to one of the more popular Chinese restaurants, Henry’s Cuisine in Alhambra on an early Sunday evening and we weren’t even sure whether the restaurant was open or not.  At first we thought it was just kind of early for dinner, but we saw the sign on the door which indicated they were in fact open, but would be closing the following day until May, due to a sharp decline in business.  That first episode was quite a shock. But then in the next few days we heard of a few other Chinese restaurants doing the same thing.   Later in the week, cities started ordering dine in restaurants to cut their seating capacity by 50 percent, and by weekend, dine-in operations were ordered to shut, with only takeout or delivery permitted.

The closure of dine-in eating in the middle of March was obviously the watershed moment for restaurants in general and Chinese restaurants in particular.  Large Chinese restaurants with a high cost structure and smaller, marginal Chinese restaurants were the first to close, either on an interim or permanent basis.  Since then, Chinese restaurants have been struggling to adapt to a take out and delivery world.  Some which tried to make a go of takeout and delivery subsequently closed.  But others, like Woon in Los Angeles, closed initially on a strategic basis, and as their subsequent path became clear, re-opened for takeout and delivery.   Henry’s Cuisine did reopen for takeout in early May, but closed again after two days with plans to reopen again in a month.  Quite often the continuing operations came on a modified basis, including changes to hours, changes to the menu, adding inventories of food products and supplies for resale, refusing credit cards and taking cash only, and other adaptations.   

Industry statistics indicate that the closure rate for Chinese restaurants during the pandemic have been more than double than that of other categories of restaurants in the United States.  While part of that may be connected to the current stigma of being a Chinese restaurant, another factor is that a higher percentage of family owned Chinese restaurants are operating on a “shoestring” compared to other types of restaurants.  As celebrity Chinese American chef Ming Tsai has stated, the post-pandemic future for mom and pop restaurants in general is bleak, warning that half of these operations are not likely to survive.  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ming-tsai-50-of-mom-and-pop-restaurants-cannot-get-through-coronavirus-pandemic-191715552.html?.tsrc=fin-srch    And mom and pop Chinese restaurants would seem to be at greater risk.

We all hope things return to normal as soon as possible with the least amount of disruption.  But realistically it is unavoidable that some restaurants will not reopen, and in this regard Chinese restaurants are more vulnerable.  Besides falling into economic distress at an earlier point in time and the xenophobia factor, there is a particularly high concentration of “mom and pop” Chinese restaurants      Unfortunately, then, it is quite likely that many of us will not have the opportunity to ever eat at some of our favorite Chinese restaurants again.

Why I Was Wrong About Gibraltar

2018 was a climatic travel year in that we visited three locales where I never dreamed I would ever visit.  Well maybe I dreamed of visiting these places, Dubai, India and Gibraltar, but I never thought it would actually happen.  Now when traveling anywhere you haven't been before, you can see pictures before your trip to get an general idea of what the destination is like, but of course there's nothing like actually being there.  However, in the case of Gibraltar, the reality turned out to be 180 degrees different from the expectation.

The reason for the gap between expectation and realization was the purchase of this computer that I am currently writing on.  It was a brand new Dell, Windows 10 computer, and Windows 10 instituted a startup screen showing landscapes or other pictures of Windows' choosing, sometimes identified, sometimes not identified, showing up for several startups and then disappearing not to be seen again.  One of the early startup picture was something that looked like the Rock of Gibraltar, with the rock teeming with crowded structures all the way down the rock.  Since Gibraltar sits across the strait from northern Morocco, this Moorish type of scene seemed logical to me.  But like I said, the startup pictures may or may not be identified, and this one was not.

So imagine my surprise when I got to Gibraltar and found not a crowded Moorish landscape, but rather a sparsely populated British looking (obviously not surprising in hindsight since Gibraltar is British) one.  And while I was still excited to be in Gibraltar, this stark difference did diminish the excitement to some extent, though I also met my goal of having a meal there, if a ham and cheese french bun at the St. Michael's Cave gift shop can be considered a meal.

As I said, the Windows 10 pictures don't repeat themselves.  Except that two years later the picture that I thought was Gibraltar did reappear, and with identification.  What I thought was Gibraltar was actually Uchisar, a town in central Turkey, built around a large rock formation that actually didn't look like the rock of Gibraltar except for this one particular view.  And now I have a sense of closure knowing where I have to go if I want to see the Gibraltar I had imagined in my mind.

This is Uchisar.

  

This is Gibraltar.