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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3630 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

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Why do East Asian restaurants have such massive menus?

Restaurants in East Asia, or restaurants of East Asian cuisine abroad?

Here in the west if a restaurant has a giant menu it's usually a bad sign because it means nothing's really good. But I think for East Asian cuisine restaurants abroad, they feel kind of forced to serve a few (often westernized to hell) "staples" of asian food else people complain. Like I see a lot of korean or vietnamese restaurants serving sushi because people just don't know or don't care. Thaï restaurants will be forced to serve general tso's chicken, all noodle restaurants will be forced to serve pad thai, etc...

Specifically, Chinese restaurants in Canada.

Some fraction of it is formatting.

The last time I had Chinese food, there were >100 items on the menu. Six of them were fried rice (vegetarian, with pork, with chicken, with shrimp, with beef, or "deluxe"), and that wasn't the only duplicated dish. If you pared it down to distinct dishes, then it's much closer to Canadian restaurants serving other cuisines.

Chinese restaurants in China also have very large menus.

I couldn't say why Chinese cuisine developed in such a way that led to this, but if you're wondering how they manage: Chinese food has very little mise en place. 95% of dishes in the average restaurant will require little more than chopping up your ingredients and frying rapidly. Take a look at someone like Wang Gang, a professional Chinese chef. The majority of recipes he shoots are <5 minutes, even accounting for editing tricks.

Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!

If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.

One thing I've found is that if you can find a restaurant that specializes in food from a particular region within a country, the food will probably be better. E.g. food from a restaurant specializing in "sichuan food" will generally be better than one specializing in "chinese food", which will in turn be better than one specializing in "asian food".

Why do they use such extremely sweet sauces? North American food outside of desserts isn't nearly as sweet.

chicken feet

I had these earlier this year at a Korean place. Mine had a kind of spicy barbecue sauce. They're not bad, just a lot of work. Something to share as an appetizer maybe. They're uncannily like miniature human hands.

Honestly I've never seen the hype on them. Meat's not great, they're annoyingly fiddly to eat and there's no real taste advantage.

Do recommend Chicken Hearts, though.

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