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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...

I asked the owner of the local Chinese place here in the US about this and she said the following, condensed for brevity. All the food they make is composed of a limited number of ingredients. 3-4 types of meat, 2-3 types of rice, 4-6 different sauces, 2-3 types of noodles, 7-10 types of veggies. You ignore the menu entirely if you are aware of what is on offer and just state what you want: pork in white rice with broccoli, cabbage, and carrots in ginger sauce for example. The menu is huge b/c they often try to explicitly list every possible iteration of these ingredients with a name and price. If you look closely most of the dishes are extremely similar but with a different starch (rice or noodle) and different meat. They list theirs by the base starch: white rice, fried rice, lo mein, chow mein, etc. Underneath these subheadings is a list of basically they same meat/veg/sauce combos reiterated under every starch type. The stuff they consider the good combinations are usually under "House Specials".

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