Hello everyone, this is the first article after a long hiatus. Not that it matters since no one is going to read this, and of those who actually do, not many are going to have the language skills necessary to understand it.
My topic for today is Asian food. However, I will be venturing a bit off the prescribed beaten path of things in Taiwan. Instead, I will be discussing the food on my side of the Pacific—the good ol’ US of A.
I’m not from California, and although I do currently reside in the most culturally diverse city in the world, there are still not enough Taiwanese people for me to be able to easily acquire a taste of home. The closest I can get to it is your run of the mill Chinese food. The Chinatown here in NYC is one of the more historically rich parts of town and the food is quite nice albeit too oily. The food is not really the problem that spurned the writing of this post. Rather it is the question of why good Chinese food can only be found in a dingy, nasty, or stereotypical Chinese eating establishment.
Japanese food does not seem to have this problem. The range of Japanese restaurants runs the gamut from dingy to Masa’s $300 per person prix fix. The same can very well be said of Chinese food, but only in Asia. Here in the US, I can find cheap eats or arm and a leg eats. Not really much in between. Those that are in between are terrible. Why is it that Chinese people can’t build a place with amazing ambiance that serves good food?
Case in point is the Peking Duck House in Chinatown. Upon arrival, I saw that the décor and ambiance was almost at a standard American level for nice. There were no cheesy Chinese paintings, no random aquarium, no stains on the wall, and it was populated by roughly 80% Caucasian patrons. All those things combined should have sent blaring warning signals all throughout my brain. But alas, I ignored them. I figured that it was a restaurant in Chinatown so it was bound to be passable. Passable it was not.
The duck was $40 dollars which is pretty expensive but after confirming with the waiter that it was a whole duck, I felt like it wasn’t a bad deal, especially since restaurant itself was decently nice. When the duck came out, they showed it to the table, and began to make a spectacle of cutting it up. After slicing off the skin and a little bit of the meat, they plated it, put it on the table and took the rest of the duck into the kitchen. I assumed that they were taking the duck back to the kitchen to do a more thorough dissection before bringing the meat back out. I was mistaken. I had paid $43.35 including tax for duck skin and trimmings, gone were the remaining couple pounds of meat still hanging on the duck I thought I had bought.
The situation was further exacerbated by the use of flour tortillas as duck wrap, a watered down sauce, and a not very tasty duck. I guarantee that if I had gone to a place that didn’t pass NYC sanitation requirements down the street, the food would have been exceptional. Therein lays the problem. Chinese cuisine in the United States is now synonymous with shabby, run-down, and stereotypically decorated establishments even among natives. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it shouldn’t as most places in Asia can attest to.
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