“Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/ and I were at a Chinese restaurant yesterday for lunch, and it struck me how much it resembled most of the other mid-range Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to. I think it was called “The Golden Wok,” though it might have been “The Golden Dragon.” And it shared a common, perhaps universal, list of traits with similarly-named restaurants:
* Located in a strip mall or other low-rent location.
* Ornate, slightly garish wallpaper, with either a floral or a generic Asian pattern.
* Cushy booths, round tables, chairs with rounded tops, cloth napkins.
* A proprietor eager to greet people as they enter. On the counter by him or her is a bowl of mints for on your way out.
* Serving staff who obsessively refill your glass of water
* Americanized Chinese food, which, if not authentic, is definitely tasty, accounting for the large number of these sorts of restaurants.
* Those cheap little wooden chopsticks in the red paper sleeve. And of course the fortune cookies with lousy fortunes.
* The syrupy red sweet-and-sour sauce and the yellow spicy mustard sauce.
* UPDATE: How could I have forgotten the paper horoscope placemats? Thanks to “Jim Zoetewey”:http://www.geocities.com/jim_zoetewey for pointing that out in the comments.
* Most importantly: The Lunch Menu. A dozen or so dishes served with choice of soup, an egg roll, steamed or fried rice, and complimentary tea. It always amounts to an amazingly good deal for a lot of food for lunch, though the exact price varies depending on where you live.
You know the place of which I speak. You probably know of half a dozen such places in the city where you live. They could almost be a franchise, but of course they’re not — they’re all individually owned. So how is it that they end up so similar? Is there a three-ring binder, a la _Snow Crash_, that dictates the Successful Chinese Restaurant Decor and Business Plan?
A sideline for those not familiar with _Snow Crash_: the novel takes place in a fanciful near-future where everything, from the place where you order pizza to the burbclave you live in to the highway you drive on, is a franchise. America is a teeming multicultural soup of dozens of disparate languages and ethnic groups, so the way that brand uniformity is established for all these franchises is the ubiquitous three-ring Binder: a repository of all the information needed to create and maintain a given franchise unit. I’d quote some amusing scenes from the book here, but unfortunately I don’t have my copy with me.
Back to my point: maybe there exists a mythical Three-Ring Binder for Chinese Restaurants that lays out the idiotproof plan that makes them all so similar. But whether or not there’s an actual, physical binder out there, there must be a loose body of information — a collection of memes spreading virally, if you will — that has retained a remarkable degree of internal consistency across the country. (Question for international readers: do they have these places in other countries too?)
Fortunately, unlike a true franchise, there are plenty of points on which individual Chinese restaurants may distinguish themselves, with actual food quality topping the list. The Golden Wok was pretty good, but there’s a place on the Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville that has hunan chicken to _die_ for.
Chinese restaurants probably the only ones with a three-ring binder linking them together. In the past couple of months I’ve eaten at the Washington Brewing Company and the Grand Rapids Brewing Company, and you probably know of that other place by you that also does the Americana food thing and has the four or five brews that they make right there in the building. Don’t even get me started on Indian all-you-can-eat buffets. The real challenge, it would seem, is finding a restaurant that’s truly unlike any other.
10 comments
December 30, 2003 at 2:08 pm
Ed
You err, my friend.
The wrapper on the chopsticks was white.
I know the red wrappers of which you speak, and it actually stuck in my mind that these were not the same.
Which in a roundabout way supports your point.
December 30, 2003 at 2:10 pm
jonathan
Ah, but Indian all-you-can-eat buffets are imo the best of the sort. I’ve had *horrid* experiences with Chinese AYCEB’s.
The Indian one at Bombay Cuisine in Eastown on Sundays is incredible.
And I would add one thing to the items that your Chinese restaurants have in common: all of their lunch specials say the same thing: “No soup with takeout.” Which is truly a bummer.
December 30, 2003 at 3:02 pm
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
May I assume you’re familiar with chowhound.com? If not, check ‘em out.
December 30, 2003 at 3:02 pm
Ed
NO SOUP FOR YOU!
December 30, 2003 at 3:22 pm
sennoma
Chinese restaurants in Australia are most definitely run according to the same rules that apply to those in America, right down to the mints on the counter. But you left out (or perhaps there is a difference after all) the art: ornate, chunky frescoes and wall hangings covered in mother-of pearl, with lots of red fringe and tassels; big scrolls with Zen ink drawings of mountain ranges and bamboo shoots; and lovely Chinese characters everywhere. (I mean the writing, not the staff.)
December 30, 2003 at 8:44 pm
Jim Z
Comment by my wife upon reading this blog entry:
“He forgot to mention the placemats with the Chinese horoscopes.”
And so I write in, in an attempt to right the injustice. That, and to second Jonathan’s comment about Bombay Cuisine. It’s very good.
December 30, 2003 at 10:48 pm
coder
Well, if the places in the US are anything like the ones in New Zealand (and Australia, and Canada,) then I can tell you that while there is not a 3 ring binder as such, there is something similar. Almost all the places I know of from my home town, from the smallest and humblest takeaways and chip shops, to the best, most interesting and ‘authentic’ restaurants, via the largest, highest turnover, and most soulless barns, are run by people who know each other very well, have worked for each other in the past, and in fact are often relatives. Or at least had inter-familial contacts that preceded their or their ancestors emmigration from China. I don’t think there is a single restaurant worthy of the name in my home city (admittedly small at ~80,000) that didn’t have a member of my wife’s extended family worked in it at some stage.
One of the main effects of all this is IMO a de-facto standardisation process similar to the de-jure one that the franchise system is based on. The downside is that you get a homogenous, less interesting range of food, and some appalling ubiquitous crimes against cuisine such as glowing pink sweet and sour sauce (WHY? FOR KUAN YIN’S SAKE, WHY?)
The upside is that you also get a very good diffusion of knowledge through the system, so successful innovations are rapidly adopted. There is also the dependability factor. You can go into just about any Cantonese restaurant in the world, from Guangzhou to East Finchley, and order steamed rice, Choi Sum with garlic, tofu with black beans, and get a more or less good quality, tasty, and cheap meal. I’m vegetarian, but I know there are equivalent meat and fish dishes. They may not all be on the menu, or at least the English one, and details may differ, but you can be pretty much assured of a good, basic, cheap meal, especially if you are with someone who can speak Cantonese.
December 30, 2003 at 11:42 pm
nate
Patrick: I know about Chowhound, but only recently. It’s a wonderful site.
Sennoma, Coder: Thanks for the int’l perspective. I don’t know if I’m heartened or scared that the typical Chinese restaurant abides overseas as well. Spot on about some of decor options, Sennoma. Coder: Interesting about the inter-familial thing. Seems like it would be harder to manage across as much ground as the U.S. covers, but considering that there’s at least one of these restaurants in just about every town of reasonable size, maybe there is some sort of vast grouping going on. Or at least several sub-groupings. In Grand Rapids, where I am now, the best such restaurant, Seoul Garden, is run by a Korean family and serves solid Korean food on the side. The guy at Golden Wok looked very northern Chinese, maybe even Mongolian.
Jim: Thank Kristen for me. The missing placement has been inserted into the entry.
December 30, 2003 at 11:51 pm
nate
Also, Jonathan, Jim: Bombay Cuisine. Yummm. I dig it too.
January 4, 2004 at 6:05 pm
Michael
One detail that didn’t ring true with all of my non-US experience of Chinese restaurants was the chopsticks. Every Chinese restaurant I’ve been to (in the UK, Australia and New Zealand) has had plastic chopsticks. It has only been the Japanese restaurants that have used the wooden ones. Perhaps this is a slight international difference.
In the UK, curry places are all quite uniform.