Why Shanghai's first American Chinese restaurant is taking off
Quick! Which of these menu items can be included in a typical Chinese meal?
- Egg Foo Young?
- Chicken Chow Mein?
- Hot and Sour Soup?
- None of the above.
Your answer will probably depend on where you live in the world. Those inside China would probably argue that none of those dishes resemble anything from a traditional Chinese menu.
But others might disagree.
For them, the idea of "western Chinese food" isn't an oxymoron, it's a genuine style of cuisine primarily developed by generations of Chinese immigrants to the United States.
Now, one restaurant in Shanghai is trying to bring American Chinese food back to China.
The Fortune Cookie is the brainchild of two friends, Fung Lam and Dave Rossi. Fung was born on the doorstep of New York's Chinatown.
"I was in the playpen of the kitchen of my parents' restaurant, of my grandparents' restaurants," he recalls. "All my earliest memories were of the woks going, my dad coming home with the smell of Chinese food."
Fung met Dave at graduate school. Outside of class, they soon discovered a shared love of American Chinese restaurants.
"Friday night was Chinese food night in the Rossi household," Dave explains. With more than 40,000 American Chinese restaurants in the United States, families of all ethnic backgrounds grew up eating New World Chinese classics.
When visiting Shanghai as tourists, Fung and Dave missed their usual versions of noodles and stir-fried classics, and thought others might too.
They decided to open what they believe is Shanghai's first American Chinese restaurant, featuring specialties served in Fung's family restaurants for 40 years: orange chicken, kung pao chicken and sesame shrimp. Dave describes the menu as "really American".
American yes, though a version of this menu is served in Chinese restaurants around the world - from Madrid to Melbourne.
But not usually in mainland China.
Dave and Fung flew Fung's father over to Shanghai to teach the chefs how to make each dish, so it is exactly the same as the food served in the family's American restaurants.
Extra American effort
One of the biggest challenges was finding the right ingredients to use in the kitchen.
"As weird as it sounds, we actually import a lot of ingredients to make authentic American Chinese food in China," Fung says
Items like Philadelphia cream cheese, Skippy peanut butter, cornflakes and English mustard powder must all be brought in from outside China. Even the soy sauce must be imported from Hong Kong, because that's what the first Chinese immigrants to the US used in their cooking.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34877507
