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I still keenly remember the experience of walking into a Chinese takeout joint when I was a kid. Some were better than others—our favorite was a place called Bo Bo Kitchen in Clinton, New Jersey, since sold and renamed Lee’s Kitchen—but they were and are very similar places. Just like the pizza/pasta joints all over the state, they’re individually owned, neither chains nor franchises, but they follow a concept or layout, with help from distributors who offer products, menu templates and things like that. Each such business is just another tenant in a strip plaza. But each one’s unique story could probably fill a book.
Anyway—going out for Chinese food. There was a certain smell in these places as soon as you walked in. The smell of steamed rice and hot oil. Deep-frying egg rolls and barbecued ribs (of course they’re dyed red, and I wouldn’t have it any other way). Vaporized soy sauce and cooking wine. I was at my local Chinese supermarket in Northern Virginia the other week, where there’s a food court and Cantonese BBQ stall. It must have been a busy day, because the air had that same perfect, classic Chinese food scent to it.
What I really remember, though, in those takeout places was the noise. These places were always whirlwinds of activity. I remember the flames surrounding the woks as the chefs tossed them and clanged them back on the range, the sound of cleavers on cutting boards, the whoosh of the gas jet burners, the phones ringing, and the ladies at the counter somehow managing to hear an order and shouting it back to the kitchen and nothing getting lost in between.
It had honestly been years since my family all ordered Chinese food together in New Jersey, and when we did so recently a couple of times, at two different places, something was different. The places were quiet inside. It looked like the kitchens were running in slow motion. I saw a chef slowly and deliberately empty a wok. I didn’t hear the clanging and the scraping. I didn’t see the flames licking the edges of the wok. The food tasted a tad underdone and lacked that elusive wok hei—the Chinese name for the savory, not-quite-burned flavor created by stir-frying with extremely high heat. And I missed the taste that went along with that smell.
What was going on? Did these just happen to be two mediocre experiences that meant nothing? Maybe. Maybe the chefs were new. Maybe the price of gas has gone up and those jet burners cranked all the way up don’t pay anymore.
But maybe there’s something else going on. I did notice that one of the takeout joints had a non-Chinese girl—not a woman, probably a high school student—working at the counter. I’m not sure I ever saw anybody but Chinese people working in these places back when I was a kid. And that may signal a truth about cuisine itself.
(Not Quite) Anyone Can Make Pizza
Growing up, we also went often to Jack’s Pizza, on Main Street in Flemington. I don’t know who Jack was—the place was owned by Sal and his son Joe, who took over at some point for a few years and then sold. Today, Jack’s Pizza offers a Latino menu alongside the old Italian menu.
Sal must have been born in the 1920s. I can’t remember if I ever learned where he was born; if he wasn’t from Italy, his father certainly was. In other words, in the 1990s in these small towns, there were still businesses that could directly trace themselves back to that old Ellis Island era of immigration, and whose original owners, in some cases, were still around.
Today, many of those links have been broken. The second or third generation often went off to college and took white-collar jobs, instead of inheriting a restaurant. The Great Recession and then, a decade later, the pandemic killed a lot of restaurants. With these closures and changing of hands, a lot of tacit knowledge was lost. It isn’t that only Italians can make great pizza, or that only Cantonese immigrants can make great Americanized Chinese food. It’s more that your best chance of making great pizza is simply being someone who grew up with it and had eaten and made a ton of it. Which, of course, favors Italians from Italy or their children. And those are the people who, over time, are filtering out of this old-school restaurant world.
Can a Cuisine Be Obsolete?
I had a fascinating conversation with a Chinese-American real-estate developer a couple of years ago. I wrote about it here [ [link removed] ], and my takeaway was that a cuisine is in some sense a living thing. It is almost impossible to actually write down a recipe in full. It is almost impossible for a seasoned cook to even realize all the little things they do that are the result of learning, adapting and tinkering. It’s a sort of knowledge that simply can’t be imitated or passed on all at once. Trying to copy it is like trying to turn a bud into a flower without letting it bloom.
My interlocutor here told me that like most older Chinese immigrants, his parents, from southern China, loved dim sum and Cantonese food. The sort of food that was once pretty much what “Chinese food” meant in America, at a level of authenticity above the standard Americanized fare—which itself is descended from Cantonese cuisine.
The trouble was that, as southern China developed and immigration patterns within China and between China and the United States changed, there just weren’t that many more Cantonese people coming to America to open or work in restaurants. And so this “type” of restaurant that was once all over the place is harder to find now, or is no longer serving the same food on paper with quite the same technique or familiarity. The cooks and maybe even the owners aren’t acquainted with it like the first or second generations.
Then he told me that one of the places his parents can find some of their favorite old classics is a Vietnamese-owned restaurant, in a heavily Vietnamese shopping center (Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia—worth a visit if you’re anywhere nearby). Why? Because Vietnam’s proximity to southern China meant that some of the Vietnamese people coming to or in America today are more acquainted with that general cuisine than most of the Chinese people coming to America today.
I suspect a lot of people never consider how fragile and contingent food is. An old deli or pizzeria or dim sum house feels solid, permanent, like it will be there forever, a little piece of living history and everyday commerce all at once. But—and when you think about it, it’s obvious—no immigrant really comes to America to share their cuisine with Americans. This stuff isn’t here “for us.” The notion of cultural exchange is surely present, but a restaurant is foremost an economic phenomenon. Someone who can cook can work in a restaurant. For many people, certainly as you go down the generations, it’s a step on a ladder. So as immigrant families have kids and grandkids here in America, and immigration patterns in their home countries change, some food items, and hence some types of restaurants, will simply no longer exist quite the way they once did.
Do you know how people sometimes talk about the best ice cream or pancakes or pizza or what-have-you that they ever had, back in 1950 or 1960, and how nothing served anywhere today is quite the same? Perhaps their taste buds or memories are faulty, or perhaps they’re just tasting nostalgia. But it’s possible that bits and pieces of tacit knowledge held by first- or second-generation immigrants explain these impressions. That in some way, those folks’ disappointment with modern cuisine may be warranted.
Is some subtle but real bit of culture, something not quite possible to distill down into written steps, vanishing? Is this why my local Chinese takeout joints are quiet? Maybe. And if it is, it just underscores how much goes into something as common as a strip-mall takeout joint, and why the appreciation of a commonplace thing is a difficult but rewarding sort of virtue.
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