Would you say most Chinese restaurants in your city serve authentic Chinese food, more stereotypical Chinese-American food, or something else all together?

13 comments

1. As authentic as it gets in Austria I reckon. Lot of chinese restaurants in the closest thing we have to a China Town which mainly serve to chinese customers.

2. In my city (milan) yes, as there is a Chinatown and there are bunch of normal Chinese restaurants aimed at the Chinese population.you can still pay in euros but mostly they prefer alipay or something. I got there occasionally pay 3.5 euros for unlimited buffet and ots as authentic as it gets. Its more of a buffet cafeteria than a restaurant and you can smoke inside coz eh. But yes.

3. I am not entirely certain what you would call it, but most ‘chinese’ restaurants in germany are far removed from anything you could call authentic. The vast majority are all-you-can-eat-restaurants (and, on the flip side, nearly all all-you-can-eat-restaurants in germany are chinese), which offer all sorts of deep-fried meat, chips and so on, together with asian noodles, rice, some soops and such things. Offering exotic kinds of meat like kangaroo and crocodile is also popular, usually combined with a live grill where you can order portions of meat to be freshly made.

   That being said, in _my_ city there is actually an, as far as I can tell, pretty authentic chinese restaurant. But outside of the major cities they are so rare that I might as well just have doxxed myself.

4. Why would we have Chinese-American food when we’re not in America?

5. I would call it stereotypical Chinese-Polish food or stereotypical Asian-Polish food. The characteristic thing about Chinese restaurants in Poland is that they always serve the same [cabbage-carrot salad](https://www.dietamojapasja.com/2020/10/surowka-jak-od-chinczyka.html). It’s even called “a salad like from a Chinese restaurant” or something similar. You usually find this kind of restaurant in shopping malls next to things like McDonald or kebab so I think that it’s quite popular.

6. It is mostly Chinese-Indonesian. Indonesian food was always popular in the Netherlands, due to colonization. When a large influx of Chinese workers immigrated here in the mid 20th century, they noticed that and since then a lot of “Chinese” restaurants were opened serving mostly adapted Indonesian food.

   The last two decades or so more traditional Chinese restaurants openend up and most Dutch people now know that ordering “Chinese” is actually ordering “Indonesian”.

7. Chinese food here isn’t Chinese American, it’s Chinese mixed with specifically the kind of Indonesian food Netherlanders like.

8. The vast majority are Chinese-American, but there’s a few aimed at Chinese customers that serve the real deal.

   Once I went to a place that had been originally an Andalusian tavern, but that had been bought by Chinese and transformed into a cheap diner for Chinese workers. They had left the original decoration though, so the walls had a bull’s head, guitars, flamenco posters and shit, but there were like a hundred Chinese dudes eating in long tables. One of the most surreal places I’ve been to.

9. Well, I’m not sure how Chinese-American food compares to Chinese-Scottish or Chinese-British (do we have different Chinese food from the rest of the UK? I’ve no idea)…

   Either way I’m pretty sure what we can get here isn’t remotely authentic to any region of China.

10. Definitely not Chinese American food, but the Chinese food here is mostly adapted to fit our country. Mostly a mix of semi Chinese with Indonesian like food.

11. Chinese restaurants where I live are mostly all-you-can-eat restaurants and you have a little bit of everything. Chinese food of course, but also a lot of SEAsian food and some japanese sushis too. I go there sometimes but it’s far from being as good as “real” homemade asian cuisine. There are more traditional asian restaurants in my city too but I’ve only tried one of them and it wasn’t chinese.

12. Born and raised in Nice but living in Papeete, the capital city of Tahiti, French Polynesia. I’ll focus on Tahiti because I think it’s more interesting. Here, it’s pretty traditional southern Chinese cuisine but over time (the first Chinese arrived in the XIX° century to work in cotton fields and kept coming ever since), Chinese culture and cuisine more or less became a part of tahitian cuisine (a really big part of the population has chinese origins to some extent). So in a basic Chinese restaurant here, you won’t have general tso’s chicken, fortune cookies or other Americanized Chinese food like that but it’s not all traditional neither. Of course you get the Cantonese classics but there are also local specialties born from a mix of cultures. For instance, a best seller at Chinese restaurant and more broadly any snack or restaurant here is “ma’a tinito”, which literally means “Chinese food” in tahitian. It’s a dish that was made by chinese workers (who were very poor) consisting of every thing they could find. The base is rice and you add different sauces and beans, pork, chicken, noodles, macaroni, vegetables,… Kind of like a chili con carne but Asian and with EVERYTHING you have and there’s no problem with having 3 feculents. Pua’a rôti (Pua’a is tahitian for pork and rôti is French for roasted) is another popular dish inspired by chinese immigrants that’s more or less local. Then you have “not traditional” local kinds of chow mein (written Chao men here). Local fillings to dumplings and steamed bread,… Poulet au citron (fried chicken with lemon sauce) that exists in China and other places I think is probably the most popular Chinese dish here. I’m not really expert but basically it’s Cantonese cuisine with French and Polynesian ingredients and techniques and sometimes, the Chinese traditions are kinda kept untouched. But sometimes, it looks nothing like Chinese. Also, Chinese people today feel very well accommodated to the tahitian society and many many people are actually Chinese, even if just 1/4 or 1/8, and outside of the Chinese restaurants, the distinction between Chinese food, French food and tahitian food (or even Italian, Japanese or Vietnamese food) isn’t very clear. People go the snack and eat pizza, steak frites, Chao men, sushi, nem or po’e (Polynesian fruit puddings) at the same place without paying much attention to where is what from. It doesn’t mean everything is good though. Being from Nice, it’s kinda sad I never eaten good pasta here while I used to live 30 minutes from Italy 🙁

13. Most places that serve vaguely Asian food serve stir-fried noodles or rice and some sweet and sour pork or chicken. There are a few Chinese restaurants in Moscow that serve proper Chinese food, which is measured by the proportion of Chinese visitors eating there.