In my somewhat limited experience, it seems like sweet and sour chicken is pretty ubiquitous across Europe. But I’m not sure if it’s necessarily the most popular.
In America, General Tso’s chicken is the most popular dish. I don’t think I’ve seen it in Europe, or it at least had a different name (it’s basically like sesame chicken but a little spicy). I’d say some other very popular dishes in the U.S. are beef & broccoli, Kung Pao chicken, fried rice, and lo mein. For appetizers, egg rolls and crab rangoon.
18 comments
Usually you choose month menu which is every month another selection of the favorite dishes from Chinese restaurant. Some of those favorite dishes are sateh, springrolls, Chinese tomato soup, egg foo young, Babi pangang. Tjap tjoy. The dishes are served with either bami goreng or nasi goreng.
I think migration history heavily influences the food scene in a country. We don’t have many Chinese restaurants. There are many “Asian restaurants” that are just a quick bite of fried noodles with sprouts, greens and soy sauce. You can often find those at food courts and train stations.
The last time I was at a Chinese restaurant it was on a day they had a buffet. I’m a big fan of peanut sauce. Fried banana is a bit too sweet for my taste.
Soups, spring rolls, shrimps and duck are quite common too.
[Scotland’s favourite Chinese dish is crispy shredded beef in sweet and sticky sauce except soft instead of crispy, whole instead of shredded, spicy instead of sweet, dry instead of sticky and prawn instead of beef.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCPNzv1j80)
Mongolian beef, Cantonese crispy fried chicken, or sweet and sour chicken, spring rolls, etc. You can also change the meat to pork or duck in some dishes.
There is a funny sounding dish called Ants Climbing A Tree, but I haven’t tried it yet. In general, Chinese food here is not spicy, compared to some Thai food restaurants and their curries..
Here we don’t actually have restaurants specializing in Chinese cuisine, they’re rather some Asian fusion style restaurants selling dishes from different Asian cultures. Noodles and sushi are the most popular choices among Greeks. Yes I know sushi is not Chinese btw
I haven’t eaten at a Chinese restaurant for almost a decade, Thai restaurants seems to be more popular.
But we usually ordered *Four Small Dishes*, which included:
* Vegetable spring rolls
* Fried shrimp balls
* Beef, mushroom, and bamboo stew
* Sweet and sour chicken
* Plus rice
To desert we always got fried banana with ice cream.
The dish *Three Small Dishes* (exclude the springrolls) was invented sometimes in the 1960–80s by the Chinese chef Liu Wan Chong at his restaurant *Kinesiska Muren* (“The Great Wall”) in Gothenburg, Sweden. His motto was cheap, much, and good food.
I usually get fried rice with egg, shrimp and chicken. If we go to the really fancy Chinese restaurant we get peking duck
Probably chicken Kung Pao, fried rice, or those deep fried chicken balls.
Usually they’re not that great since we don’t have the proper fresh ingredients, and also most Chinese restaurants are mainly about cheap prices, less about quality…
We had a bunch of purely Chinese restaurants in the 90ties. Back then things like pork sweet sour was a staple, also fried noodles with chicken or pork and a bunch of similar dishes.
Nowadays most have switched to Asian fusion all you can eat buffets, some with assemble your own dish and watch the cook grill it kitchens. Haven’t been to a real Chinese restaurant for ages due to this. From what I can tell 99 % get the stuff from the same Asian wholesale operator, as all esentially look the same and taste the same. Interesting side note was a few years ago the Austrian authorities busted several secret dumpling production sites in private apartments where unregistered Chinese slave labourers produced hundreds of thousands of Chinese dumplings.
“British” Chinese food tends to be Cantonese or Szechuan in origin, usually.
So you get lots of takeaways and restaurants doing very similar things like Foo Yung dishes, Chow Meins, Chop Suey etc.
Or dishes with a meat / seafood choice served with mushrooms, or ginger and spring onions, or sliced pineapple. All served accompanied with your choice of Rice, noodles or chips.
Spicier stuff like Crispy Chilli Beef will be on the Szechuan side of things.
[This blog from Foodhub](https://blog.foodhub.com/top-10-most-popular-chinese-dishes-in-the-uk/) gives a reasonable idea of the 10 most popular Chinese dishes in the UK. I’m fairly sure I could find them on the menu in restaurants or takeaways across the country.
Have you read about the history of General Tao’s? It is a recent invention and tied up in the civil war: https://www.npr.org/2007/02/28/7639868/the-strange-tale-of-general-tsos-chicken
Chinese restaurants are usually run by Vietnamese people here. No idea what is most popular, but most people I know love chrumkavé kura aka crunchy/crispy chicken.
So this is an interesting one, we do have a fair amount of actual Chinese people in Sweden so a Chinese restaurant (or the ones that just call themselves ‘Asian’) has a fair chance of having Chinese staff (by the way sushi places are very often Chinese-run). The food is Chinese-inspired but heavily modified for European tastes.
Spring rolls are a stable, as are fried chicken dishes like Cantonese crispy chicken or sweet-and-sour chicken. There are shrimp versions of chicken dishes available, often beef as well. Since most such restaurants advertise themselves as ‘Asian’, there are usually non-Chinese dishes like teriyaki chicken or pad thai. In most traditional European cuisines, spicy food is totally absent and Asian restaurants adapt by cooking versions with no spices and then a ‘spicy’ version that means almost no spice by actual Chinese standards (there are exceptions, a few restaurants will serve genuinely spicy food).
I’ve made a couple Chinese friends and it’s been an interesting experience dining with them. They know which restaurants have staff that can cook authentic food so if I follow my Chinese friends there, it’s possible to get more genuine dishes that aren’t on the menu. Standouts I’ve gotten to try tea egg, xiaomian noodles and several types of steamed buns (baozi). I like spicy food, by European standards, but Chinese standards are definitely something else – I’ve joined a homemade hotpot dinner that my friends toned down to “just a little spicy” and it was about as much as I can handle.
The most popular dishes served in Chinese restaurants in Italy are, imo, spring rolls, chicken with almonds, and fried ice-cream.
* beef or pork stew with mushrooms and bamboo
* chicken curry stew
* sweet and sour chicken
* spring rolls
* chicken pieces in dough
* [cabbage carrot salad](https://kuchnianawypasie.pl/surowka-jak-od-chinczyka/)
It sounds like westernized Chinese food from reading the comments here.
Many times a Chinese restaurant, in a western country, will offer non-authentic food because their customers will probably only order that. They need to make money to stay in business. Also authentic ingredients can be harder to source.
Some restaurants will offer authentic food in the non-buffet offerings. This may be on the menu or you may need to ask about it.
I think it would be helpful to introduce authentic dishes. But that takes time for the public to adjust to. It would be easier to do that now instead of 20 years ago.
We don’t have a lot of actual Chinese restaurants; almost all Chinese restaurants here are a generic western influnced hot pot of vaguely Asian dishes.
There are some dumpling restaurants but if you’re asking besides dim sum I can honestly only answer for me and I usually get Laziji
LOL.
There is kinamat but is hard to really call it Chinese food in a real sense.
I know some Chinese restaurant owners, they just get generic American-Chinese “wok sauce” and stir fry random shit in that and call it “Sichuan” or “Kung Pao”
I lived in Norways second largest city. It got its first authentic Chinese restaurant 2 years ago and it has already had to adjust its menu to suit to more local tastes. It was originally billed as a Yunnan restaurant but there are only 3 Yunnan dishes left on the menu now.
There is a local restaurant that has a Chinese-only menu separate from their normal menu, and you have to message them on WeChat or call them 24 hours in advance so they can get ingredients to make Chinese food.
I’ve been to “Chinese” restaurants where they have told me “sorry we don’t serve Chinese food” and restaurants where they told me “we actually cook all our food ourselves here.”
There are some options in Oslo and they’re okay. There’s a restaurant called Shanghai 2k18 that I thought was decent but was very surprised that despite the name they only served Sichuan food and no shanghainese food.
I just recently moved to USA and you guys do certain Chinese cuisines better in California than we do in Taiwan. There’s a Northern Chinese restaurant here that is run by a lady whose restaurant I used to go to back when we both lived in Taiwan. Chinese food in USA vs Chinese food in Norway/Germany really can’t be compared.
That said, I’ve been in USA since August and have never seen the General Tso’s Chicken you mentioned on a menu here, and we eat Chinese food at a restaurant maybe 4-8 times a week.