In 1983 Tim Ma’s parents opened Bamboo Garden in Conway, Ark. It was a sideline – his mother was in graduate school and his father was a full-time medical technician. As the owner of the only Chinese restaurant in their small town, the Mas earned well in their first year. But it wasn’t without its setbacks. There was the brick hurled into her family’s home, the drunk driver crashing into the restaurant’s dining room, and the eventual arrival of the competition when their talented chef opened his own restaurant across the street.
The fighting the Mas endured influenced her son’s future career in the hospitality industry and his new restaurant, Lucky Danger. The Washington, DC diner he opened with Andrew Chiou in November reflects the Asian-American experience, he said.
“It’s a kind of respect for our elders,” said Mr. Ma of Lucky Danger. “That’s a bit of the mission here.”
Called “American Chinese” by a Chinese-American, Lucky Danger serves many of the American-Chinese classics Bamboo Garden once made – lo mein and fried rice dishes, orange beef, cashew chicken – as well as less conventional offerings prepared by the chef’s staff Inspired by tastes and experiences, including a Taiwanese-style omelette with dried radish and a whole branzino dish.
Lucky Danger is joining a new breed of American-Chinese takeaway restaurants that are redefining how this food is viewed. Historically, “most Chinese eaters really despised Americanized Chinese food,” said David R. Chan, a historian and archivist of Chinese food in America. The owners and chefs behind this new breed of restaurants are well aware of the long and complicated history of Chinese cuisine in the United States and take pride in its Americanized offerings. With a more modern focus on branding, marketing and operations, they are changing what Chinese take-away food can be.
“American-Chinese food is a really great example of how cultures come together,” said Lucas Sin, chef and co-owner of the Nice Day Chinese Takeout, which opened in New York’s West Village last summer. Growing up in Hong Kong and college in the US, Mr. Sin is fascinated by the kitchen’s ability to absorb influences from everywhere. Nice Day’s website describes American-Chinese food as “wonderfully inventive and tasty regional Chinese cuisine.”
The notion of American-Chinese food as a legitimate sub-category of Chinese cuisine is a relatively new and radical idea, according to Chan. This sensitivity is evident at Lucky Danger and Nice Day as well as in the take-away shops Mamahuhu and Lazy Susan in San Francisco, where the owners have dedicated themselves to the classics – at least from a culinary point of view.
“People write it off as ‘take away only,’ but what I see is a lot of ingenuity, observation and a lot of skill,” said Brandon Jew, the chief owner of the lauded Mister Jius in San Francisco and the owner of Mamahuhu, a casual American-Chinese restaurant that opened last January. “No question about it, that’s why people love it so much – because it was thought out the way it was done.”
Traditionally, meat is used sparingly to stretch vegetables and rice, an imaginative trademark of the kitchen. Even the exact way the chicken is cut for a sweet and sour dish adds to the overall dining experience, Mr Jew said. Inspired by historical recipes, the sweet and sour sauce in Mamahuhu is prepared with pineapple juice, honey and hawthorn berries, which give it an earthy taste and a reddish tinge.
“As much as I’m interested in mainland Chinese food because I cook for an American audience, I’m also interested in what Chinese chefs have been doing here,” he said.
The development of Chinese food in America dates back more than 150 years and can be traced back to the first wave of immigration in the 19th century, when most of the Taishan men found work in the United States. After taxes on foreign workers and violent attacks effectively deterred many immigrants from keeping jobs, some of them opened restaurants and offered humble stir-fries with no direct parallels in China, said Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, ” a history of Chinese food in America. Cooking was improvisational, a means of survival rather than a point of pride. Dishes like Moo Goo Gai Pan and Chop Suey – which roughly translates as “cross sections” – were the beginnings of a culinary tradition.
“The recipes, which are American-Chinese, were created by people who were forced to cook for a living,” said Ms. Lee, “and they developed a number of dishes to suit the American palate.” Many dishes followed one Formula: a protein known to American eaters, made with quick-seared vegetables, topped with a thick sauce and served with rice. The addition of bean sprouts, water chestnuts, and baby corn added texture and was considered an exciting novelty for non-Chinese eaters, Ms. Lee said.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 largely restricted mainland China’s influence on the cuisine. But it did not prevent the expansion of Chinese restaurants in America, which continued to expand into cities and suburbs. Chinese chefs adopted ingredients that had become fashionable in the United States, such as broccoli. The mid-20th century tiki bar craze, which fetishized an imagined South Pacific landscape, seeped through appetizers like the crab rangoon in American Chinese restaurants.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ushered in a new wave of immigrants from China and Taiwan, including trained chefs, introducing a wider variety of local cuisines to American diners and expanding the repertoire of Chinese cuisine in the United States.
“All of a sudden, you get what you could call authentic Cantonese food from Hong Kong,” said Chan. Yet even as they introduced dishes from provinces like Hunan and Sichuan (and opened restaurants with those names), catering to local palates often meant customizing them beyond recognition – a kung pao chicken that’s more sweet than spicy, or a deep fried cashew chicken born from a Springfield, Mississippi, restaurateur failure to tempt residents with Cantonese seafood dishes.
“Chinese restaurant owners are very resourceful,” said Chan. “They were able to find their niche quickly and move with the times.”
The emphasis on takeaway and delivery was just another attempt by these restaurateurs to “meet Americans where they were,” Ms. Lee said. In the 1970s and 1980s, the American family increasingly consisted of two working parents looking for convenient meals. While takeaway meals were largely limited to pizza and fast food, Chinese restaurants offered families more variety and healthier options, such as shrimp with snap peas and beef with broccoli, Ms. Lee said.
As the kitchen grew, there was a backlash. The “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” joke has long fueled the stigma surrounding the consumption of Chinese food and monosodium glutamate (MSG) – a flavor enhancer used in most processed foods. While some Sino-American restaurateurs are struggling to shake off the assumptions that American-Chinese food is cheap and inauthentic, and others have chosen to break away from the take-away model and become more upscale, the owners and cooks of Lazy Susan, Lucky Danger, Mamahuhu, and Nice Day Day pride themselves on the affordable and accessible heritage of the kitchen.
Hanson Li, a co-founder of Lazy Susan, remembered the Chinese restaurant he visited in Rochester, NY. It served Chinese home-style cooking such as Zha Cai Rou Simian – noodles with shredded pork and pickled mustard greens – and dishes from its immigrant parents, they would not have recognized as Chinese. But each “was delicious in its own way,” said Mr. Li.
Glazed and fried dishes like General Tso’s chicken, on the other hand, felt indulgent.
“For many of us, kids have enjoyed eating this Rangoon crab,” said Mr. Li.
The take-away-only menu at Lazy Susan, which opened in February, was designed by Eric Ehler, a chef and consultant, and celebrates this duality. The contrast between American and Chinese influences in the kitchen can best be demonstrated with the dish “Garlic-Broccoli” with sautéed Chinese and broad-crowned varieties.
Lazy Susan and Nice Day hope to add more locations to their business. The biggest challenge to growth is to train chefs to master the quick wok cooking that the kitchen requires – a skill not taught by American cooking institutes. According to Yong Zhao, a co-founder and CEO of Nice Day, America’s Chinese restaurants face a “generational cliff” as older operators retire and their children climb the economic ladder. But the demand for American-Chinese food has not decreased accordingly.
“I think people should keep craving and getting it, but it won’t be sustainable without a new generation of stewards,” said Mr. Zhao.
Lazy Susan, Lucky Danger, Mamahuhu and Nice Day look like the beginnings of this new watch. And their owners only learn from their predecessors – like Mr. Ma from his parents or Tiffany Yam, a co-founder of Lazy Susan, from her father David Yam, who has owned Chinese restaurants in the United States for almost 30 years.
“I think a lot of Asian restaurants generally serve a large menu and cannot handle it,” said Mr. Yam. “Doing everything well and improving it is better.”
Consistency is key, he said, something these newer restaurants have taken to heart. All four shops offer much leaner menus than a typical American-Chinese restaurant, which can often list more than 100 items. Ms. Yams Lazy Susan has a more reduced menu than any of her father’s restaurants.
Despite the many challenges a budding food stand may face – opening during a pandemic among the toughest – Mr. Yam is proud of his daughter’s decision to get into the business of making Chinese food and is happy to share trade secrets.
“He’s really happy now because I call him, ‘Dad, how did you make your crab rangoon?'” Said Ms. Yam.
Recipes: Cashew Chicken | Sweet and Sour Pork | Crabs Rangoon