From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States by Haiming Liu

Author:Haiming Liu [Liu, Haiming]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780813574776
Google: Az1TCgAAQBAJ
Published: 2015-09-09T16:54:39+00:00

Hunan Restaurants in New York

In Ang Lee’s film Wedding Banquet, the scene was in New York rather than in Taiwan. The movie was about how a young gay Taiwanese immigrant in New York planned a fake marriage to placate his parents. While the plot depicted family relationships, the movie also reflected how Chinese food followed Taiwan immigrants to the United States. When the parents arrive in New York, the family eats in a Chinese restaurant, which is coincidentally owned by a former subordinate of the father, who is a retired senior military officer. The restaurant is not a cheap chop suey house in Chinatown but a trendy, upper-scale, full-service Hunan cuisine restaurant located in Manhattan. The restaurant owner, of course, waives the charge and adds two more dishes, one of which is General Tso’s chicken, the most famous dish in Hunan cuisine in Taiwan, though the owner speaks in an obvious Shandong accent, a northern provincial dialect. The dish also figured prominently in another Lee film, Pushing Hands.⁴⁹ In his book Chinese Food: An Introduction to One of the World’s Great Cuisines, the food historian Kenneth Lo listed several dozens of basic Chinese dishes provided by Chinese restaurants overseas before the early 1970s. While chop suey and chow main were the very first two items, General Tso’s chicken was not on the list.⁵⁰ In Lee’s movie, however, General Tso’s chicken was a must dish that the restaurant owner wanted to serve to treat his former boss from Taiwan. The episode reflected changes in Chinese restaurants in New York in the 1970s. Authentic Chinese restaurants began to replace chop suey houses after the arrival of Taiwanese immigrants. Among various regional flavors, Hunan cuisine was the most visible and popular one, with General Tso’s chicken as its representative dish. It was listed on the menu of every Hunan restaurant in New York City.

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