Kung Pao chicken in Beijing is the perennial sichuan dish that you can barely find in chengdu (and even then, it's just for the eastern tourists).
Most of the authentic Chinese resteraunts in the San Gabriel Valley are not in basements, but in strip malls. Heck, these days china town isn't the best place for Chinese food in most cities (seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Vancouver), rather some suburb they has a large rich Chinese population is. Most of the authentic food you get in American china towns are very old school Cantonese, while Chinese food is much more diverse than that.
The weird thing about Chengdu is that they don’t have kungpao chicken, which is actually just Beijing-style Sichuan food. You can have inauthentic Chinese food even China.
Sichuan cuisine in the Bay Area is atrocious compared to the real deal. Maybe Cantonese or Hunan fare better but unfortunately I don't like these cuisines nearly as much.
BTW, I'm neither American nor Chinese, so I don't have any national pride involved either way. I just happen to have spent multiple years in both countries.
You left out Millbrae. I don't think the grandposter tried very hard. There's definitely a number of proper Chinese places in that corridor, but the average ones do suck. That or the in-laws are looking for a specific region in China that isn't well represented in the bay.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley in LA is better than in China, since you can find a large number of regional cuisines all in one place, and the raw ingredient quality is higher when compared to mainland China.
Not sure where you are. But in Bay area, American Chinese cuisine and authentic Chinese cuisine are different genres. As a Chinese I never go to the former unless I have to.
Better to ask your Chinese colleagues for suggestion.
There has been an explosion of Authentic regional Chinese restaurants in the U.S. in the last 10 years or so. Even if that can't replace the Americanized Chinese takeaways that are closing it is much easier to find high quality Chinese cooking these days than ever before. Heck, take a place like Minneapolis that's not a particular hot spot for Chinese-Americans and there are probably 4-5 pretty decent Sichuan restaurants.
I'd argue after having lived in China and Hong Kong for numerous years that very few major western metropolises have proper authentic Chinese (and Chinese food is vast there's a huge amount of differences between regions).
For example, try getting proper cantonese dim sum in Paris or Barcelona. I only know 2 places in Paris that are halfway decent after having searched quite a bit. Or try searching for good Zhejiang food (the Hangzhou or ningbo style) in Europe.
And Chinese food in most of the US is bastardized to make it much sweeter and oily to conform to the taste there making it absolutely terrible and far from authentic.
I used to think this, but then I visited China and the food isn't that different from Chinese food in the US if you are comparing food from the corresponding region of China.
Yes Kung Pao Chicken is very different from Cantonese dishes, but that's because Kung Pao Chicken is from a different part of China.
It doesn't take such arcane rituals to find more "authentic" Chinese food in major US cities. Many Chinese restaurants serve both the Americanized dishes and traditional Chinese dishes. You just have to know what to order.
Seriously, though. California, and the Bay Area specifically, is one of the best places in the US to find authentic Chinese food. OP's spouse is just a snob. Sure, a lot of restaurants feel the need to put some "standard" dishes like General Tso's Chicken on the menu, just in case. You don't have to order those. Outside of tourist traps like SF Chinatown, Chinese restaurants mainly serve Chinese food to a predominantly Chinese clientele.
It's also hilarious to act like there is one authorative version of a Chinese dish.
China is 1 billion people over a large geographic area that has culturally exchanged for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years; at this point, the same dish can have many regional variations in preparation. The mapo tofu or kung pao chicken you find in its homeland of Chongqing is going to be very different from the versions of the dish served to locals in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. In that sense, American preparations of the same dish are adjusted to local taste and ingredient availability.
It isn't nearly that hard to find authentic Chinese food. It probably isn't on the menu because it doesn't sell, but most non chain Chinese restaurants are pretty capable of putting together a nice authentic meal.
That may well be true but it's hard for tourists to find them. My experience of "Chinese" food in San Francisco is that it's appalling, and in New York, my Chinese wife wasn't even willing to try it. Fortunately, tourists are usually very happy with "New York diners" and other exotic American restaurants, whose authenticity is unquestioned.
Most of the authentic Chinese resteraunts in the San Gabriel Valley are not in basements, but in strip malls. Heck, these days china town isn't the best place for Chinese food in most cities (seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Vancouver), rather some suburb they has a large rich Chinese population is. Most of the authentic food you get in American china towns are very old school Cantonese, while Chinese food is much more diverse than that.
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