> walked into a P.F. Chang's, and had General Tso's Chicken
To be a touch contrarian, I'd even argue that the kind of food served in some of the newer chain restaurants isn't even proper traditional American-Chinese food (which seems to have shown up sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century). One of the things I've come to appreciate after lots of travel and lots of <insertcountry>-Chinese food is how well developed and embedded American-Chinese food is as an American cuisine.
There's rough variants of it in Western Europe when you can find it, but it's a little different. But you can find an American-Chinese restaurant in almost every po-dunk country town across the entirety of America. I've been to places where the only places around to get prepared foods was a local gas station and a Chinese takeout. And the menu is both incredibly standardized, but quintessentially American.
P.F. Chang, Ka Pao, and a couple other of the new food places seem to be putting an effort to "de-ethnic" the food and make the preparation and presentation of it shift a bit more into familiar American diets. It's actually kind of hard to talk about without ending up confused with the words, but the nearest I can think of is a spectrum from:
<food somebody from China would recognize> - to - <food an American would routinely make for themselves>
These new Chinese dining places seem to shift a bit more to the American side, and lose some of that scrappy mom&pop Chinese takeout joint charm and replace it with fresh faced, often Caucasian college kids serving healthy optioned brown rice and not too spicy or oily (and not too tasty) variants of American-Chinese favorites.
America has a lot of very interesting quasi-ethnic cuisines that are no longer recognizable by the people from their origins, but also don't really exist outside of the U.S. in any meaningful way.
Some day, perhaps, we'll just think of it as "food" and it'll be solidly on the right of that weird spectrum, much in the way Ramen is thought of as "food" in Japan even though it's also Chinese-Japanese cuisine. P.F. Chang's is a step towards Ramenizing American-Chinese food, but it still makes me feel a bit sad.
My only hope is the more recent trend of more "authentic" regional and modern Chinese cuisine finally starting to show up as a new wave in the U.S. Non-scary (for Americans), high quality, and tasty Chinese foods are starting to appear in American cities, often with an American-Chinese section on the menu.