Chinese restaurants are closing – many owners are glad
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> “These people (Chinese immigrants) did not come to be chefs; they came to be immigrants, and cooking was the way they made a living.”
> “These people came to cook so their children wouldn’t have to, and now their children don’t have to.”
Basically, a story of the American dream, not too dissimilar to my own (european) family's story. Immigrants take on difficult work and long hours to provide their kids with opportunities they themselves didn't have. The natural result is they age out and their kids take on different occupations, the line of work they did changes to accommodate fewer people doing it.
New immigrants have more safety nets but fewer overall opportunities, I think, in particular if they came without professional skills. I recall the story of my grandfather and his brother who- during the great depression- drove halfway across the country on a small motorbike with nothing but a box of tools, trading a bit of mechanical work for some food and a night in a barn's hay loft along the way. They eventually stopped and worked as mechanics until they could open their own shop. That is the sort of thing that just seems unthinkable nowadays.
Now with a MacBook, you work in a comfy coffee shop to earn enough to stay at a regular motel for the night and get a regular meal.
Also, MacBook freelancing is a higher bar than handyman mechanical work. It requires literacy and training on some skill on the computer that puts you above the Mechanical Turk workforces in much cheaper countries.
Please elaborate.
26 states run their own programs as well which may or may not have different time requirements for accessing them.
Per the most recent census, a majority of non-citizen households utilize some public benefit (most often medicaid and food assistance) likely due to the difference in education (63% at 10 years living here).
If my grandparents had come here today, they would also certainly be making use of these programs. Since they came over roughly 20 years before the New Deal was passed, local community support was the best they had.
> The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
That is truly inspiring, I really like it.
"There is a huge cast of well-paid people, from management consultants to economic advisers, whose entire salaries are earned by ripping out Chesterton’s fences. Interestingly, these are mostly male-dominated industries (men are more prone to narrow systematising than women). Silicon Valley, which is overwhelmingly male, is possibly the worst offender of all. The very fact that a fence is over ten years old, requires atoms in its manufacture or creates employment for human beings is reason enough for them to want to get rid of it."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/chestertons-fence-and-th...
Each generation has it better than the last but at some point the knowledge of the fundamentals of life and success is lost and the process restarts.
Not a hard and fast rule of course, but an interesting concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefri_Bolkiah,_Prince_of_Brune...
Look, if you need a second moron stupid enough to do it, I'm just letting you know, I'm available.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_...
Say more, please. Interested in hearing your stories.
The 1980s don't seem that long ago, but back then there was not nearly the variety of foreign cuisines that there are now in the west. At the time you could still conceivably go to a Chinese restaurant for an "experience meal" where you would either enjoy some slightly different cooking, or bring a date or business connection. It even felt right that the owner's kids were running around, and there were kitsch pictures from China on the walls.
Back then the entry cost was very very low. You had either only family or other recent immigrant staff. You'd spend nearly nothing on the interior.
Nowadays that style of restaurant serves a very small segment of the market. Basically, it's the people in the area - not the town centre - that don't want to cook that night and didn't have Chinese the night before. They don't care about the decor, many of them do takeaway. They don't care about authenticity either. And they are well aware that this style of food is unhealthy in large quantities.
If you're going to open a restaurant these days, it needs a degree of slickness. People expect it, heck even I expect it. You can't have a bunch of spelling mistakes on your self-printed menus. You can't be showing tourist quality photos of the food, with plastic place mats and different cobbled together chairs. Plus people now care not only about general healthiness but also specific things like allergies and intolerances that your foreign chef might find hard to communicate about.
The competitive landscape is also changed completely. You're not competing with just other mom and pop stores. There's not only McDonald's, which was always a thing, but actual Chinese food chains that do what you do, better.
Finally, I don't know anyone who actively desired for their kids to take over. If the family business was a global shipping company, sure. But not the bottom-of-the-pile restaurant, surely. Having said that, one of my cousins did build and sell a restaurant, having made the observations I've written about here.
You have to get under the Chipotle line approximately in terms of population required to support that type of chain. The trade-off of course is potentially less volume (although also less competition).
Pasta Divina, Brussels. Highly recommended.
From just personal experience over the last two decades, the number of "authentic" Chinese restaurants has increased a lot in most of the places I've lived. So has the number of Thai/Korean/Japanese restaurants run by Chinese owners, as more savvy Chinese restauranteurs seek out higher margins.
The Chinese in the US at the time had to tailor their dishes for American tastebuds.
Previous Chinese immigrants were mainly from Southern China, where the cuisine is more rice based. The more recent Chinese immigrants come from everywhere, so you’ll get people from Northern China, where the cuisine is more wheat based. There’s even some Chinese dishes that uses goat milk and cheese in their dishes.
This might be a bit off topic now, but after watching Watchmen recently and learning about the Tulsa race riots, I was surprised by how much of US history I wasn’t taught. For example, I was surprised by how involved Chinese immigrants were in American history and learned of some of the more tragic events like the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles.
Huajiao is very unique among Chinese food ingredients. It is the so-called "numbing pepper", which produces a mild numbing feel on the lips and (in my opinion) enhances the spiciness considerably. It's really unfortunate that Americanized Sichuan food has had to do without this spice for nearly 50 years.
If you're a fan of spicy food, give real Sichuan food (with the huajiao peppercorns) a try sometime - you might be very surprised at the difference.
I've recently become enamoured of Szechuan food and the places near to me seem reasonably authentic judging my the unfamiliar ingredients and the predominantly Chinese clientele.
And the food is spicy and numbing. I believe the combination is called "Mala" meaning "Hot + cold" which describes it well. Szechuan peppers don't provide heat - they do something very strange to one's taste receptors. Chewing on one is a very peculiar experience a bit like eating something akin to savoury popping candy with a kind of menthol cooling plus a kind of "citrus on steroids" feeling.
It is a numbing or tingling effect. It makes us think that the tingling/numbing is due to spice/heat scoville level. This in turn starts a cascade of other symptoms that is involuntary and usually associated with too much spicy heat in the food..like sweating or increased heart rate or eyes watering etc. in pale skinned diners, it makes them really red in the cheeks and fully flushed as tho they are eating Chilli peppers at a very high scoville rating.
The interesting thing is that the numbing sensation ‘hijacks’ the neural feedback to the brain which releases a flood of endorphins because there is a cognitive dissonance..because heat/spice level is translated as pain in the brain.
It’s the neatest culinary hack. I used to be a chef before I drifted into farming. I take great pleasure in demonstrating this. Another one is Japanese Sansho pepper tree. Also from South America, spilanthese ..these button like flowers(they look like buds..they lack petals). do the same thing. It is also known as toothache plant as its used by herbalists for numbing of the mouth for dental pain/toothaches. I grew them in my farm for some years (I was selling to herbalists) and it was always a hit with school kids on farm tour.
But it’s not true that it was banned. Growing Sichuan pepper tree was banned for some years due to quarantine rules. At least here in CA, as an Ag state grossing 45 billion/year, it was a risk. Sichuan pepper isn’t a true pepper but it’s of the citrus family. The Asian Psyllid and citrus greening is devastating to CA’s citrus crop and they clamped down hard on citrus crops.
The ban was lifted some years ago. Altho the quarantine still exists between counties in CA. Example: I can’t buy a citrus plant from Sonoma county and plant it in my garden in Solano county. And this is even more significant because our vineyards would be devastated and they bring in a lot of $$ even though citrus is relatively small in CA. Only 250k acres. It’s tiny compared to lettuce, strawberries, almonds and pistachios etc. each one of 3-5 billion dollars in state ag income.
Japanese sansho is similar. There are many Asian cultivars that give the numbing effect. But Sichuan peppers are my favourite.
Yes, it was due to a concern over the huajiao’s potential to carry citrus diseases into the US. I think it’s fair to say it was banned for quite a long time and restricted thereafter.
I was approached by a restaurant group to grow it for them and I couldn’t. I suggested Japanese Sansho to which I had access..but it was just one tree..and it wasn’t an acceptable substitute. And then I tried with spilanthes/toothache plant which is an annual. And they didn’t like it either. But the herbalists co op said that they will take it all and so it wasn’t a complete loss for me. And I grew it for a few years.
Sichuan pepper is really an unique taste profile. I would very much like to grow it if possible in the future.
plus even if they use it sometimes it's completely burned not producing the buzz on lips, so you need to find good restaurant which won't burn it for that unique buzz on lips
By establishment numbers alone I'd say it's the most popular food group.
Modern immigrants and refugees, however, seem to have more education from their home countries. We got a wave of Syrian immigrants a couple of years ago, and many of these had degrees and careers before having to leave.
Now, a couple of years later, it seems that many of these are getting settled in with professional careers here.
It obviously depends on the country you come from, and your background, but I think the days of the classic immigrants are starting to end. 30-40 years ago some poor teacher or engineer pretty much HAD to start their own shop, to make a decent living - but now they can relatively fluidly continue with their careers - and thus get more freedom to pursue their own things, rather than getting pigeonholed into something else.
The old people buffet and the movie theater were the only things open in the mall.
However, I would like to posit that there are a couple of other points that make it impossible to operate a profitable restaurant today, especially in large cities: (a) ridiculously high rents (b) increased regulation.
But let's say you meant difficult rather than impossible. Rising rents make things more expensive for sure, but regulation? Which regulation? I worked in a restaurant for years and I can't think of a regulation I had to deal with that wasn't about food safety and employee protections...
This says there are zero profitable restaurants today, which, yes, is obviously false. I can think of several restaurants that do, in fact, turn a profit.
Would America had looked more like China if no check were placed on immigration from one particularly huge country? Sure travel costs, but as long as fees were paid via labor, people would have financed it. And the word would have spread that there's money to be made in USA...
You mean, like the United Kingdom?
Before world war 1, lots of the USA spoke German, some places much more than English. Then sentiments... changed, towards anglicizing the country.
A nation of 22 million was well advised to be careful
http://nwasianweekly.com/2009/07/historians-track-chinese-hi...
To be honest, most Chinese restaurants probably serve more vegetables (and roughly the same amount of fat and carbs) than a meal at a non-Chinese restaurant at the same price point.