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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

I hear chef celebrities say the same thing but frankly, these kinds of restaurants usually disappoint me, and precisely because of the paradox of choice.

Good chinese restaurants are the literal opposite of that philosophy: multi-page menus with hundreds of choices.

I don't want to pick between a meat I want but cooked in a way I don't care for vs a meat I don't want as much but cooked in a way I prefer. And that's why the chinese restaurants with large menus excel: they pretty much have every possible permutation and then some.

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I'd beg to differ. Really good Chinese restaurants in China tend to specialize ruthlessly, selling only a few items.

If anything, the "matrix menu" where you have X proteins in Y sauces for X*Y stir-fry combos is usually a "restaurant smell" indicating that they don't really care about the end product (satay salmon, anyone?).

> I'd beg to differ. Really good Chinese restaurants in China tend to specialize ruthlessly, selling only a few items.

What are you defining as "good"? Luxury restaurants?

Because I've been to hole in the wall restaurants in the middle of nowhere, and they'll have 20+ things on the menu and the food is generally delicious. I've been to higher end restaurants that have 8 pages or more. I've never seen anything with a tiny menu, except street stalls that only sell one or two items.

I'm definitely a person who prefers larger menus. Small menus make me worry more about what to order because it's usually 1 or 2 things I want, with 1 or 2 things I don't want in the same order. I also generally don't return because there isn't much else to try unless the few items are all appealing, which is rare. Longer menus at good restaurants keep me coming back to try new things.

I'd say 20 or 30 menu items is still a far cry from the usual American Chinese restaurant thing of four to six pages full of menu items in 8 point font.

My experience eating at hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Shanghai is that they put the menu up on a big board on the wall where everyone can see it. That tier of restaurant doesn't give you an individual menu. So the number of items is limited. You don't order a permutation of options; they list options and you order one of those. Some things come in multiple options (e.g. 孜然牛肉盖浇饭 "cumin beef served over a bed of rice", if present, is likely listed alongside 孜然羊肉盖浇饭 "cumin goat served over a bed of rice"), but those are just separate (adjacent) entries on the menu, not a "pick your meat" kind of thing.

Good = tasty! As a random example, Yang's Dumpling http://www.xysjg.com/ sells exactly one thing, shengjianbao dumplings, and all their outlets have lines out the door. Even the holes in the wall with 20+ items tend to focus on a well-defined theme, eg. you might have hand-cut noodles with a variety of toppings but little beyond that.

And yes, higher-end restaurants do tend to have longer menus, because in China these cater mostly to large groups and entertaining businessmen, and a key part of Chinese banquets is to order way too much food -- so much so that there's now an official CCP campaign to stamp out the practice.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/china-food-waste-o...

Literally permutating sauces does indicate low quality but that's just because chinese cuisine has so much diversity that a decent restaurant can offer a large variety of flavor profiles without really repeating itself. Personally I'm not so picky to specifically want salmon satay, but I am able to define some parameters, e.g. heaviness (steamed/stir-fried/deep-fried), spiciness, texture, types of proteins, ratio of food groups, etc and find a suitable combination of menu items.

Specialized restaurants can certainly be better at specific dishes, but at the same time, the lack of options can be detrimental. For example, my kids won't enjoy a meal all that much in a place that specializes in spicy hot pots. Or maybe one person in the party will think the food is too heavy or spicy, etc.

Right but the preparation for the meats doesn't really vary between most dishes and they're added as the last step.

Big marinating dishes of beef pork and chicken

Yes, permutations is the key word here. Mexican restaurants tend to have this kind of food - where they combine just a few different base ingredients (flour or corn tortillas, meats, cheeses, beans, rice, and various sauces and toppings) prepared in various ways and just call them different things, the permutations of which could be in the hundreds. Italian food is very similar in that regard. For this kind of food, having large, multi-page menus might make more sense.

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