Chinese Food: Restaurant Food

Today, the United States boasts over forty thousand Chinese restaurants. Theirs is one of the most unlikely success stories in American culinary history. It begins in 1849, when a few Chinese adventurers arrived in San Francisco at the start of the California Gold Rush. By the end of that year, the city had three Chinese restaurants serving “chow-chow and curry, besides many genuine English dishes.” Miners liked the food because it was cheap and exotic but much preferred the western style of the menu. Chinese immigrants spread out through the American West, operating cheap cafes selling steak, fried eggs, and beans to whites. In the many Chinatowns, they opened restaurants serving the Cantonese dishes their countrymen were used to back in Guangdong province. San Francisco’s most elaborate Chinese eateries could stage banquets with one hundred or more courses featuring the most exotic imported ingredients. Tourists from the East liked to venture into these to sip tea and eat sweet dim sum pastries, but local whites largely stayed away. During the “Chinese Must Go!” movement of the 1870s and 1880s, many western Chinatowns were burned, and their residents fled back to China or to the big cities of the east. At the same time, new federal laws severely cut the flow of Chinese immigrants into the United States.