Kung Food

[mickey]

Greetings Gene,

A few weeks ago, I sent out an email to the Wah Lum people in Florida, asking if GM Chan would consider writing a cookbook. Judging from the documentary on him, the guy can burn!

mickey

[GeneChing]

I hope he writes that book, mickey. It would be an amusing adjunct to his legacy.

Here's an amusing Washington Post article I stumbled over while reading lunch.

We analyzed the names of almost every Chinese restaurant in America. This is what we learned
By Roberto A. Ferdman and Christopher Ingraham April 8 at 6:01 AM


(Credit: Rachel Orr/The Washington Post; iStock)

A funny thing happened when reporter Jennifer 8. Lee showed the man who invented General Tso's Chicken what had become of his dish: He was appalled.

"That's not right. This isn't authentic," he told her, an interaction she chronicled in her 2009 book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.

General Tso's Chicken might be the most popular Chinese dish in the western world, but like so much of the Chinese food Americans eat, it's the product of a telephone game we play with foreign cuisines.

In many ways, this has turned American Chinese Food into a cuisine of its own, an amalgam of dishes that either barely resemble the authentic versions that inspired them or resemble traditional Chinese dishes not at all. (This isn't a new concept—others have suggested it, too).

And that cuisine is vast, at least in terms of its reach. There are a lot of Chinese restaurants in this country. Tons of them! Somewhere around 50,000, according to Lee, who likes to point out that there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy's—combined.

But the dishes aren't the only thing that defines the landscape of Chinese food in the United States. Another constant is something you might have noticed anecdotally: the restaurant naming structure.

In the same way that opening up a new Chinese restaurant without any of the food staples Americans already love might make it difficult to woo customers, launching one without the sort of name people have come to expect could throw things off, too.

Americans have been trained to expect Chinese food at places with names like “Golden Dragon Buffet.” If you were to open a Chinese restaurant named like “Dorchester Meadows” it would probably tank.

Lee points out that this isn't specific to Chinese restaurants. The widespread use of certain phrases and words, she says, is characteristic of many cuisines, including not only other Asian ones, but also European ones.

Still, we wanted to quantify exactly what the vernacular of American Chinese restaurant names sounds like. To do that, we needed a database containing all of the country's Chinese restaurants. And we were able to get it -- or something pretty close to it -- from Yelp.

The crowdsourced review company provided us with geolocated names of close to 40,000 Chinese restaurants. And after sifting through the data, some interesting patterns became clear.

The single most frequent word appearing in Yelp’s list of Chinese restaurants is, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Restaurant.” “China” and “Chinese” together appear in the names of roughly 15,000 restaurants in the database, or over one third of all restaurants.

“Express” is the next-most popular word, showing up in the names of over 3,000 restaurants. But as with “Panda” (2,495 restaurants), the numbers for “Express” are inflated by the Panda Express restaurant chain, which has over 1,500 locations.

“Wok,” another popular naming option, was represented in over 2,500 restaurant names. “Garden,” “House” and “Kitchen,” meanwhile, are the three places that appear most often in Chinese restaurant names.

Interestingly the word “New” comes in at #11 on the list, appearing in the names of over 1,500 restaurants like “New Fortune Chinese Restaurant” and “New Chef Huang Buffet.” But the word “old” only appears 31 times, in restaurants like “Old Peking” and “Old Sichuan.”

The most popular color appearing in the list is “Golden” (1,238 restaurants), and other than “Panda” the most well-represented animal is “Dragon.”

Rather than rattle off a huge list of words, we’re just going to show you the word cloud below, which represents the 100 most frequently appearing words in Yelp’s database of Chinese restaurants.



These 100 words make up the lexicon of American Chinese restaurant names. They're the words American consumers unconsciously scan for when they drive through an unfamiliar town with a hankering for some General Tso's, the indicators American Jews look for when satisfying their Christmas-time craving. Search for them on Google, and you might find the nearest place you can order Chinese take-out from.

The other thing we can do with Yelp’s data is map it. Below, for instance, is a county-level map of the number of Chinese restaurants in the United States.



Yes, this is essentially a population map – where there are people, there are Chinese restaurants. But if we want to get a little more specific, we could note that the the number of Chinese restaurants in a county looks like more a function of the county’s Chinese-American population, which the Pew Research Center mapped not too long ago.

We can also map the number of restaurants on a per capita basis, which corrects for population to some extent. Here’s what that looks like.



The Northeastern states, Nevada and San Francisco’s Bay Area are the big standouts here, as well as parts of Hawaii and Alaska. There are a lot of sparsely populated counties in the middle of the country that stand out on this map too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re hotbeds of Chinese cuisine. Rather, when you only have a few thousand people living in a county, it only takes one or two restaurants to end up with a sky-high per capita number.

Taken together, though, these maps do show the surprising ubiquity of Chinese restaurants all across the country. Unless you’re smack in the middle of that Chinese food desert running from North Dakota to West Texas, you’re never really that far from Chinese cuisine -- or from the very specific words that denote that cuisine in the American imagination.


Roberto A. Ferdman is a reporter for Wonkblog covering food, economics, and other things. He was previously a staff writer at Quartz.

Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

[mickey]

Greetings Gene,

Thank you for that last post. I remember reading that General Tso's Chicken was a New York thing. I did some research on it after you posted: eye opening. I learned what we now call it used to be called General Ching's chicken. I remember seeing that on a menu a very long time ago.

mickey

[GeneChing]

There was that documentary on General Tso's chicken. I thought we mentioned it here somewhere on the forum, but I can't find it just now (not that I searched that hard - it's late Friday, whaddyawant? ) That doc came up on Netflix I think, and I was planning to watch it but I didn't. Maybe someday when I run out of Kung Fu movies there. Like that's ever going to happen...

[GeneChing]

Inventor of General Tso's Chicken dies in Taipei at age 98

The inventor of General Tso's Chicken and founder of famous Taiwanese Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden died in Taipei on Wednesday

By Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
2016/12/02 18:00

Chef Peng Chang-kuei (彭長貴), the founder of the famous Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden Hunan Restaurant (彭園湘菜館) and inventor of the world famous Chinese dish General Tso's Chicken, died on Nov. 30 at the age of 98 from Pneumonia.

A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, Peng began training at the age of 13 under the tutelage of the famous Hunan chef Cao Jing-chen (曹藎臣), who was the family chef of Tan Yan-kai (譚延闓), the prime minister of the Nationalist government from 1926 to 1928. After WWII, he was put in charge of running Nationalist government banquets, and in 1949 he fled to Taiwan after the Nationalist forces were defeated by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War.

According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish.

The admiral was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called, he thought quickly on his feet and said "General Tso's Chicken" (左宗棠雞).

Peng chose the name to honor General Tso, a famous military leader from Hunan who helped put down the Taiping Rebellion as well as other rebellions in the 1800s during the Qing Dynasty. He was well respected not only for his successes on the battlefield, but also for his contributions to Chinese agricultural science and education.



In the 1973, he opened a restaurant in New York City, where he began to gain the attention of officials from the nearby United Nations headquarters, including U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was very impressed with his cooking. It was because of these high profile visits that media outlets started to report on his restaurant, including the New York Times, which ran one of the earliest published accounts of the dish in 1977:

"General Tso's thicken was a stir‐fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature, and dragon and phoenix was a combination of pearly, dewy fresh lobster chunks on one side of the platter and stir‐fried chicken with peanuts on the other."

In 2014, a documentary film was released called "The Search for General Tso" directed by Ian Cheney that explored the origins of what has become an iconic dish in Chinese restaurants across the United States and even the world. The film first shows how Americans are generally clueless about the origins of the dish and then visits China, where Chinese are equally ignorant of the existence of the dish. It then covers the exploits of the real General Tso in Hunan, where the filmmakers find that the general had a number of favorite dishes, but the modern sweet fried chicken incarnation was not among them.

The documentary then covers the history of Chinese immigration in the U.S. and how the Chinese Exclusion Act forced Chinese into self employment, leaving them few options other than opening laundries and restaurants. To gain customers Chinese restaurants started modifying their dishes to suit American palates, by deep frying them, adding sugar, and including extras like fortune cookies.

After the thawing of relations between China and the U.S. after Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972, the film pointed out that there was a resurgence of interest in Chinese food and there were a number of restaurants that began to try and cash in on the new craze. Among them was Michael Tong, who opened Shun Lee Palace in Manhattan, and in 1973 introduced General Tso's Chicken to the menu for which his establishment received a four-star review from the New York Times.

The documentary revealed that businessmen from Shun Lee visited Peng's restaurant in Taipei in 1971 and brought back several dishes "inspired" by Peng's, including General Tso's Chicken. The dish's original creator, Peng, tried to open his own chain of restaurants in New York, but was not as successful as his rival, choosing eventually to return to Taiwan where his Hunan-style restaurant chain continues to thrive to this day.

I don't eat chicken anymore but I do remember General Tso's chicken being tasty.

[GeneChing]

I'm posting this on the Kung Food thread and also copying this for its own indie thread: General Tso.

[GeneChing]

1.23 kg = 2.71 lb = 10+ quarter pounders.

Tourist wins gold after devouring 1.23 kg of fried bugs in under five minutes
BY SHANGHAIIST IN NEWS ON JUN 27, 2017 6:45 PM



One man took extreme eating to the next level over the weekend, consuming 1.23 kilograms of deep fried insects at a competition held in the tourist city of Lijiang.
The man, surnamed Peng, stuffed his face with fried grasshoppers and worms, devouring more than a kilogram in under five minutes. His prize: a 24K gold bar and some (pretty strange) bragging rights.
Peng hails from Chongqing, but adventurous eaters from all around the country showed up on Sunday to take part in the competition while dressed up in traditional costumes.




The scenic town of Lijiang, located in China's southwestern Yunnan province, has a long history of eating bugs, including bamboo worms, locusts, dragonflies, and silkworms. Locals there have recognized creepy crawlies like bee larvae, grasshoppers and cicadas as excellent sources of protein for centuries.
According to the news site Yunnan.cn, Peng took one bite of the Lijiang delicacy and proclaimed it "delicious."



Others at the competition weren't as convinced. The same website reports that some tourists had to close their eyes before digging into their plate of bugs.
One woman from Guangdong had to quit after eating 500 grams of assorted insects, saying that some of the black insects "tasted terrible" and that all the bugs were "too dry." She was reportedly an experienced bug eater, consuming worms occasionally at home.




The competition's popularity reflects a growing worldwide obsession with eating bugs. Even in the West, where they are typically considered a taboo food reserved only for extreme foodies, insects are becoming more popular.
American companies like Exo and Chapul, who make protein bars made out of crickets, have gained millions of dollars from investors in recent years, but for the people of Lijiang, eating bugs is nothing out of the ordinary.



Just be glad they weren't alive when Mr. Peng gulped them down.
By Caroline Roy
[Images via ECNS / ChinaNews]

[GeneChing]

Another Film Yanked From Chinese Cinemas After Poor Opening, Producers Vow Rerelease
11:45 PM PDT 8/23/2018 by Patrick Brzeski


YouTube screengrab
'Kung Food'

The case of family animation 'Kung Food,' which opened to just $420,000 despite the support of powerhouse studio Beijing Culture, echoes the recent debacle of 'Asura,' China's biggest flop ever.
Chinese studio Yi Animation had high hopes for its first feature film release, Kung Food, an adaptation of a popular children's TV series about an adventurous steamed dumpling.

But after the animated film opened to just $420,000 last weekend — after costing $12 million and more than half a decade to develop and produce — the company and its partners resorted to desperate action. On Monday, the film was pulled from cinemas, with the director posting an apology to social media, saying he would make changes to improve the film and attempt to release it again.

Kung Food opened in a crowded weekend, facing off against the debut of Sony's big-budget animated feature Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (which has earned $23.1 million to date), as well as Warner Bros' holdover giant shark hit The Meg ($136 million) and Chinese blockbuster The Island ($180 million). Still, the severity of Kung Food's flop surprised many in the Chinese industry, given that the title was marketed and distributed by Beijing Culture, a local studio which has been on a two-year hot streak. The company was one of the lead producers of Dying to Survive ($450 million), China's biggest hit this summer, as well as the 2017 mega-blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 ($870 million).

"Pulling the film was a mutual decision between the production company and distributor," wrote Sun Haipeng, Kung Food's director, in his apology post. "We only hope that after many years of effort, our film will be seen by more audiences. We will upgrade the film during this period of time, and when it is released again, everybody will see a more complete and better work."

The Kung Food episode echoes the recent, curious case of Asura, the Alibaba-backed fantasy epic now known as China's biggest flop ever. Produced at a cost of over $110 million, Asura opened to a disastrous $7 million in July, prompting producers to pull the film and allege that its release had been sabotaged. A representative for Zhenjian Film, the movie's lead producer, later told local media that changes would be made to the movie and it would eventually be rereleased (no updates have followed).

If either Asura or Kung Food do manage to get released a second time — and do so successfully — the producers will be setting an entirely new precedent for the film business. Classic movies and cult favorites have been rereleased fruitfully in various territories around the world — the best examples include George Lucas's lucrative Star Wars rereleases and James Cameron's 3D update of Titanic, which earned a huge $145 million in China in 2012. But industry insiders would be hard-pressed to come up with a single example of a film has been widely embraced by audiences after flopping, undergoing changes, and trying to open again ("Films are among the most perishable of products — a one shot thing," an analyst told THR in the wake of Asura's meltdown).

Unlike Asura, which features a boldly original story set in a mythical realm based on buddhist mythology, Kung Food was a big-screen take on an established piece of IP. The Kung Food television series, produced by the same Yi Animation in Guangzhou, has been broadcast on 120 Chinese satellite and terrestrial TV channels, including flagships like CCTV Children, Golden Eagle TV, and Kaku Children, as well as on leading online platforms iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video.

Like the TV series, the film version follows the adventures of Super Bao, an innocent and passionate steamed bun, who goes through untold hardships in a battle to save the world from flavorless food. Yi Animation had naturally hoped that affection for the established character would translate into big-screen success.

International film buyers and sellers may remember the project from the 2016 American Film Market in Los Angeles, where Yi Animation erected an enormous inflatable sushi roll character from the film outside of the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica.

THREADS
Kung Food
Asura