THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT CHINESE FOOD
AND “ CHINESE BUFFETS”
Five Decades Ago — About five decades ago, when I first stated writing about things, It was a real treat when Mom said we were going out for Chinese Food. It was a restaurant about a block away and we knew the owners, people who were of all things actually Chinese. We had Chinese Restaurants with the usual soups, Egg Drop, Wonton, Hot and Sour, egg rolls and then something over white or fried rice like Shrimp in Lobster sauce, Hot right out of the wok and cooked to order over 700-1000 degrees of heat. And it was spot on, fresh, hot, safe to eat and delicious. that changed and the Chinese mixed buffet was born...
When I went on my journey to discover, “ What else is out there to eat” and add to my culinary skills and knowledge, much of it driven ( well courtesy of Military.GOV sailed or flew me there) westbound toward ASIA and brought to the US as foods supposedly typically called Chinese Food. Not what I saw there, but what was created here.
There are fewer Chinese style sit-downs and more buffets, and that brought us the “ Asian Fusion” as we assimilated more refugees from LAOS, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, added to some basic Chinese dishes like Egg and Spring Rolls, the usual soups, and lots of Chicken...
Few standalone Chinese full service restaurants exist today in my area, luckily my favorite Oriental habitat is ZOM HEE and on Park Blvd, going West just past Starkey Rd. ( about 100 yds on the right ) in Seminole Florida. The owners is three generations, thirty-five plus years I have been going there and they maintain their standards. I know Kenny, his Dad and even the kids help on weekends. He’s always busy, the foods great, consistent, bountiful and fresh, old school. Dad rules the kitchen and has for forty years. And it’s kept clean. The decor shows it’s traditional age, old school, and it’s nostalgic looking like places I ate in forty-five years ago. I think thats what I like about it… not that it’s the same in Hong Kong, A different world.
Countries of origin create a problem as those Cultures formulated what winds up on your plate and we all hope that rules and regulations put in place here in Florida by the Agricultural Department and county inspectors are followed to the letter and there are no exceptions because of health, ignorance, indifference or financial digressions…
ASIAN FUSION — OR ASIAN CONFUSION — Hardest hit during the pandemic were buffets. In this section I believe all six of those Chinese Buffets in my county and joining counties alone failed the food police tests. People are being more cautious, diets are changing due to obesity, trends change, authenticity challenged, poor service. Horribly it’s all true! See data.tallahassee.com
- Two of the largest held on for years, beyond belief and finally closed, I like many who served in the Asian Peninsula and it was like De-Za-Vu. But they soon opened up under another name or Brother-In-Law same scam, same dirt, new name…I bear witness to that fact, I have seen those discrepancies and the stale food they put out.
- What was OK back home does not work here and that led to four of them getting nailed for Human Trafficking, Some of the management failed to realize people in this country have rights. Even immigrants or students. A huge task force from Clearwater and Tampa got on their case and several went to jail. SEE TRAFFICKING
- I tried all of the places listed on my webpage for the writeup that normal food critics do. The food at that time was edible but over time after arrests, it went downhill from there. OK. They deserved to be fined, temporarily closed and for three of them forever. What bothered me the most was attitude, seeing ungloved food being handled and some of the bathrooms not exactly monitored and filthy would drive me up a wall. Those same bathroom were used by the help handling your food.
And thats not taken into consideration if the food had survived three days of heated-chiller-heated again-chiller-heated. We call that reconstituted leftovers… - Over 40,000 Chinese style restaurants are in strip malls or occupying real estate along crowded boulevards, more common than McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined. In places like New York, American-Chinese restaurants have deeply embedded themselves within the city’s cultural fabric thanks to garishly lit picture menus, trapezoidal takeout containers, and pork-fried rice with fries and chop suey. Differences between a Chinese restaurant in China and an Chinese-American restaurant…
- Bring people straight from China into the latter, and most likely they will be terribly confused by all the zodiac placemats, fortune cookies, and dishes smothered by an extremely generous amount of corn starch to thicken. I brought Me Lai to dinner at a buffet and she just stared. Little did we know that dairy products are seldom used in Chinese food, few dairies exit in China and that most of the take-out dishes she grew up eating can’t even be found in the mainland. “People in China don’t eat much fried rice. The bulk of these dishes were created by accident.
- Chop suey, for example, was invented in the nineteenth century by San Francisco chefs who threw a bunch of ingredients into a pan and unintentionally started a craze. It’s a money maker, rich, rice is cheap and filling. Many of these dishes were created using available ingredients at the time because chefs didn’t have much else at their disposal. The substitutions occurred mostly in the greens department: broccoli was swapped for kailan; carrots, peas, and white button mushrooms were put in place of mustard greens or shiitakes.
Americans lean toward white meat, whereas Chinese are more partial to dark which has more flavor… Good chefs cook with thigh meat for that reason, the meat had a better blood supply… Bones don’t make a frequent appearance on the American-Chinese menus. “Americans don’t like bones,” - Fortune cookies are Japanese,” and are based on a Japanese confection called “tsujiura senbei”. Kim Chi is a Korean one vegetable dish, heavily spiced, hot peppered Napa Lettuce and fermented, and not Chinese. I love KimChi But it has a problem with most alimentary canals, again being made from the NAPA cabbage, which takes a long time to break down and digest actually fermenting and drowned in Hot pepper sauce. With its popularity, It produces when in sleep mode, and with contact with the colon enormous amounts of gas. Soon we will see signs prohibiting KimChi lovers from riding in elevators. The retorts are vile, I do not eat it any more.
- Because of immigration patterns, Chinese restaurateurs in America traditionally represented a limited pool of people from areas like Fujian, Hong Kong, and Guangdong. This was the demographic that introduced recipes for Kung Pao chicken, Moo Shu Pork, and Orange Chicken—based off of Sichuan, Beijing, and Hunan dishes, respectively.
This has been changing over the last decade, especially with an influx of immigration from mainland China. You'll see different types of Chinese food trends in countries across the board. “In Thailand, there’s a heavy Chaozhou population. India is Hakka.” - There’s an unofficial network that connects American-Chinese restaurants across the nation. Kari-Out, makes most of the soy sauce packets in the United States. And much soy sauce is not soy-sauce. Fold-Pak is responsible for two-thirds of takeout containers. Chinese people don’t receive separate menus at American-Chinese restaurants; the only real “secret” is to speak the Chinese language. In the Mecca’s of food like NY and San Francisco you’ll find more authentic Chinese food. Many have in their name Golden, Garden, Lucky, and Happy in them. This isn’t incidental. In China, restaurant names aren’t chosen for their quirkiness, but rather for their auspiciousness. This practice has carried over even in America.
- The most interesting thing to me about Chinese restaurants in America is that while the food may undergo a dramatic transformation for the sake of the masses, the superstitions are left untouched. The crystal ball, the fat happy Buddha, that bowl overflowing with gold ingots—even the cat with the moving paws (which is Japanese in origin, not Chinese)? Those pieces aren’t just decorations. They’re fengshui tactics to bring in more money, superstitions that have been transferred down through family lines over centuries. So while Chinese people may compromise their food, they definitely won’t adjust their rituals involving superstitions. I would rather they work on the better food part…
TRANSFORMATIONS AND INDIGESTIONS
THE FAKE CHINESE BUFFET - Info gathered from many sources and amazingly true and dangerous
Confessions Of A Chinese Buffet Owner — Buffets had its roots in the Swedish smorgasbord, which was originally a spread of appetizers — usually meats and cheeses — offered before the main course — The Stockholm Olympics elevated the idea to the world stage in 1912, and the concept was expanded to include the main meal, with everything from soup and salad to dessert and more.
The Reason: Less servers needed, and less headaches with help, just add a few more cooks, more profitable, sometimes. Less Staff, Less training, you need less highly paid staff, Customers don’t get redo’s or returns, they don’’t like it, they dump it and get something else.
Same food cooked every day. Not chefs but cooks… Bulk food purchase including things like cheap sacks of vegetables and cheaper cuts of meat, beat to death and served, Odds are those who do eat the expensive stuff, like Crab Legs and goodies, there are many who don’t overeat and the crab legs are an attraction but few are good quality.
We’ve only got so much room in our stomachs, and buffets count on filling that space quickly with low-cost, high-carb foods. When you hit the Chinese buffet, what's first on the table? Probably the white rice, fried rice, and noodles.
Plate size is a huge factor in buffets, too. Most buffets will offer small, half-sized plates, ramekins for soup instead of bowls, and tiny dishes for desserts. That limits how much you can pile on your plate and carry, and once you’re back at your table you might rethink whether or not you really need that extra trip up to the line for another go.
One thing that’s probably huge, though, is the water glass. It’s essentially free for the restaurant, and it takes up space in your stomach. More expensive food items will typically be surrounded by cheaper ones, and some places might even go as far as to keep the expensive items only partially full, in order to encourage you to take less and more of the cheaper. That’s made even more effective by dividing expensive foods into smaller portion sizes.
So how can buffets minimize their food waste. Science. What you're going to eat is very predictable. The restaurant probably knows what you’re going to pile on your plate before you do. Food placement - when you get in line. Around two-thirds of what ends up on your plate comes from the first few items you get to.
At a glance, the amount of food waste from a buffet might seem like it would be off the charts. But in some areas, buffets are being put to incredibly good use combating food waste by putting it in the chiller overnight and serving it the next day.
Humans waste enough food every year to feed around two billion people. You probably know someone who cringes at the thought of heading out to a buffet. Eating out anywhere is putting a lot of trust in a stranger, and buffets ask you to trust employees and other customers. You have to be out of your friggin mind to believe that.
Hitting the buffet and going right to the seafood section might seem like a good idea, especially if it's piled high with things you just don't get often, like oysters and crab legs. But there are a few reasons you should think about skipping these, and the first is obvious: the potential for some serious food poisoning, as MedlinePlus says shellfish and fish are both extremely susceptible to contamination and the epidemic is world wide.
There’s something else to consider, too, and it comes from an all-you-can-eat buffet operator who took to Reddit to dispel some mysteries about the buffet. When someone asked what food they would stay away from at all costs, the answer was “CRAB LEGS”.
The TV show Deadliest Catch is a reality television series that premiered on the Discovery Channel on April 12, 2005. The show follows crab fishermen aboard fishing vessels in the Bering Sea during the Alaskan King Crab and Snow Crab (Opilio) fishing seasons. The boats home at the Aleutian Islands port of Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The crabs you see caught are the real crabs rated by size minimums and sex, quick frozen and sent fresh to fine restaurants.
What you see in some buffets are the seconds, unsold inventory, broken pieces, undersized back legs etc, not what you might find in a select Crab house. Adding to the problem, they will be then be picked over and handled by the customers with the same utensils and in a Pandemic situation, this is stupid and extremely dangerous… since COVID-19 can sustain on metal.
"I'm being serious," the poster continued. "I have seen Chinese buffets at the fish market going and buying bottom of the barrel seafood, including crab legs past their prime. And then they don’t steam them properly either to save on volume.” And when you see mushy particle substance in the water or legs, run fast, don’t walk away.
The Redditor also adds that oysters are usually less-than-fresh, often imported and past their prime once they make it to the buffet table. If you’re not skipping these, you might be risking a trip to the hospital. When it comes to dangerous foods, you might want to consider giving some of the other seafood (particularly raw things like oysters and sushi) a miss for the time being as they require hands on handling.
Just think that buffet can get you COVID-19 and food poisoning all in one meal…There’s a huge potential for illness there, especially when those foods aren’t kept at the proper temperature. Thats a real bad combination...
Aside from improperly cooked or stored foods — which can be a danger anywhere, not just at buffets — the other big danger is cross-contamination. Cross-contamination can also happen anywhere, but buffets have more potential hazards. With all customers serving themselves, there's a huge chance for the transfer of germs on serving utensils. And it isn't hard for someone to use one serving spoon for multiple dishes. This is bad; please don’t do it.
👺 Buffet Survival Issues — Best Answer is Not Now — Not Worth It —
- Long sleeves making contact with the food or serving line is bad
- People who might pick up a dinner roll, change their mind and put it back.
- Look for telltale danger signs like spoon handles touching food
- Other customers returning with dirty plates
- Dishes that don’t have their own individual serving spoon or set of tongs.
- Since you’re already thinking about buffet safety, let’s touch on the sneeze guard. Don’t go around it.
- Take advantage of the small plates on offer. They’ll minimize food waste and encourage you to take less food, which might be exactly what you want. Don’t opt for a bigger plate, and make sure you’re seated as far from the buffet
- Since you know now that the first things you see are the majority of what you take, the experts also suggest that you break that pattern, take a look around first.
- See what’s on the menu, and if you know ahead of time that your favorite roast chicken is halfway down the buffet, you’re less likely to pile the carbs on your plate before you even get there.
- And while you might be tempted to go without eating for the day before you hit the buffet, snacking on some fresh veggies before you head out will go a long way in managing the worst of your impulses.
UPDATED MAR 2021