Chinese Food Menu Recipes Take OUt Box Near Meme Noodles Images Delivery Clipart Photos : Chinese Food Take Out Chinese Food Menu Recipes Take OUt Box Near Meme Noodles Images Delivery Clipart PHotos

Chinese Food Take Out Biography

Source(google.com.pk)
"Have You Eaten Yet?," the wonderful Chinese restaurants exhibit now on view at New York's Museum of Chinese in the Americas, takes a Babel of ephemera and makes it speak. One's visit begins with an absence: the never-photographed first Chinese eateries in America, known as "chow chows," which sprang up in California in the mid-19th century to serve Cantonese laborers. True holes in the wall, they were marked, as per a Chinese tradition, with yellow cloth triangles. No menus have survived, if ever there were any; who knows but that they served stir-fried buffalo. Still, we may gather that the workers liked the fare, for we do have the advertisements of competitors, who suddenly began offering free potatoes with their meals. The spud strategy was ultimately for naught, though: The Chinese restaurant had been born.

Would anyone have bet the bank on Chinese food back then? According to Chinese Restaurant News, there are now more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald's franchises—nearly three times as many in fact. In the 19th century, though, the Chinese were scorned as rat-eaters; nothing could have been more revolting than eating what they ate. An 1877 magazine cartoon titled "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner" shows various immigrants contentedly enjoying their respective national dishes —a Frenchman, for example, tucks into his frogs—while an officious African-American manservant conveys a turkey to Uncle Sam. All is harmony, right down to a Native Indian who, unable to abide a chair, squats peaceably beside his fellow guests. Only one personage draws horror from the other diners—the Chinaman, about to eat a rodent.

Click image to expand.
A Chinese restaurant in the 1900s
Yet despite this prejudice, and despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which categorically barred further Chinese immigration, Chinese restaurateurs strove to make a place for themselves. With trepidation: Chinese food was often embedded in the familiar. For example, one early menu lists "Grilled Dinner Steak Hollandaise" and "Roast California Chicken with Currant Jelly," with "Fine Cut Chicken Chop Suey" presented as just another option. As if to counter stereotypes, early interiors featured stunningly sophisticated wood-carving; early images, too, include a surprising number of tuxedos. Observes show curator Cynthia Ai-Fen Lee, "It's as if the owners are trying to say, It's OK. Don't be scared." And indeed, the phrase "Try it" recurs hypnotically throughout the exhibit. Still, despite the best efforts of the restaurateurs, something disreputable remained, not only about Chinese food, but about people who ate it. In 1903 the New York Times described the Chinatown clientele: "It is the men and women who like to eat after everybody else is abed that pour shekels into the coffers of the man who knows how to make chop suey."

Shekels. What an interesting currency to have gratuitously cited. And yet how unwittingly prescient the writer turned out to be, by mid-century: One of my favorite parts of this exhibit is the wonderful collection of kosher Chinese menus from New York restaurants, sporting names like "Glatt Wok" and "Shang-chai," and serving dishes like Matzoh Foo Young. Lee speculates that East European Jews, themselves marginalized, flocked to Chinese restaurants as a way of forging a new, modern, identity—as a way of becoming American. Not that things "Chinese" were generally recognized as American; it took outsiders to see the obvious. Visiting Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, for example, was amused and amazed by a restaurant he visited in the early 1940s. "It was called a Chinese restaurant," he wrote, "but ... nothing made me feel the slightest at home."