Life Working in Chinese Restaurants

October 15, 2019
When people dine in restaurants, however elegant or humble, Chinese or other cuisine, they rarely think about the kitchen and the conditions under which the restaurant staff toil to serve the orders from the patrons.  It is hot, especially for the cooks, crowded with wait staff and kitchen help rushing around in tight quarters to serve meals in a timely manner.

In Chinese, and probably in other ethnic restaurants, many of the workers are immigrants who find short-term employment through an underground network. Their ability to speak or understand English may be limited or non existent. Working long hours, mostly on their feet, they earn minimal pay with no fringe benefits and are vulnerable to exploitation by restaurant owners. They may have left families back in China and send part of their earnings back to support them.. 

A 2014  article by journalist Lauren Hilgers provided an in-depth and sympathetic examination of the plight of "underground workers" in several Chinese restaurants in the New York City area. Inspired by Hilgers' article in New Yorker Magazine, another journalist, Katie Salisbury, herself the grand daughter of a Chinese immigrant restaurateur, interviewed Chinese immigrant restaurant workers for an online report in 2018.


A cook sent Salisbury a documentary with English subtitles about the lives of Chinese immigrant restaurant workers portrayed in poignant 2013 documentary on YouTube, Floating Days.

Salisbury presented a detailed and personal account of Chinese restaurant worker lives that 
follows a young Chinese immigrant who works at a takeout that reveals the dark side of the American dream: exhaustion, isolation, disillusionment, and a growing sense of frustration and aimlessness. In one scene, a cashier describes her life in a nutshell: “The restaurant is my stove. Home is my pillow.” That phrase has become a kind of sardonic mantra within the restaurant-worker community. 


 

Ruby Foo, Behind the scene of celebrated Chinese restaurateur

June 1, 2019
Jan Whitaker's fantastic blog, Restaurant-ing through history, has looked into the history of the many Ruby Foo restaurants and pondered how much fact and fiction existed about the popular perceptions of Ruby Foo, the person. 



     

Whitaker commented, "After extensive research I’ve begun to wonder if the public persona of Ruby Foo was largely fictitious. She is often seen as a rare example of a Chinese woman who defied convention by creating a chain of stylish, nightclub-style Chinese restaurants that appealed to non-Chinese customers."


"During the 1930s, with the end of Prohibition, Ruby Foo’s Den grew into a popular nightclub and expanded into New York and Miami, each with two locations, plus another at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But it isn’t at all clear to what degree Ruby owned and operated the 11 Ruby Foo’s that existed at one time or another (not only in Boston, New York, and Miami, but also in Providence, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London)."


 

Chinese Used Food to Offset White Xenophobia in Chicago in 1893

May 25, 2019

The World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893 helped expand recognition of Chicago as a major city. Many nations, including China, had pavilions to showcase their culture to Chicagoans. One important part of the Chinese Village was its  Cafe, which although it did not serve authentic Chinese food, functioned to promote more positive feelings and contact between the growing Chinese population and Chicagoans.


"While no definitive record exists, the Chinese Café is widely believed by scholars of Chinese American history to be the first Americanized Chinese restaurant in the Midwest. Although Chinese food encompasses myriad regional cuisines, each with unique characteristics, the Chinese Café exhibited not only an Americanized version but a homogenized version through its limited menu. The menu was not extensive and featured mostly U.S. and familiar European dishes, such as pork and beans, oatmeal, ice cream, and soda. The Chinese character of the café was found in the emphasis on rice, preserved fruits and relishes, and teas. Imported teas were valued at up to $100 per pound."

detailed description of this World's Fair,  A Cup of Real Chinese Tea:Culinary Adventurism and the Contact Zone at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 by Grace Krause noted that "Prior to the 1870s, foreign foods were considered inferior and indigestible by U.S. middle- and upper-class whites. Anglo-Americans believed that palates were inherited according to one’s cultural background and status. Lingering nationalist ideologies from the Civil War also discouraged the consumption of non-American foods during Reconstruction. These ideas stemmed from the racial hierarchy constantly in play during the nineteenth century, in which peoples perceived as foreign were considered less civilized than white middle-class residents of the U.S. After Reconstruction, more and more people began living in urban areas, where they were more likely to both come into contact with individuals from other parts of the world and purchase food instead of growing their own.Cosmopolitanism was not a result of new ways of thinking about ethnicity, but rather, a renegotiation of whiteness in urban environments in which a wide knowledge of the world." 

 

King Joy Lo, Early Elegant Banquet Restaurant in Chicago

June 19, 2018
As more acceptance of Chinese cuisine developed in the last quarter of the 19th century in large cities, Chinese formed partnerships to raise capital to fund the opening of opulent large banquet hall restaurants decorated with fine furnishings that provided an exoticized oriental ambiance, and extensive menu selections that introduced western diners to more authentic as well as Americanized Chinese dishes.

 A prime example of these dining palaces was the King Joy Lo restaurant opened in 1906 in Chicago and managed by Chin Foin. it was funded by the Baohuanghui or Empire Reform Association  to raise funds to support its activities in the China reform movement, which failed as Sun Yat Sen led the revolution in 1911 that toppled the Chinese Empire. 

  

                                                      

Located in downtown Chicago, the King Joy Lo appealed to the non-Chinese after-theater crowd and featured orchestral music and served nonchinese food such as steaks and chops in addition to chop suey and “Mandarin” dishes. A special section was reserved for women diners unaccompanied by men, since women shoppers were known to be fond of Chinese food.  Other interesting information about these Chicago restaurants, Chin Foin, and the connection of these restaurants with political issues is presented on this blog.


 

Selling The American Public On Eating in Chinese Restaurants

April 20, 2018

Today, with the popularity and ubiquity of Chinese restaurants of many types, it is hard to realize that America initially was not attracted to eating in Chinese restaurants.  The dishes were markedly different from Western foods and Chinatowns were often dangerous places in run down parts of town so it was mainly Chinese who patronized Chinese restaurants. Besides, there were rumors that Chinese ate dogs as well as strange things.

             

In 1878 Benjamin Taylor was unimpressed with his meal in San Francisco’s Chinatown: 
“Pale cakes with a waxen look, full of meats, are brought out. They are sausages in disguise. Then more cakes full of seeds as a fig. Then giblets of you-never-know-what, maybe gizzards, possibly livers, perhaps toes. …”

Several decades later Alice A. Harrison wrote this scathing indictment of Chinese food:

“The man of timorous spirit or sensitive stomach who survives the ordeal of a Chinese dinner should be awarded a chopstick badge for courage… . It may be water chestnut Chop Suey, as the bill of fare declares it is. Then again it may be, as the taste swears it is, a few old shoes, brass buttons and a wornout pipe. At any rate it swims about in a bedragoned bowl, and you eat it if you can.”

To counter these derogatory views,  some white food writers in the early 20th century worked to inform or "educate" the public about aspects of Chinese restaurant food with newspaper articles and books to allay their fears.   Harriet Quimby, a journalist, in 1909 noted:

"The Chinaman, it must be admitted, knows how to cook, and he cooks with such skill that the peculiar mingling of flavors in which he delights pleases the Occidental as well as the Oriental palate...   The attractive thing about a dinner in the Chinese quarter of New York is its novelty, tables of teakwood, richly inlaid with pearl, are coverless. The china used is of odd design and still more odd decoration, and the entire place, in its foreign atmosphere, is a departure from the every-day restaurant. 

The lengthy menu is: ..

"profusely decorated with pictures of chickens, ducks, lobsters, and fishes, so that, if one cannot master the mysterious pidgin-English, he can at least point with some degree of intelligence to what he wants—will be handed around by a soft-footed Chinese waiter." 

She cautioned to "Occidentals" however that: 
"The menu that will invariably appeal to Occidental tastes in a Chinese restaurant consists of pineapple chicken, fried noodles, chicken with mushrooms and bamboo shoots, an herb omelet, and rice, followed by preserved cumquats, ginger, lychee nuts, Chinese nuts, candies, and cakes."

And she advised that it is difficult to get chefs to share recipes because, 

 "like chefs the world over, the Chinese chef thinks there is safety in silence; so he innocently answers, “No sabe,” and that settles the question as far as he is concerned." 

Quimby's attitude is definitely more positive toward Chinese restaurants than the earlier writers, but still evokes the feeling that the Occidental diner should probably stick with certain "safe" dishes on the menu.  Even in current times, there is some the implication that who knows what is really in Chinese food, as illustrated by humorist and food writer Calvin Trillin's quip below:



Was Trillin really serious or just being flippant? Either way, his one-liner serves to perpetuate a long standing suspicion of what ingredients are in Chinese food? For example, could they be serving dogs and cats?

In 2006, Trillin got considerable criticism for a different reason when he published a poem, Have They Run out of Province Yet?," in New Yorker magazine that spoke to the seemingly endless arrival of new Chinese cuisines from provinces other than Guangdong, the source of Cantonese, the first Chinese cuisine to come to America. He met with considerable criticism that he was demeaning Chinese, but he maintained his poem was a parody of foodies who were obsessed with seeking new eating experiences    


 

Racism And The Growth of Chinese Restaurants in Early 1900s?

July 16, 2017
 In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and other laws that barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming U.S. citizen. 

MIT legal historian 
Heather Lee discovered an important exception to these laws: Some
Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list, leading to a Chinese restaurant boom.


Getting a special merchant visa was far from easy, Lee explains. Only the major investors in a restaurant qualified — and it had to be a "high grade," fancy eatery. .. . they couldn't do any menial work: no cooking, waiting tables or ringing up the cash register. ..  Chinese immigrants found ingenious ways to get around these hurdles: They would pool their money to start luxury "chop suey palaces," then each investor would take turns running the joint for a year or 18 months... Once gaining merchant classification they could then legally bring their relatives over to help run their restaurants.   
 


CLICK for  a video account of this analysis by an online 'magazine' reporter, Isabelle Niu, in 2017.


 

What's In A Name of A Chinese Restaurant?

April 14, 2016
How do Chinese choose names for restaurants?  Although they change over time most of them seem to consist of a limited combination of a few terms.  Thus, Golden, Silver, Jade, Imperial, Panda, China, Hong Kong might be combined with terms like Palace, Dragon, House, City, Wok.

One empirical study by Frank Shyong and David Chan based on close to 7,000 restaurant names gathered from several decades confirmed this impression as they found a high repetitiveness of Chinese restaurant names.

Why?  The authors speculate:  "But perhaps the repetition in naming says more about us than it does about Chinese restaurateurs. Chinese restaurants have to use English words that the average American can associate with Chinese food or culture. .. Perhaps the monotony in Chinese restaurant naming just reflects how impoverished the knowledge of Chinese culture is here.

 This redundancy among names has led to several  "automated restaurant name generators"  such as the one by on the website of  a U.K. supermarket, Wai Yee Hong.
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        In addition to selecting a name, a decision must be made about whether to use Chinese or English on the  restaurant signage.  Should they use only Chinese characters,  Chinese names transliterated into English spelling based on how the Chinese name sounds, or only English words,  The graph below shows how there was a shift from over a century from Chinese names to western names.


Another study used a consumer database from YELP to identify the 100 most common words used in Chinese restaurant names.  The results showed:

“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.



Incidentally, the study also mapped the geographical location of Chinese restaurants across the country, and not surprisingly found highest concentrations on the west and east coasts.

 

Origin of the Chinese Restaurant Container for Leftovers?

February 13, 2016
Although it is rapidly being replaced by boring plain styrofoam or other plasticky rectangular boxes, for many years Chinese restaurants provided a distinctive trapezoidal-shaped paper 'pail' for patrons to take leftover food home.
 

What were the origins of this iconic object that characterized Chinese restaurants, second only to the fortune cookie?  I stumbled upon the following explanation.  In 1894 Frederick Weeks Wilcox patented containers he created by folding a single sheet of paper to replace more expensive wooden pails for transporting small quantities of oysters.   


Around the middle of the past century when Chinese restaurants became more popular, the oyster pails were repurposed to enable Chinese restaurant customers to enjoy their Chinese food leftovers when they were assumed to be "hungry an hour later" after their meal.




 
 

About Me


John Jung After retiring from a 40-year career as a psychology professor, I published 4 books about Chinese immigrants that detail the history of their laundries, grocery stores, and family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada.

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