The issue of 'authenticity' inevitably surfaces when ethnic foods of any type, Chinese or other, are evaluated. I have often wondered to what extent "foodie snobbism" is at work.  Food dishes, like language, evolve over time and differ over space. Can there be a single recipe that is the authentic version for a dish? Who 'decides,' and using what yardstick, whether a dish is 'authentic'? And, is authenticity the end all which trumps even 'great taste'?
      I recently stumbled upon an arcane but thought-provoking analysis of this issue as it applies to recipes in Chinese American cookbooks, past and present:  "Authentic” Chinese Food: Chinese American Cookbooks and the Regulation of Ethnic Identity   It is a revised version of Malindo Lo's 2000 master’s thesis in Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard that was presented at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in 2001.
      Here are a few brief excerpts worth chewing on:
... “authentic,” ... functions as a norm or ideal against which cultural practices having to do with food are compared. The idea of the “authentic” thus produces foods, practices, and people who are constrained by that ideal. It demarcates those who fit within the regulated space of the authentic from those who do not; it separates the “authentic” Chinese from the “inauthentic” (Chinese) American.
     "In many Chinese cookbooks published in America, the word “exotic” is used over and over, resulting in the representation of a cuisine that is unknowable yet simultaneously subject to Western authority.... the reader is confronted by the constant, contradictory reiteration of Chinese food as complex and baffling, but which can nonetheless be easily mastered by the Western chef who follows the instructions presented.
... If Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” are these Chinese American cookbook authors merely complicit in the Orientalist enterprise? Their presentations of Chinese cuisine are often overt attempts to dominate and restructure—to authorize—particular versions of Chinese culture.