Jenise wrote:I wonder what your take is on why it's been such a hard sell on the American public? ... dinner out for casual Chinese with friends in Anchorage ... well educated persons, shocked us with their naivete about food. While Bob and I stared at the menu, John announced that Barb would have "her usual, sweet and sour pork" while he was having Mongolian Beef... / Not only did they not understand that Chinese food is to be shared. They were applying the typical American appetizer/entree/dessert mentality to Chinese food. neither was interested in cooking ... they didn't go out for higher end cuisine where they'd have been exposed to a wider variety of dining styles. It would be easy to understand how the rather low ratio of Maxes and Jenises to Johns and Barbs over the last few decades made any prior attempt to popularize small plates an uphill battle.
A few things here. There's always individual custom and taste. I've encountered this many ways. Long ago in a student house in the SF Bay area, a housemate's brother visited from the NYC area. He saw gringos using chopsticks in the many east-Asian restaurants and concluded (with the air of one who sees through things) it was an affectation, for appearance. (Presumably, an honest interpretation from within his personal reality.) I was amazed at this. Living in the area, even as a gringo, meant east-Asian restaurant meals, since so many restaurants were east-Asian. You got chopsticks automatically, you asked for forks. As a student especially, often dining with people from other countries including east Asia, the sooner you mastered the tiny skill of chopsticks, the more you ate. This is important when you're young, active, hungry, and short of cash. (The visitor listened with an I-know-better look.) Evidently things were different where he came from.
I believe it almost impossible to gauge the "ratio of Maxes and Jenises to Johns and Barbs" -- call it
MJJBR, following technical practice -- without objective yardsticks, because (like the knowing brother from New York) we're prisoners of our particular experience. There's some support for your point in that most Chinese restaurants in my area routinely include a repertoire of offerings understood in their industry as "what white people order," not from myth but good business practice because, in fact, white people do order them, however loudly individual white people may insist to each other that they don't. (Those latter white people account for a higher than average talking-to-spending ratio,
TSR.)
I like to encourage people
never to order their favorite dishes at a new restaurant though -- try to learn the
restaurant's favorites instead. (To insist "this dish is the measure of a ... restaurant" is to prefer their personal reality, just like that New Yorker's, over a larger reality that may differ.)
Some folk
really like the same thing all the time. It's their call. Durgin-Park in Boston (traditionally the US's oldest restaurant, "Established before you were born") had a local fisherman or something who breakfasted there regularly on baked Indian Pudding with whipped cream for maybe 60 years. Then one day he asked for the menu, and after a terrible pause (while staff wondered if his health, and the universe, were in order) requested baked Indian Pudding with ice cream instead. I know a local Chinese restaurant with profound mapo doufu (or "ma po tofu,") a quintessential Szechwanese dish. One Chinese-émigré customer comes often, only for that dish, usually alone, and the servers brighten up because he leaves a huge tip many times the check.
Another thing: the from-the-ground-up US small-plates restaurants I mentioned upthread -- Just A Taste in Ithaca, Park Chow in SF -- thrived from the outset. They offered interesting food at decent prices and word spread.
