Is the food from chinese restaraunts from china?

Question

i hear china/hong kong does not have laws that regulate how they process food, im told not even to use chop sticks at restaurants because they are reused. do most restaurants get they food from china? especially chinese restaurants?

Answer 1

There is very little resemblence to actual Chinese foods here in the US restaurants...it is Americanized.

Answer 2

not necessarily the prepared food it self but they import things like noodles different sauces & canned things & probably frozen items as well

Answer 3

Just the Chinese themselves are from China.    The food is bought and cooked in America.      Good question though.

Answer 4

are you kidding?  Its the style of cooking.  the food is the same as you get here.

Answer 5

No offence, but that question is a bit retarded if you ask me. But...to answer your question:

YES, if the restaurant is in China or Hong Kong.

NO, if the restaurant is in some other country. Ask yourself this question: "Would anybody eat Chinese food after it has been shipped for several days from a different country?"

Answer 6

The food in American Chinese restaurants is actually American food.  You won't find it in China or even many Chinese cookbooks.  Many American Chinese restaurants use precooked foods that are thawed and reheated and it's very possible this food is prepared in china and shipped to the USA. So many other foods come from China.

Answer 7

NO there are local and they get their supplies from the same markets that you do..

Pssst

they do grow a lot of their own produce.. seeds from China ??? still grown here or There...

Answer 8

If the food came from china it would spoil.

Answer 9

No it has been Americanized

Answer 10

Are you talking about the Chinese restaurants in America, or in Europe ? Either one, the food is from local. No way are the ingredients from China, plus no way will you find the exact dishes in the menu in China. Many so-called Chinese restaurants in the western world have modified their dishes to suit the taste of the westerners. Want to taste genuine Chinese food ?  I am afraid you have to go to Hong Kong or China or any Chinese speaking countries.

Answer 11

American Chinese food typically treats vegetables as garnish while cuisines of China emphasize vegetables.[citation needed] This can be seen in the use of carrots and tomatoes. Native Chinese cuisine makes frequent use of Asian leafy vegetables like bok choy and kai-lan and puts a greater emphasis on fresh meat and live seafood[citation needed]. As a result, American Chinese food is usually less pungent than authentic cuisine.

American Chinese food tends to be cooked very quickly with a great deal of oil and salt. Many dishes are quickly and easily prepared, and require inexpensive ingredients. Stir-frying, pan-frying, and deep-frying tend to be the most common cooking techniques which are all easily done using a wok. The food also has a reputation for high levels of MSG to enhance the flavor. The symptoms of MSG sensitivity have been dubbed "Chinese restaurant syndrome" or "Chinese food syndrome." Market forces and customer demand have encouraged many restaurants to offer "MSG Free" or "No MSG" menus, although some restaurateurs don't believe that people can be allergic to MSG[citation needed].

Most American Chinese establishments cater to non-Chinese customers with menus written in English or containing pictures. If separate Chinese-language menus are available, they typically feature delicacies like liver, chicken feet or other exotic meat dishes that might deter Western customers. In New York's Chinatown, the restaurants are legendary for refusing to offer non-Chinese Americans the "secret" (i.e. authentic) menu.

[edit] American Chinese dishes

Dishes that often appear on American Chinese menus include:

• General Tso's Chicken— dark-meat tidbits of chicken that are deep-fried and seasoned with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions, and hot chili peppers, and often served with steamed broccoli

• Sesame Chicken— boned, battered, and deep-fried chicken which is then dressed with a translucent but dark red, sweet, slightly sour, mildly spicy, semi-thick, Chinese soy sauce made from corn starch, vinegar, chicken broth, and sugar.

• Chinese chicken salad — Salad, in the form of uncooked leafy greens, does not exist in traditional Chinese cuisine for sanitary reasons, since manure and human f***s were China's primary fertilizer through most of its history.[citation needed] It usually contains crispy noodle (fried wonton skin) and sesame dressing. Some restaurants serve the salad with mandarin oranges.

• Chop suey — connotes "leftovers" in Chinese. It is usually a mix of vegetables and meat in a brown sauce.

• Chow mein — literally means 'stir-fried noodles.' Chow mein consists of fried noodles with bits of meat and vegetables. It can come with chicken, beef, pork or shrimp.

• Crab rangoon — Fried wonton skins stuffed with artificial crab meat (surimi) and cream cheese. Rangoon (now Yangon) is the former capital of Burma (now Myanmar).

• Fortune cookie — Invented at the Japanese Tea Garden restaurant in San Francisco, fortune cookies became sweetened and found their way to American Chinese restaurants. Fortune cookies have become so popular that even some authentic Chinese restaurants serve them at the end of the meal and may feature Chinese translations of the English fortunes.

• Fried rice — Pan-fried rice, usually with chunks of meat, vegetables, and often egg.

• Mongolian beef — Usually beef stir-fried with scallions, often served in a brown sauce.

Regional American Chinese dishes:

• Chow mein sandwich— Sandwich of chow mein and gravy (Southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island).

• Chop suey sandwich — Sandwich of chicken chop suey in gravy on a hamburger bun (North Shore of Massachusetts — the only known remaining restaurant serving this specialty is Salem Lowe at Salem Willows Park, Salem, Massachusetts.)

• St. Paul sandwich — Egg foo young patty in plain white sandwich bread (St. Louis, Missouri).

[edit] Americanized versions of native Chinese dishes

• Batter-fried meat — Meat that has been deep fried in bread or flour, such as sesame chicken, lemon chicken, orange chicken, sweet and sour pork, and General Tso's chicken, is often heavily emphasized in American-style Chinese dishes. Battered meat occasionally appears in Hunanese dishes, but it generally uses lighter sauces with less sugar and corn syrup.

o Chicken ball — Uses a large amount of leavening and flour in its preparation and battering process which causes them to be more similar to doughy "hush puppies" than actual batter-fried meat.

• Egg drop soup — A soup of chicken broth with scrambled egg ribbons. Often served with fried noodles.

• Egg foo young — A Chinese-style omelet with vegetables and meat, usually served with a brown sauce. Also known as egg foo yung or egg foo yaung.

• Egg roll — While native Chinese spring rolls have a thin crispy skin with mushrooms, bamboo, and other vegetables inside, the Americanized version (specifically the version found in the New York metro area) uses a thick, fried skin stuffed with cabbage and usually bits of meat or seafood (such as pork or shrimp). In other areas of the US outside of New York, egg rolls tend to be of the spring roll/Panda Express variety.

• Fried rice — Fried rice dishes are popular offerings in American Chinese food due to the speed and ease of preparation and their appeal to American tastes. Fried rice is generally prepared with rice cooled overnight, allowing restaurants to put unserved leftover rice to good use.

• Kung Pao chicken — The authentic Sichuan dish is very spicy, and the American versions tend to be less so.

• Lo mein — The term means "stirred noodles"; these noodles are frequently made with eggs and flour, making them chewier than simply using water. Thick, spaghetti shaped noodles are pan fried with vegetables and meat. Sometimes this dish is referred to as "chow mein" (which literally means "fried noodles" in Cantonese).

• Moo shu pork — The native Chinese version uses more typically Chinese ingredients (including wood ear fungi and daylily buds) and thin flour pancakes while the American version uses vegetables more familiar to Americans and thicker pancakes. This dish is quite popular in Chinese restaurants in the U.S., but not so popular in China.

• Wonton soup — In most American Chinese restaurants, only wonton dumplings in broth are served, while native Chinese versions may come with noodles. Authentic Cantonese Wonton Soup is a full meal in itself consisting of thin egg noodles and several pork and prawn wontons in a pork or chicken soup broth or noodle broth.

• Cashew chicken — see Regional variations.

• Meat "with" a vegetable — Examples of common variations on this dish are pork, chicken, beef or shrimp cooked with mushrooms, snow peas, or other assorted vegetables. This dish is sometimes served with oyster sauce or with garlic sauce. These dishes are primarily variations on Cantonese-style stir-fry.

• Broccoli beef — This dish exists in native Chinese form, but using gai-lan (Chinese broccoli) rather than Western broccoli. Occasionally western broccoli is also referred to as sai lan fa (in Cantonese) in order not to confuse the two styles of broccoli. Among Chinese speakers, however, it is typically understood that one is referring to the leafy vegetable unless otherwise specified. This is also the case with the words for carrot (lo bac) or (hung lo bac hung meaning red) and onion (chung). Lo bac, in Chinese, refers to the daikon, a large, blandly flavored white radish. The orange western carrot is known in some areas of China as "foreign luobac" (or more properly hung lo bac, hung meaning "red"). When the word for onion, chung, is used, it is understood that one is referring to "green onions" (otherwise known to Westerners as scallions or spring onions). The many-layered onion common to Westerners is called yang chung. This translates as "western onion". These names make it evident that the Western broccoli, carrot, and onion are not indigenous to China and therefore are less common in the cuisines of China. Hence, if a dish contains significant amounts of any of these ingredients, it has most likely been Westernized.

• Tomatoes — Since tomatoes are New World plants, they are also fairly new to China and Chinese cuisine. Tomato-based sauces can be found in some American Chinese dishes such as the popular "beef and tomato."