Hi Rainycatcooks
Pleased to meet you. I’ve been to Taste of Sichuan several times, and I’ve mostly enjoyed the dishes I’ve tried there. I like that they have the cold deli case of “small eats” (小吃) which I’d grown used to seeing at my favorite Sichuanese restaurants in Los Angeles. The best restaurants have an extraordinarily broad selection of different “small eats”, and you get to pick 3 or 4 as an appetizer for a relatively low price. I found the dish know (in Chinese) as “water boiled fish” (水煮魚) to be quite good (despite the innocuous-sounding name, it’s boneless chunks of a tender white fish cooked in chili oil, served with cabbage and eaten over rice). I did not like the knife cut noodles, which they have on the menu but is not at all a Sichuanese specialty. The one thing I learned eating regional Chinese specialties- stick with what the restaurant is known for. Menus are often fleshed out with “filler” - dishes that the restaurant doesn’t specialize in or prepare to a Chinese standard of excellence, but is there to try to please people who are looking for something different. If you’re not interested in trying the Sichuanese specialties, I’d go elsewhere. (And yes, I’m looking squarely at you, Taste of Sichuan 小籠包!)
And thank you very much for the recommendation to try out the so-called “secret authentic menu” at Tang’s Wok. I’ll be curious to try it out and talk with the chef, to see where he’s from and what his specialties are.
Oh, and as much as I understand your distaste for the “secret menu” practice, Chinese restaurants do this for a practical reason. Americanized Chinese food is a formula that we have acculturated to. We, as a culture, have a broadly understood interpretation and expectation of Chinese food-- we all know beef & broccoli, General Tso’s Chicken/Orange chicken, sweet and sour pork, egg foo yung, wonton soup. What Americans have not acculturated to, in any kind of meaningful way, is beef noodle soup (which often has slithery, tender strips of tendon, prized by the Chinese), dongpo pork (which has a thick later of skin and fat attached to the meat), and countless other dishes that Chinese restaurants really take a risk on by selling them to people who don’t know or understand the food. Someone who receives dongpo pork and complains about there being too much skin and fat speaks more of their own ignorance of the dish, moreso than the chef’s skill at preparing it. Chinese restaurateurs got tired of throwing away perfectly good food because it wasn’t made to the expectations of beef & broccoli Americans. Eventually, the “secret menu” was born as much as a way of ensuring that Chinese customers, with Chinese expectations, got the food they knew and expected, as much as it was a way to keep out American customers with American expectations from being served something that challenged their cultural understanding and expectations of Chinese food.
So you see, it really doesn’t have anything to do with elitism or preferential treatment-- it has only to do with trying to make the customer comfortable and fulfill their expectations. If you’re ever offered a fork instead of chopsticks, the same rationale applies. They’re trying to meet your expectations-- not make you feel inferior by assuming you’re such a stupid American that you’re incapable of using chopsticks.
The interesting thing happening now is that Americans, in larger and larger numbers, are becoming more educated and adventurous in their dining choices, and are starting to seek out the real stuff. Chinese restaurateurs are still unaccustomed to this-- too many bad memories of perfectly prepared food being sent back to the kitchen. I think we’re in a transitional period now- as regional Chinese food slowly grows in popularity, it’ll be interesting to see in a generation whether the “secret menu” becomes less and less a thing.
Mr Taster