Ooh, quality and variety of dishes aside, what regional styles are in LA but not the SFBA? ( I’m heading down there soon and would appreciate learning about stragglers that didn’t make it into the Destination Chinese thread)
I suspect the answer would involve particular cities or subregions—- at the province level, I think LA and the SFBA are tied. LA’s one Anhui restaurant closed (i really hoped to get there). After Clarissa researched her piece, two Lanzhou chefs opened restaurants In the SFBA (one has closed). Tawainese and Malaysian notwithstanding, neither the SFBA or LA to my knowledge have chefs cooking food from Fujian (SFBA’s Wenzhou restaurant closed). The two SFBA Jiangxi restaurants aren’t standouts (one isn’t very good, the other has two token dishes).
LA certainly seems to have a broader range of dishes from particular regions than the SFBA, e.g. no oat Shanxi noodles dishes. I’m curious to what extent different dish representation reflects chef’s training/origins prior to LA vs SFBA. SFBAHubei chefs here are from Wuhan, Dongbei (mostly) from Shenyang. At one time, our Sichuan chefs were from Chengdu (or northern China, like Royal Feast’s Sichuan and Tanjia Cai specialist, Chef Liu and Z&Y’s owner Chef Han), but we’re seeing more Chongqing chefs (not necessarily same quality as in LA). SFBA Shandong restaurants are either Shandong Korean or directly from Shandong focusing on noodles and dumplings (though, two newer places have Dezhou chicken, maybe other dishes).