![]() ![]() Health concerns also killed it in the last decades of the 20th century "low salt" and "fat-free" became watchwords. What killed it? The incursion of other types of fast food, and the appearance of other forms of Asian food - specifically, recently arrived fare from other Chinese regions, less tailored to meat-and-potato American tastes and hence more interesting to a city with diversifying culinary interests. It also betokened a kind of cultural exoticism in a country that was rapidly becoming less homogenous, and one with returning GIs who had been become familiar with Asian cuisines during World War II and the Korean War.īy the 70s and 80s though, appreciation for salty, bland, and sometimes greasy Chinese-American food, now over a century old, had begun to wane. ![]() They saw their heyday in the 40s and 50s, when a legion of housewives found employment outside the home and carryout Chinese became a necessity for feeding a family with two working parents. But it probably wasn't until the 1930s that neighborhood Chinese restaurants started to appear around the five boroughs. Meanwhile, beleaguered sailors started New York's first Chinatown around the time of the Civil War by 1885, according to William Grimes in Appetite City, our city could boast six Chinese restaurants.īy 1924, Chinese restaurants had become synonymous with floor shows and musical entertainment, and there were 14 in the vicinity of Times Square. Such recipes as chow mein, egg rolls, pepper steak, lo mein, egg foo young, shrimp toast, sweet-and-sour pork, and wonton soup gradually followed, making up a roster that came to include dozens of dishes that partly catered to American tastes. This flexible recipe featured meat and vegetables stir-fried into something already partly familiar to Americans as "hash" - canned ingredients like bean sprouts, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots notwithstanding. By all accounts, their first invention was chop suey. ![]() The new Gold Rush restaurateurs and railroad chefs collaborated in creating Chinese-American cuisine, with help from a few cooks in the gradually growing Chinatowns around the country. ![]()
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