[BRIEF NOTE] On eating Canadian Chinese food in Toronto in 2015

[rfmcdonald]

Beef with ginger and green onions

Celia Hatton's report for the BBC, "Why Shanghai's first American Chinese restaurant is taking off", caught my attention.

The Fortune Cookie is the brainchild of two friends, Fung Lam and Dave Rossi. Fung was born on the doorstep of New York's Chinatown.

"I was in the playpen of the kitchen of my parents' restaurant, of my grandparents' restaurants," he recalls.

"All my earliest memories were of the woks going, my dad coming home with the smell of Chinese food."
Fung met Dave at graduate school. Outside of class, they soon discovered a shared love of American Chinese restaurants.

"Friday night was Chinese food night in the Rossi household," Dave explains. With more than 40,000 American Chinese restaurants in the United States, families of all ethnic backgrounds grew up eating New World Chinese classics.

When visiting Shanghai as tourists, Fung and Dave missed their usual versions of noodles and stir-fried classics, and thought others might too.

I'm personally much more familiar with Canadian Chinese cuisine than its American equivalent, for obvious reasons. Just last night, on the occasion of my parents' first night of their visit in Toronto, that's what we ate, as Ho Jan Chinese Restaurant (45 Carlton Street) just across the street from their hotel.



Sweet & sour chicken with pineapple

The food was great. I know full well that the food produced in Chinese restaurants in North America for unknowing North American audiences exists at a distant remove from actual Chinese food. I know this: I've ate local, reasonably authentic, food living in Toronto over the past decade. As someone from small-town Canada for him Canadian Chinese food was perhaps the first culinary experience I had coming from outside, this food has strong, positive nostalgia value. More, I'm prepared to argue that this food can actually be good, if adapted and presented successfully. Such was my experience last night; such will be my Yelp review. Soy sauce and sriracha can co-exist in the Toronto of the 21st century.



(No, I did not order an egg roll.)



(I did have one of these.)