Chinese Food

As a doctor, Jonathan Tam has a message for San Gabriel Valley residents: Eat your vegetables. Farm Cuisine, his new organic restaurant in Monterey Park, is trying to get cost-conscious Chinese diners to buy healthful organic takes on traditional Chinese dishes. But the pricier meals are a tough sell in the heavily Asian American valley, where more than 500 Chinese restaurants are in a pitched battle to offer authentic dishes at ever lower prices. JOIN A LIVE DISCUSSION AT 4 P.M. PT Area restaurants wear B and C food-safety grades like badges of honor, and diners line up for cheap fried pork dumplings and dim sum at $2 a plate.

Los Angeles attorney David Chan has eaten at more than 6,200 different Chinese restaurants, and he can prove it . He studied accounting at UCLA and for about three decades he has kept track of each meal on an Excel spreadsheet with 6,297 entries.  Scrolling to the beginning of the spreadsheet takes you not just to Chan's first meal, but a time when the only Chinese food in Los Angeles was in Chinatown and less than 1% of the city's population...

To outsiders, authentic Chinese restaurants are like some maddening puzzle, equal parts tantalizing and frustrating. You know you want more than beef with broccoli, but how do you order that wonderful-looking stuff that guy is eating at the next table? And what the heck is it? Now along comes Carl Chu to the rescue, to lay bare one of California's, if not the country's, great culinary treasure-troves.

Times reporter Frank Shyong and attorney David Chan will join L.A. Now Live at 9 a.m. Tuesday to discuss Chan's culinary journey to 6,297 Chinese restaurants .  Chan, a third-generation Chinese American, has been keeping track of every Chinese restaurant he's dined at since the early 1980s. He grew up with little to no knowledge of his culture, and eating Chinese food became a way of discovering it. Chan's appetite helped him discover unique slices of Chinese American immigrant life all over the nation.

Jonathan Tam's new organic health-food restaurant in Monterey Park is an incongruous slice of Santa Monica chic in one of the San Gabriel Valley's most Chinese neighborhoods. At Farm Cuisine, diners nosh on salads and miso-glazed salmon against a backdrop of artfully overturned vegetable crates and hip chalkboard menus. LIVE DISCUSSION: Join us here at 4 p.m. Tam has entered a crowded, highly competitive market where restaurants compete on taste and price rather than presentation or healthfulness.

Los Angeles attorney David Chan has eaten at more than 6,200 different Chinese restaurants, and he can prove it . He studied accounting at UCLA and for about three decades he has kept track of each meal on an Excel spreadsheet with 6,297 entries.  Scrolling to the beginning of the spreadsheet takes you not just to Chan's first meal, but a time when the only Chinese food in Los Angeles was in Chinatown and less than 1% of the city's population...

The '70s and '80s were the heyday of the cookbook primers--big books that walked you step by step through the nuts and bolts of the various international cuisines that we Americans just then happened to be "discovering." That trend has slacked off over the last decade. Maybe our taste for exploration has waned. Maybe all the good stuff has been done. Maybe there were just so dang many Italian books on the market there was no room for anything else.

Chinese food adapts to its environment like a chameleon, so that in each country the taste is a bit different. A good example of this is Mami King, where Chinese dishes are prepared to the Filipino taste with American ingredients. Noodle soups and steamed buns are Mami King's specialty. The buns, called siopao, resemble the fluffy pork-filled char siu bao you get in Chinatown. But the taste of the pork is different and so are the buns.

Rick and Maureen, who have been my friends for years, are real squares. When he wears his bow tie and she has her hair permed, they look as if they stepped right out of a '50s sitcom. They couldn't be called adventurous eaters, but recently they became a bit daring and "discovered" Chinese cuisine.

To reach the Heart of China requires a journey through two cultures. As the name indicates, the restaurant is Chinese and emphasizes Mandarin and Sichuan food. The menu includes the same dishes as other Mandarin restaurants. But the location is Korea Town, and that guarantees a difference. The Heart of China opened recently on the second floor of a shopping center on West 8th Street.

Jonathan Tam's new organic health-food restaurant in Monterey Park is an incongruous slice of Santa Monica chic in one of the San Gabriel Valley's most Chinese neighborhoods. At Farm Cuisine, diners nosh on salads and miso-glazed salmon against a backdrop of artfully overturned vegetable crates and hip chalkboard menus. LIVE DISCUSSION: Join us here at 4 p.m. Tam has entered a crowded, highly competitive market where restaurants compete on taste and price rather than presentation or healthfulness.

As a doctor, Jonathan Tam has a message for San Gabriel Valley residents: Eat your vegetables. Farm Cuisine, his new organic restaurant in Monterey Park, is trying to get cost-conscious Chinese diners to buy healthful organic takes on traditional Chinese dishes. But the pricier meals are a tough sell in the heavily Asian American valley, where more than 500 Chinese restaurants are in a pitched battle to offer authentic dishes at ever lower prices. JOIN A LIVE DISCUSSION AT 4 P.M. PT Area restaurants wear B and C food-safety grades like badges of honor, and diners line up for cheap fried pork dumplings and dim sum at $2 a plate.

Two lesbians, a man with Down's syndrome and a Jewish couple walk into a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Eve. Sounds like the setup to a joke, yes? Nope. This is my family, doing what we've done for a decade. Separated by differing philosophies, as well as locations, we have no other tradition. I don't know who got the idea to spend Dec. 24 eating egg rolls and mu shu pork at a Chinese restaurant in Ventura. Doesn't matter. Regardless of what political and social arguments have ensued during the year, we all drive or fly in to go to the restaurant and the big round table by the fish tank.

FACEBOOK FUN FACT What do Facebook employees eat at an all-night hackathon (its regular software-coding party)? Egg rolls and other Chinese food from the company's favorite restaurant Jing Jing in Palo Alto. [ Los Angeles Times ] 5 FOOD FESTS IN MEXICO Looking for a corn-and-tortilla fair worth traveling for? Here's one in the Mexico City borough of Xochimilco , plus a vanilla festival in Veracruz, a 127-year-old ice cream festival, an apple fair and Three Kings festival.

"What makes Chinese people tick?" What a great opening sentence for a book. Because what makes Chinese people tick is also what makes Chinese people buy. And these days, virtually everyone involved in selling anything, anywhere, wants to know how to sell it to the Chinese. The line comes from "What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and China'sModern Consumer," a new book published by Palgrave Macmillan and written by Tom Doctoroff, chief executive of advertising agency JWT in Shanghai and the doyen of foreign marketers in China.

Over the course of three hours of conversation at a roadside diner here called Pete's Henny Penny, Tom Waits, the singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, actor and note taker, will offer the following similes and metaphors, seemingly at random though just as likely cataloged in his memory for future use: an aging musician as "a Popsicle in the sun on a bus bench in Florida"; the process of creation as "like making Chinese food — it's very exotic and...

The Chinese are great herbalists, using all manner of preserved roots, seeds, flowers, plants and animal products in health-giving elixirs. Fresh green herbs, on the other hand, aren't terribly important. You don't find them in Chinese herbal stores, and they don't appear often in Chinese dishes, except for cilantro (Chinese parsley). But Shirley Fong-Torres may change all that. She's a cook of the future, anxious to incorporate new seasonings into old ways of cooking.

A new Food and Drug Administration report released Thursday concluded that monosodium glutamate--the controversial flavor enhancer often added to Chinese food--generally is safe to eat, finding that it causes a mild reaction in only a tiny part of the population.

In the wake of new California legislation that outlaws the sale and possession of shark fins, some Chinese American food purveyors are objecting that the law unfairly deprives their customers of a centuries-old Asian delicacy, shark fin soup. "Now it's just one more thing Chinese people cannot find in America," said Thai Ong, manager of Monterey Park's Wing Hop Fung, a Chinese specialty store that carries dried shark fin. Dried shark fin, the soup's main ingredient, can sell for more than $2,000 a pound in California.

If you're familiar with the Chinese food wonderment that is the San Gabriel Valley, you probably know what to expect from Sichuan food. It's searing, brain-rattling Chinese food from a different dimension, one in which there are two forms of spice — the usual chile burn and the otherworldly ma la, the pins-and-needles tingle of the Sichuan peppercorn. At the new Taste of Chong Qing you'll get your tongue seared and razzed with the strange electricity of ma la , you'll also experience delicate fishes and the subtle complexity of fresh vegetables.