Book: Ten Restaurants that changed America

Dude, relax. I just asked why you adopted a method of doubting a person’s career when posting your thoughts. Then I noted that the statements about this book suggested that it may have had a different goal than you expected, hence the dislike. (What disagreement has to do with it isn’t clear to me, nor is why you care so much if I agree or disagree. But it appears that so much more is going into your hatred for this publication and its author… and apparently all the workers in academe.
Your responses suggest you have way more feeling about this than I do, so I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy!

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What does your grammatical lexicon say about open ended parentheses?

OK- we established a few things. The OP doesn’t like the book, and he doesn’t like the publisher using the author’s credentials as a professor to market the book and working with professors in general, hence the “professor”. A couple of posters think regardless the author is a professor.

You all got your points across. Its getting a little unfriendly. So let’s stop tangling on this point and focus on the book itself. Thank you.

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You mean you didn’t like the “scarekhwote”?

After all, he got an honorary doctorate in thinkology.

There are definitely restaurants that change a countries fine dining food culture (and trickle down to mass markets). But are there really that many even in a country as large as the US? Surely the restaurant needs to drive a real change in chefs styles and the type of food discerning diners expect…?

Chez Panisse is definitely a strong candidate for the US, maybe The French Laundry as well, and a David Chang place. I would say that somewhere like El Bulli would be a place that defined the rise of high end Spanish food. Maybe Alain Chapel’s restaurant in France with Nouvelle Cuisine. The River Cafe in the UK for produce driven food. And in Australia Rockpool (in conjunction with Tetsuya’s and The Grange Cheong Liuew)) as they championed East/West fusion.

As to BBQ (and Burgers, Steak restaurants, red sauce Italians etc) I think that is a style of food that evolve and grow in complexity rather than a pioneering chef changing a food culture. BBQ for example is a bedrock food that ebbs and flows with fashion but is always there.

A cuisine changing restaurant is the one (or two) you can point to that started a food movement e.g. Nouvelle Cuisine in France; Farm to Table in the US; East/West (Mod Oz) fusion in Australia; and ingredient driven food rather than technique driven in the UK.

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McDonald’s changed America.

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BBQ has always been a thing in certain areas.

This includes the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri River valleys, the Carolinas and Georgia, and Texas, most often in rural areas. The rest of the USA, not so much.

BTW, I’m a KCBS certfied judge for 30 years now, and have been known to detour 80 miles out of my way to hit a certain pit. So I have done the research here.

Twenty years ago I used to have serious arguments with people when I said BBQ is not hamburgers and hot dogs on a grill but rather large pieces of meat slowly cooked over hardwood coals served with a savory sauce and fixings.

Today explanation seems redundant.

Back then, the only place in the NYC area that served BBQ was Virgils in Times Square.

Now there are numerous good places in NYC, like Fette Sau, not to mention in Jersey and pretty much everywhere else. I recently saw on a tv show there is a place in Southwark London that is importing briskets from the US. And you can get pulled pork on anything, anywhere, anytime.

That is a major change in American, if not international, foodways in just 20 years or so.

There are way more BBQ places than Howard Johnson’s left, whether in Maine or California.

Which restaurant explains this?

Or did it just not happen in Berkeley or Manhattan until later.

There’s my beef with BBQ and this book.

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Sadly true, and more so than any other restaurant I can think of.

But again, it’s not in the book.

The selection is totally arbitrary, and reflects one person’s apparently limited opinion.

Don’t get me wrong - I love and respect BBQ and don’t see it as a lesser food at all.

But, it is a long established tradition. It represents techniques that have been honed and developed over generations and is therefore solidly established in US food culture.

A restaurant that changes a countries food scene is one that causes a fundamental shift in the cooking style of a restaurant genre. It’s an ah ha moment - chefs suddenly adopt a new technique of style due to its influence.

Examples are the Mod Oz style in Australia, the Nouvelle Cuisine in France, the molecular gastronomy in Spain, the US fusion style from Chang, etc etc.

I am not old enough to know the answer to this but did it…? I had the impression they industrialised a product that was already common - burgers and shakes.

So instead of lots of little independents flipping burgers we saw a more profitable “cookie cutter” model that could be deployed quickly via a franchise model.

McDonalds didn’t fundamentally change the food - they changed the business model behind it.

We now have BBQ bacon burgers, brisket tacos, pulled pork nachos, BBQ chicken pizza (huge at California pizza kitchen), BBQ shrimp, smoked hot wings, Jack Daniels steak, brisket burgers, and more pulled pork over everything else than you would find in a 20 £ knocking shop in the UK.

You name it, it gets the BBQ treatment over here.

I suggest you check the menu at an Applebee’s or a Chili’s.

50 years ago the only place we could get BBQ anything where I grew up was an outdoor, roadside pit.

And if we wanted BBQ sauce at home my Mom still had to make it from scratch.

I’ll bet today I could find 3-4 kinds in your local Sainsburys alone.

I’m not sure how you would define transformative, but to me that seems pretty transformative.

Actually that’s not true if you read the history of McDonald’s.

In their drive to standardize suppliers and insure uniform quality McDonalds completely revolutionized the supplier chain, including the way food is grown and processed.

In so doing, they more or less single handedly created some of the largest US agribusiness concerns. Check the history of JR Simplot or Tyson.

I will bet that if you could go back a hamburger at a good 1950’s diner or restaurant was a lot more tasty and nutritious than the McDonalds version.

So McDonalds did change the food we eat, and this was not necessarily a positive development.

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Those restaurants might have changed NYC, but their influence on the country as a whole is a questionable concept. I like the idea of 10 cuisines that changed America more than this. Again, the country is more than the coasts.

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Your review didn’t entice me to buy the book, but I got it as a gift so I can make some comments :slight_smile: I’ve skimmed a few chapters and read the chapter on the Mandarin in full. @VikingKaj is right to bring up the absence of BBQ— even in the intro, which discusses whether America has any regional cuisines in the age of industrialized food, it bizarrely makes no mention of BBQ.

I get the impression that the book includes some restaurants as change makers, and other restaurants as examples to illustrate broader culinary or cultural shifts in the US. The Mandarin chapter is the token chapter on non-European cuisine and starts/ends with a history of Chinese food in America, and sandwiches in the Mandarin as “an important example of the trend away from chop suey toward a more sophisticated understanding of Chinese food.”

It discusses the Mandarin/Cecilia Chiang as challenging stereotypes and being groundbreaking for several reasons. To enumerate a few, it covers Chiang (1) becoming a successful owner of a fine dining restaurant, and the difficulty of doing so as a Chinese woman, (2) marketing refined Chinese dishes that cost $$$, (3) showcasing Chinese cuisine in a place with non-stereotypical decor and with a wine/cocktail list, (4) introducing non-Cantonese dishes like hot & sour soup, (5) popularizing some dishes in the US (szechuan prawns and deep fried bananas). (6) teaching people like Julia Child, James Beard, and Alice Waters, and (7) mentioning how her son’s PF Changs has 200 international locations (wow, there’s lots in the US).

These are all good things to mention about the Mandarin/Chiang, but Chiang’s story is covered in her autobiography and the history of Chinese American cuisine is covered in various places. The biggest limit of the chapter is it fails to emphasize how these important breakthroughs connect to what happened afterwards. In other words, It would be a more interesting chapter if it followed the title of the book rather than simply contrasting the Mandarin to the status quo for Chinese restaurants in the 1960s. The reader is left with unanswered questions such as: Did Chiang’s success motivate other Chinese restauranteurs to open non-Cantonese restaurants and make it easier to get investors? Or inspire women chefs/owners of all ethnicities? What happened to the former chefs and bartenders at the Mandarin? It’s cool to hear that Julia Child, Alice Waters, and James Beard learned from Chiang and that John Lennon ate at the Mandarin, but how did those experiences or lessons affect those people and others? The Mandarin might have been the first to serve certain dishes, but can their popularity be attributed to the Mandarin or to the new wave of Chinese immigrants in the late 60s? What would America as a whole have not learned, or learned later, had the restaurant not taken off? Is Chiang’s son really the only contemporary person in the food industry than can attribute their career to their association with the Mandarin (as a disservice to Chiang, no one else is mentioned or quoted)?

Freedman’s lack of curiosity could have saved the chapter from ending in a thud that thwarts the title of the book and suggests that the Mandarin did not “change America.” After discussing the closing of the Mandarin, the chapter finishes with a section titled, “Chinese Food in America Today,” stating that Chinese restaurants outside of immigrant enclaves “have not been able to achieve significant innovations or improvements over the last decades.” The reasons for this are complex and touched on by Freedman but he misses an opportunity to reiterate what innovations the Mandarin made and how they permeated the US during its heyday or beyond. Instead we are left with the thought that “American consumers typically resist the notion of a first-class Chinese establishment in terms of both food and atmosphere. In its prime, however, the Mandarin was something of an exception.”

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Thanks for the excellent observations.

You helped me put my finger on what really bugged me about the book.

It’s like a history if history was written by People Magazine.

And you’re right that no new territory is covered that wasn’t already better covered in Chiang’s autobiography.

For those who don’t know he changed the name and founded PF Changs, the Applebee’s of Chinese Food, which to me seems the antithesis of a good Chinese restaurant.

Ingredients prepped in a central kitchen, portion controlled, and trucked in to be prepared by Central American cooks according to a specific formula.

Sichuan Cottage it’s not.

There is excellent Chinese food in Marlboro NJ, Omaha NE, or Indianapolis IN, none of which would be generally considered immigrant “enclaves”. You just have to look for it.

Also fusion cuisine is everywhere these days. A lot of it is not well executed, but I don’t see how you can say there isn’t a lot of innovation going on.

Again this type of unfounded sweeping overgeneralization abounds throughout the book.

Could a quote be more condescending?

I guess eating at Sichuan Cottage or Picnic Garden makes us all vulgarians.

Or do we have to pay up the yin yang for Chinese food to be good?

BTW some of the better places to eat in Hong Kong or Singapore are not long on decor.

To true patrons it indicates that money is being placed elsewhere rather than in preparation of the food.

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Ha, I actually ate at a PF Changs for the first time last week (coincidence with reading the chapter). I was expecting a train wreck when I saw the list of sushi, but the happy hour appetizers reminded me of Applebees— not exciting, but perfectly fine. Actually, the garlic chili green beans, deep-fried no doubt for maximum shriveling, were better than at most non-Sichuan restaurants and included preserved vegetables (probably zha cai).

I’ve spoken to family members (I’m Jewish) who advocate PF Changs as “real Chinese food.” If it gets people to realize that there exists a distinction between the corner takeout and a real or mythical “real Chinese food”, and that that other food isn’t weird, I think that’s a net positive… especially in a contemporary atmosphere with cocktails. And if that set the stage for places like Martin Yan’s MY China, we’re in a good place. But that’s me saying this— whether or not perceptions of Chinese food have changed since the 60s, Freedman provides little evidence plus or minus besides the proliferation of new dishes!

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I read Jane Kramer’s review of this book in the New Yorker, and while I concluded that the book probably wasn’t much worth reading (she’s more charitable than the OP, but has some of the same criticisms re narrowness) I found the review quite interesting and entertaining.

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I don’t want to get started on the topic of “real” or “authentic”. If you begin with the premise that all good food is local then IMO you have to go to the China or Taiwan to get good real Chinese food.

Even in this era where we are flying basic ingredients all over the planet, the executions here are always facsimiles or interpretations of the real thing.

Maybe, as the say with Brooklyn pizza, it’s in the water.

With regards to PF Changs, they literally have to be serving tons of iceberg lettuce in those lettuce wraps, which everybody orders.

I’m pretty sure iceberg lettuce didn’t exist in China before McDonalds got there.

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