US vs UK Chinese Takeout | Food Wars | Insider Food

Harry: From signature items to portion sizes, we wanted to discover all the differences between Chinese takeaway in the US and UK. This is "Food Wars." Here are all the menu items you'll find at a Chinese takeaway in the UK that you might not find in the US. Here's all the Chinese takeaway we got from our local restaurant that you might not be able to find in the United Kingdom. We'll start with the appetizers. In the UK, it's quite common for you to ask a Chinese person to order some starters and eat them along with your meal.

One thing to note, almost all of them are beige, and I think that will be a theme as we move through this episode. A lot of British Chinese

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is just beige fried stuff, and we love it. We'll start with an exception to the beige rule, with crunchy seaweed. It actually has a misleading name, because it is not algae. It is shredded cabbage that is then fried. It's always aggressively salty. Sometimes a little fish flakes are sprinkled on top. I think this is basically fried cabbage with a little salt powder. When we have Chinese

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at home, it will be pretty much the only green thing on our plates.

And this is what we have for our signature appetizers, starting with the steamed dumplings. That's very good. I love a dumpling. Another fairly iconic starter is a chicken satay skewer. They take a piece of chicken, put it on a skewer, grill it in a kind of satay sauce, which is mostly peanut, and serve it to you there. We also have some extra satay sauce for dipping. These are great. They are always a little dry. I think that's why you also have to have the sauce on the side. Next we have the scallion pancake, which literally looks like a small pancake cut up.

I am going to try. Yes, that's really tasty. I want to dip this in something though. I feel the need to immerse myself. When I think of British Chinese takeaway, this might be one of the main dishes that comes to mind. They are sweet and sour chicken balls. So the sweet and sour part really just refers to the sauce it's served with. It's basically just a piece of chicken that is then breaded and fried. MMM. Now, its quality varies greatly from one restaurant to another. If chicken balls aren't your thing, we also have the option of a shrimp ball.

Now, instead of a piece of chicken, they take a whole shrimp, bread it, and fry it. Kind of like a tempura shrimp, but I think the batter is much heavier. We've been stuck in a debate about whether there is any difference between prawns and shrimp. It seems like they are sometimes used interchangeably, but perhaps they are actually different species. I don't know if Nico, you have any idea about the differences between prawns and shrimp. There is actually a difference between shrimp and prawns. It is not just a linguistic issue. Shrimp are more common in the US and tend to be smaller and more flavorful in flavor compared to prawns.

Charlie says that when he ate it in the past, it was like some kind of shrimp paste mashed into a ball, whereas these are just whole shrimp in a dough, so I feel like I get a better deal here. This is a fried wonton. He is so cute. It looks like a small flower. It is very good and crispy. Next, I wanted to take a look at British wontons. I know you can get them in the US, but I thought there might be some differences. So these are not crispy. These are steamed. Quite tasty. It's not something I would normally ask for.

Moving on, we have the crab rangoons. For some reason, they're kind of a meme now. I do not know why. These had an increase in popularity overall, but this is what they look like. Something similar to a wonton, but bigger. Let's open this bad boy. Oh! Gorj. The filling is just crab and cream cheese. I get it, I think. I understand why it is so popular. This is a success. When you talk about your Mount Rushmore of beige

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, this has to be up there. This is sesame shrimp toast. We have four beige foods immortalized forever in stone.

Now, if you order a full English breakfast in the UK, you're likely to find fried bread there. Basically what Chinese restaurants in the UK have done is jazz up the frybread by putting a layer of prawn paste in the middle and then covering it with lots of sesame seeds. These are delicious. I love these. Moving on, we have the ribs. I must admit that I have never had ribs. It's not something I've ever asked for. These have bones! That's literally a bone. I thought I ordered boneless ribs, but I guess I ordered ribs with Peking duck sauce and they look and smell amazing, so I'm going to take a bite anyway.

Yes, that's literally that good. That's so good! Why don't I order ribs? That's so delicious. Now, I was surprised when I saw them as exclusives in this episode, but the next one is shrimp crackers. This is another thing you'll see on almost every Chinese takeaway order in the UK. Even if you don't ask for them, they often just throw you in a free bag. They're great for soaking up chunks of sauce or something. You can also dip them in the sweet and sour sauce and you will get a sizzle. I really almost hope we made a mistake in the script and that you can actually find them on Chinese

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menus in the US, because they're great and you guys are missing out.

The last two items we wanted to talk about were the fries. Here we have two versions that you will find on almost every British Chinese takeaway menu. We have regular chips and we have salt and pepper chips. As I'm sure some of you will know, Brits don't tend to have the most adventurous palates in the world and crisps are usually in high demand. The same goes for Indian restaurants and Chinese restaurants. Basically, they just satisfy the demand of the British public. In addition, it is very common to accompany fries with curry sauce. So curry sauce in this sense probably has some of the similar flavors that you would find in a katsu-curry type sauce.

I would refer to this type of curry sauce as chip shop curry sauce, and that applies to both Chinese takeaways and fish and chip shops. Then we also have the salt and pepper chips. Now, salt and pepper seasoning is quite common in UK Chinese restaurants. It refers to a seasoning blend that is made up of salt, white pepper, and Chinese five spice. They take that, they base it on that, they make chips, they cook them most of the time and then they finish them usually in a wok with some chiles, a little bit of onion and a little bit of scallion.

These are delicious. Now, I'll defend salt and pepper chips, but they were at the center of that British Chinese food TikTok controversy, which is honestly why we made this episode. I also received an order of fries. Obviously these aren't exclusive to US Chinese takeaway places, but I just wanted to show how they looked here compared to the UK. Very bland. I don't even think they have salt in them, which is pretty interesting. This is definitely one of those Chinese takeout menu items that suits a different type of palate. I would say I almost never see people ordering fries at a Chinese food place.

Something like this is probably for kids who are picky eaters, and I definitely was. When I was a kid I ordered white rice and chicken wings at Chinese takeout because I didn't want to try anything else, but that's how it feels. Something to please the children. I'm calling Harry kid right now. Something to please the child. Another British Chinese takeaway is a crispy and aromatic duck pancake. Now, it falls somewhere between an appetizer and a main dish, because, I mean, if you gave me enough of this, I would just eat it as my main dish. It can be a little expensive, so I feel like some people can just share a little.

It was packaged perfectly for us, but it comes in a few different components. Obviously, we have the crispy and aromatic duck itself. These little crunchy pieces of skin are amazing. We have the pancakes. We have hoisin sauce. And then you have your vegetables. In this case we have some cucumber and chive juliennes. I'll do a little demo montage here. I feel like everyone has different ways of putting it together, so don't judge mine. Start with a pancake. Get as much of that crispy skin as possible. Cuke bits. Some spronions. Hoisin is a kind of plum-based sauce.

Just nice and sweet. It works very well with salty. Have some fun with it, you know? Beautiful. These are sensational. In fact, I haven't tried one of these in a while. Next, let's talk about the unique soup options we have. This is a bean and vegetable curd soup. I should mention that I never order soup when I get Chinese takeout, but it will obviously vary from person to person. Some people like a small soup appetizer. I'm not one of those people. I love soup in general though. It smells mainly like broccoli to me. It doesn't have a super strong flavor.

I feel like the broth is not as rich as I wanted, but the tofu is very tasty. Next we have the spicy and bitter. I've never had sweet and sour soup before, so I'm interested in trying it. This smells a lot like sweet and sour sauce, so I guess that's what's in here. I'm looking at vegetables, what I think is tofu. It smells really good, so let's take a sip. The texture is not my favorite. I think it has the texture of a sauce to me, so drinking it like a soup doesn't seem right to me.

But it tastes good. And lastly, we have the egg drop soup, which I think is a pretty popular soup when you order Chinese takeout here. The one we have here is chicken and sweetcorn, which I think is like the archetypal Chinese takeaway soup here in the UK. I won't necessarily go out of my way to order one of these, although I think they're pretty tasty. Although something to highlight is the texture of these, because if you are not used to it it can surprise you a lot. There is something about chicken and sweet corn soup in particular that is very comforting.

We actually have corn and chicken soup here too, but I don't think it's as popular as something like a sweet and sour soup. In the UK we have many fried rice dishes. They can probably be ordered as a main meal, but I would say that in the UK they are more traditionally ordered alongside a meat or vegetable dish and enjoyed together. We chose a couple of options. Here is the house special fried rice, and we also have the Singapore fried rice. I just wanted to know what makes this the house special fried rice, because it usually includes a variation of different types of things mixed together.

There are bits of chicken, pork and shrimp here, plus some scallions. Singapore fried rice seems to have the same filling, because I see these little shrimps in it. I also see pieces of chicken and pork. I think this is supposed to be a slightly spicier fried rice, so let me try it quickly. Not too spicy, but definitely more of a chili flavor. Moving on to our fried rice option, we only had one, and this is the young chow fried rice. Basically, it's made with a bunch of different protein options. Looking down right now, I just see ribs, I see chicken, I see shrimp.

It looks pretty good. I had never thought about eating several meats at once like this. I would say fried rice in general is a popular food here. I do it all the time. It is a very easy dish to make at home. And it's definitely popular at Chinese takeout places, but for some reason, we only had one exclusive option at this particular location. I'm going to try to take a bite of every meat in it. Oh! There is. It has a very strange flavor when there are three different meats at the same time, but it's not bad.

It's actually pretty good. Now, chow mein has to be one of the most popular dishes in the UK. I think the surveys have placed it as the number one dish. It is quite versatile. I would say that usually this would also be an accompaniment to a meat dish, or you could eat it on its own. Personally, chicken chow mein is my favorite, and I think it's probably most Brits' favorite too, but you can also get simple toppings, vegetable or otherwise. Here we have the chicken chow mein. It's actually just a stir-fried noodle dish. Chow mein definitely exists here, but it doesn't exist at this particular restaurant.

I'm sorry I have to repeat myself so much. Let's talk about noodles. These are the fried noodles, this is the lo mein and this is the Singapore mei fun. Upon opening this, I knew exactly what it smelled like. It smells like curry, so it has to contain some kind of curry element. It smells really good, so I think I'll take a bite. I've never had this before. And they also seem to use smaller noodles than in either of these two dishes. It's like those thin ones, are they like noodle noodles? Vermicelli noodles. That's my daughter's name.

This dish also contains multiple proteins. I see chicken and shrimp. I don't know if there's anything else underneath, but that's what I see now. The taste is quite good. I don't know if I like noodles. I think this is the first timethat I have them. They are very thin noodles. I like them a little chewier, like the ones that come in lo mein. Once you get past the portions of rice and noodles, Chinese takeaway menus in the UK are usually sorted by protein, so you choose chicken, pork, beef or whatever else, and then choose a sauce that goes well . with that.

For example, we can get sweet and sour chicken, but you can also get sweet and sour chicken, sour pork and sweet and sour beef. From each protein category, we'll show you a couple of interesting or unique foods. Let's start with the chicken. Here I have lemon chicken. This is another one that you will probably find on almost every Chinese takeaway menu in the UK. The sauce is pretty good though. It's lemony. A little sweet. A little sour. Then here we have the kung po chicken. You may also see this called kung pao chicken, with that A in the middle, but it's the same dish.

Basically, it's not much different from the sweet and sour chicken you might find on a Chinese takeaway menu in the UK. They are these pieces of chicken dredged and fried in a sweet and spicy sauce. I think Kung Pao Chicken traditionally can contain a bit of peanuts as well. In the United States it is exactly the same. Our menus are categorized by protein type, but many of the dishes are really different, so you don't always get the same sauce, for example, for a seafood dish as you do for a chicken dish. Let's start with chop suey, which I have never tried before, but I am very interested.

You can get it with any protein. We have ours with chicken. And this is how it looks. The chicken looks a little pale. I feel like this is a surprisingly mild dish compared to many other chicken dishes I've had at Chinese takeout. It's definitely not my favorite. Moving on to sesame chicken. This was a fan favorite. They told me I had to get this. I'm not a sesame chicken orderer, but my friends and coworkers are. Yes, it's so good. Next we have the orange chicken, which, as its name suggests, has orange in the sauce. And this particular place uses orange peel to season the chicken.

I've definitely eaten a lot of orange chicken in my time, particularly the frozen one from Trader Joe's. So it's quite popular. It is not a hot sauce. It's definitely just a sweet and spicy sauce, but it's very delicious. And last but not least, we have General Tso's Chicken, which is my favorite dish for Chinese takeout. You'll see it on many Chinese restaurant menus here in the US, but it's not exactly authentic Chinese food. Disgusting surprise. General Tso was a real general from Hunan Province who supposedly enjoyed eating a dish similar to General Tso's chicken, although this modern American version would probably be unrecognizable to him.

The dish was actually created in the 1950s by a chef named Peng Chang-kuei. When he emigrated to New York in 1973, he modified his recipe to suit the American palate, which in this case means he made it sweeter. Peng Chang-kuei called him General Tso's chicken because he and General Tso are from the same city. Now we move on to the meat options. Now, firstly, I have to mention what might be my favorite British Chinese takeaway, which is Crispy Chili Shredded Beef. One thing I have to say, talking a lot about textures and crunchiness, what you will often find in Chinese takeaways in the UK is that they will actually make a small hole in the plastic container.

This is probably the first thing I order when I order Chinese takeout. What they do is they take these little pieces of meat, usually they coat them in something like cornmeal, fry them, and then they toss them in this delicious sweet and spicy chili sauce. I love the variation you get. Some of them will be a little chewier, others will be crunchier. The flavors are great. Next we have some Szechuan beef. Now, I really enjoyed listening to Tianran talk about the flavors of Szechuan... Tianran: Szechuan-style cooking with peppercorns. ...when we were doing the series between the United States and China.

Go see that. But I think Szechuan food tends to be quite spicy and they also use Szechuan peppercorns, which gives you this kind of numbing effect in your mouth. The meat here is not fried either. It's more like pieces of stewed meat. I'm a little intrigued to try this, although I'm concerned about my spice tolerance. Yeah, that's pretty spicy. It's very tasty, very tasty. And finally we have beef in black bean sauce. I would say this one is pretty common too, and you can also get it in different varieties of meat, so you can get it with chicken, pork, and anything else.

It also comes with lots of peppers. A little chili there, onion. It is a rich and very rich sauce. That's really good. That with a little rice, beautiful pairing. In fact, we will often get this one. This is one of my favorites. I feel like I've said that about a lot of things. I think I order too much Chinese takeout. There are a variety of meat dishes that you can get at Chinese food places here in the United States. Today we have moo shu beef. It has cabbage, some mushrooms and obviously beef. Let's take a look.

The meat it contains is really tender and delicious. I actually like this! Seafood is also a fairly common option on Chinese takeaway menus in the UK. Many of the options you'll find have similar sauces to some of the beef or pork options, but there are some unique ones as well. First we have the squid with salt and pepper. You may remember the salt and pepper sprinkles from before. It's basically crispy squid cooked with the same seasoning. Sometimes this can be found in appetizers. Today they had it in their main section, so let's go with that. I love crispy calamari.

The way they cut it with this striped pattern, particularly in Chinese cuisine, gives it a really nice texture. It's not as chewy. It is very tasty, not very fishy. Just to illustrate that sometimes sauces are the same on different parts of the menu, this is the black pepper and black bean sauce again, but this time with calamari. Then we have a couple of shrimp options as well. Here we have the prawns in oyster sauce. And prawns with cashews. While we have the prawns here without balls, let me take out one of those. Nico, how does that sound to you?

Is that a prawn or a shrimp? Or none? That shrimp looks a bit like shrimp to me. It certainly doesn't look like a prawn. That's not the king of prawns. In the US, shrimp is definitely the most popular seafood option when ordering Chinese takeout. We have a couple of shrimp options here, the Szechuan shrimp and a seafood delight, which contains shrimp and I guess other delicious sea creatures. That's just shrimp. Is that what's delicious? Or do they mean that the delight is, for example, accompanying it with a lot of vegetables? Let's try the Szechuan shrimp. It smells as spicy as I think it will be.

This is probably the biggest shrimp I've seen today. I swear I've eaten with a fork before. Oh no, it's behind! It's spicy, not as spicy as I thought it was going to be, but I'm sure the more you eat it, the spicier it gets. But that sauce is very, very good, and the shrimp are amazing, even though they have tails. Take off the tails. We also got an egg roll with shrimp. Harry really wanted me to try this, and I'm glad he mentioned it, because he'd never had a shrimp egg roll before. Pork only. That's what I get every time.

See that little piece of shrimp? I feel like it tastes slightly different than pork, not just because the meat is different. Another item you will see in many Chinese restaurants in the US is the egg foo young. It is an omelet made with vegetables, a protein and a sauté sauce. Wow, honey. This is a large tortilla. It smells very good. It doesn't just smell like eggs. It smells like a lot of good things. In fact, it needs a lot more salt. I wonder if you're supposed to add sauce or something on top? I think we're actually supposed to add this sauce to it, so let me add it and see if it helps with the salt factor.

This feels very typical of the UK at the moment, pouring this sauce over food. Better. It's still not great. I don't know if I like this. Yes, egg foo young is interesting, but I'm not sure Brits would really go in and order just an omelette from a Chinese takeaway. I'm not sure how well that would take off here. It's time to talk about sauce. Salsa talk. If there was ever a time to talk about salsa, it's now. So, here in front of me, I have all the sauces that were offered at the restaurant where we ordered.

I'll go over them now, explain what they are, what they can be combined with, and try them out. We'll start with a slightly infamous one. It's British curry sauce. The British went around the world, took spices from everyone and this is somehow the only thing we could think of. The British love curry sauce, or at least this version of curry sauce. There's definitely some heat there. Not much. It is a fairly mild spicy flavor. There's something about its texture. It's really satisfying. That really thick, cornstarch-like texture. Pairs excellently with chicken meatballs. You'll often see the British sprinkling this on chips.

Chips and curry sauce are very popular in the UK. Or you'll just see it drizzled all over your succulent Chinese food. I will say that Joe really loved that when we did our "Food Tours" episode of the fish and chip shop. It's not just Brits who can enjoy it. Then we have another iconic Chinese takeaway sauce from the UK, which is sweet and sour. Depending on where you get it, the color will again vary. It's a pretty balanced question. The first thing that hits your tongue is the bitter taste, then it softens quite quickly and you get a pleasant sweet aftertaste.

Again, I think this is meant to be paired with chicken balls or shrimp balls or something. But I think a lot of Brits will just cover all their food with it. While we're talking about these iconic sauces, I should also highlight the Styrofoam cups. I think Americans might call it Styrofoam. But these are truly iconic. This is the standard delivery container for your sauces. The restaurant we ordered from had two chili options. First of all, we have sweet chili. The British love sweet chilli. This is on the menu of many restaurants. And then the next one we have is chili oil.

I would say this is not very commonly found on UK Chinese takeaway menus. Next we have the black bean sauce. Now, this is the same sauce that you may have seen on some of the dishes before. Then we have two more sauces. First, we have hoisin sauce. This is now most commonly paired with the crispy duck you'll find on Chinese takeaway menus in the UK. It is a very thick dark brown sauce. Again, thick sauces. We love it. I think the main ingredient in hoisin sauce, or one of the main ingredients, is plum. This gives you that real sweetness, which pairs very well with the tasty duck meat and other things on the menu.

And finally we have barbecue sauce. Now, I was a little confused when I saw this on the menu, because barbecue sauce in the Western sense, like Texas barbecue sauce, for example, doesn't look like that, and I think that's what I was expecting. . But I think what is really delivered is more of a Chinese style barbecue sauce. What this makes me think about is more when you eat, like, a char siu pork bun, for example. Because even though it's roasted, it still has some sweetness. Here are five Chinese spices. But if you're expecting Heinz barbecue sauce, this isn't it.

I think that of all of these, the one I would choose the most would be the sweet and sour sauce. It's because I almost always order chicken balls when I order Chinese takeaway in the UK, and one of these will come with them. Yes, I think in the UK it is the ultimate sauce, closely followed by curry. I think that's one of the biggest differences between Chinese takeout in the US and the UK. Our takeout comes with the sauce already incorporated, for the most part. However, you get a mix of small sauce packets like this one.

We have soy sauce and duck sauce, which are very good. It's a kind of sweet sauce. We usually have mustard, which I don't see here. But you get mustard. And hot sauce. I'm pretty sure there are more, but that's just what we have now. And then we take a couple of small cups, this looks like a paste. I think this is a small container of oyster sauce, and this is just a small container of extra soy sauce, probably for dipping. If you don't have a drawer full of these sauces, I don't know what you're doing. I feel like everyone has that drawer in their house full of random sauce packets like this.

Now that we've covered each item individually, what I wanted to do was show you my ideal British Chinese takeaway dish. You may have seen them on TikTok or somewhere else since they broke the internet a while ago, but I'll show you my version. I need some chow mein. The amount of carbohydratesThat they could end up in this dish might be alarming to some, because we're going to get to the noodles. We're also going to go with rice. You know, we're going to use the salt and pepper chips. So I want a healthy portion of my crispy chili beef.

I'm going to want some seaweed here. Some of this shrimp toast. Definitely a couple of spring rolls. And of course also our shrimp crackers. Generally speaking, this is a pretty average Chinese takeaway dish for a Brit. But we're not done there. The last step, of course, is to add our sauces. Yes, that is sauces in the plural, because we will add both the curry sauce and the sweet and sour sauce. And honestly, I'm not discriminating here. This applies to virtually all food. And of course our sweet and sour sauce. Love it or hate it, that's your typical British Chinese takeaway dish.

I think I've done a good job there. Brits, agree or disagree with me in the comments below. Nico, I have to hear your thoughts on this. Would you eat this? Let me stop you right there. Why do they sauce the whole dish? Doesn't the whole dish taste like that sauce? Do you want everything to taste exactly like that sauce? Bone application of teeth. Now let's put together an American takeout dish with a bunch of staples that I think are very beloved nationally, I would say. Let's start with our accompaniments, our small appetizers. So we'd probably put a couple wontons in there.

I would also do some kind of roll. Normally I would make an egg roll, but all we have left are spring rolls. Next, you would have your rice. I prefer white rice. I just think it's very easy to pair with any type of main dish. Okay, normally I wouldn't eat the entire container of rice, but we'll leave it on the plate. We have to get some chicken. You definitely need a side dish of vegetables, so we're going to make broccoli, because I feel like literally every Chinese restaurant has broccoli as a side dish. If you ignore the huge mountain of white rice, I think it looks quite appetizing.

The last thing I would add to this dish is probably some lo mein, so let's do that. I didn't mention this before, but these little fried ones, I think they are fried noodle pieces. They come with soups, so you can throw them in your soup. Eat them with your soup. They are good for snacking. I think it's a pretty appetizing dish. This is probably the point at which people in the UK would dip their plate in sauce. I would do things a little differently. I really like dipping egg rolls in duck sauce, which is what this is.

It's so good. And I think some people put sauce on the rice and stuff. So we have our white rice, our wontons, our fried noodles, some spring rolls, a side of broccoli, sesame chicken, and the lo mein, which I think sums up what a typical order from a Chinese food place would be. It seems here in the United States. If it doesn't look like what you would order, I'm sorry, honey. I do not know what to tell you. This is just what I think. I can't even believe I haven't mentioned it yet. You have to get a can of Coca-Cola on the side.

Any soft drink will do. I just think you need a can of soda with your Chinese takeout. It's just a feeling like no other. It goes hand in hand. In the UK, when we order food for delivery, we say we order "takeaway" rather than ordering "takeaway". Also in the UK we tend not to bother adding the words "food" or "takeaway" to the type of food we eat. For example, if we order Chinese takeaway, most Brits will simply say that we are eating "a Chinese". The same perhaps applies to Indian food, when having "an Indian" or even a full English breakfast.

In the United States we call it "takeout." Obviously they both mean the same thing, but that's our preferred way of saying it. We also say "Chinese food" or "Chinese takeout" instead of just "a Chinese." We also wanted to look at how each country packages its food. In the UK, you might find your Chinese food in one of these laminated, paper-topped boxes. The other most common form of packaging is one of these clear plastic containers. And finally, for appetizer options, like some spring rolls, which we have here, they usually come in a paper bag. I've always seen those folded cardboard boxes on American TV shows and I have to say they look pretty cool.

Also, cute little takeout boxes are something that I think we see a lot, maybe in the media, when someone orders Chinese food, but they're not very, very common. Most food comes in these types of containers, which are like black Tupperware with a transparent lid. They are usually reserved for rice, perhaps lo mein, but they are not reserved for all meal options. These boxes were actually inspired by Japanese origami. Frederick Weeks Wilcox was the first person to introduce the paper box in the 19th century for transporting raw oysters. He created a patent for it and called it a "paper cube," which is basically what it is.

It's like a cute little cube. In the UK and US, portion sizes and menu items will vary slightly depending on the different restaurants you go to. But we did want to compare a couple of standard menu items in the US and UK to see who might get larger portions. An iconic appetizer from a Chinese takeaway in the UK is the spring roll. The restaurant where we ordered serves them in portions of six. In the United States, spring rolls are prepared a little differently. They are made with rice paper and inside they have thinly sliced ​​vegetables. This particular Chinese restaurant only gave us two, but I've ordered at some places that give you more.

It just depends on where you place the order. We have egg rolls, which are somewhat similar to those in the UK. These come in only one size as far as I know, but depending on where you order them, they might be a little bigger, a little smaller than this. At my local house, they are actually a little larger than this size. In the UK, our egg fried rice only comes in one size. I don't want to weigh this outside the box, so I'll just weigh it inside the box. This is a mountain. All this rice just came out of this little container.

This is what our fried rice looks like. At this particular restaurant, they only had one size of this fried rice, but I've seen places selling small and large sizes. Alright, let's weigh this mountain of rice. Harry: It's like the scale is at its maximum. Nico: That's a lot of rice. We have chicken included in that. Just to let you know. And we weighed the plate beforehand, so that's not part of this weight. The restaurant we ordered had chow mein in two different sizes, regular and large, although the large was only available with certain varieties. So this is a regular size chicken chow mein, and this is their house special chow mein in a large size.

Here in the United States we have chow mein, but we didn't have it at this particular restaurant. We have fried noodles, which I think are similar, so we're going to weigh them. Harry: Although I feel like once again it might be too heavy for the scale. Moving on to the sweet and sour chicken. This is a tried and true classic with takeout. I think I'm supposed to skip it myself, which is not the norm for me. In my experience when buying Chinese takeout, everything is already stir-fried. You don't need to add anything. This time they came without sauce, so we will add it ourselves.

In the UK our sweet and sour chicken came in one size. In the UK, it consists of small pieces of fried chicken, peppers, onions and also pineapple. It worries me to think that I should have dipped the individual pieces in sauce and eaten them like that. I never ordered this. I just know it's a common takeout item here. But I already poured the sauce all over it, so let's weigh it and see how much is left. As we mentioned before, each Chinese restaurant is unique in how they prepare and cook their food, so it's almost impossible to know exactly what goes into each dish.

However, one ingredient we wanted to highlight, as it is commonly associated with Chinese food, is MSG, or MSG. In 1907, a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda discovered a substance called glutamate, also known as umami. He later decomposed that substance into monosodium glutamate. MSG is a seasoning and food enhancer that provides a rich, savory flavor. In fact, MSG is very commonly found in fast foods, including Chick-fil-A, in snack foods, including Doritos, and it is found naturally in some cheeses. The FDA has recognized multiple times that MSG is safe and only contains one-third the sodium content of table salt.

So why does it have such a bad reputation? In 1968, The New England Journal of Medicine published a letter titled "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." In it, a doctor describes his experiences after eating at Chinese restaurants, citing symptoms such as "numbness in the back of the neck," "general weakness," and "palpitations." MSG was blamed and the myth of Chinese restaurant syndrome spread quickly. The phrase even ended up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Even though there was no evidence that MSG was dangerous, there was still public panic around it. Chinese restaurants, in particular, were considered unhealthy. Fortunately, MSG use is much more normalized today, although xenophobic misinformation from the 1960s still persists.

If you Google "MSG," some of the suggested search terms include things like "Why are Americans afraid of MSG?" and "Is MSG a neurotoxin?" Short answer, no, it is not. The first Chinese restaurants to appear in the United Kingdom were called eating houses. They would serve Chinese sailors who would dock in British ports. This dates back to the 19th century, when Hong Kong was part of the British Empire. Notable locations for this included Limehouse, which is part of London's East End and was actually where the original Chinatown was. London's East End was particularly affected by the bombing of World War II, causing Chinatown to move to Soho, where it is today.

The first recorded Cantonese restaurant in London was a place called Cathay, and it opened in 1908. It was opened by a former ship's chef, a guy called Chung Koon. It was Chung Koon's son who opened a restaurant in Bayswater decades later, which may have been the origin of Chinese takeaway in London. Apparently, the food was so popular that if customers couldn't get a table, they simply ordered takeout. Chung Koon's Maxim restaurant had a very popular dish consisting of pork and a sweet and sour sauce called jar jow. While the origins of the dish are specifically Cantonese, the British simply knew it as Chinese food.

The first known Chinese restaurant in the United States was called Canton and opened in 1849 in San Francisco. The 1850s saw the lure of the gold rush, so to escape the worst conditions in China, there was a flood of Chinese immigrants around this time. Restaurants began popping up to feed Chinese workers who missed home cooking, modifying their favorite dishes using ingredients they could find in the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States. An exception was made for restaurant owners, who could apply for merchant visas, which saw a boom in Chinese restaurant openings in the 1910s.

Any new restaurant that opened had to be considered "high quality" to be within the law of 1882, so the owners decorated the restaurants profusely and, in 1943, the law was repealed. During this period, dishes such as chop suey and egg foo young became popular throughout the country, especially with the spread of chop suey houses. Chop suey was made with leftover food. Its name basically means leftovers. The male immigrants who came from China had little to no cooking skills and the ingredients were different from those back home, so they put together what they could find and created a dish that was very easy to prepare.

Chop suey was a popular American Chinese dish until the 1960s, after which General Tso's chicken became popular. Also during this era, Chinese food began to be preserved in cans for pickling and freezing because the Great Depression meant people sought more affordable foods. The popularization of chop suey houses was a turning point for the integration of Chinese cuisine into American culture, although the dish ultimately became less popular. Chinese food gained popularity in the United Kingdom during and after World War II. The BBC introduced the British to recipes for Chinese cakes and other simple Chinese recipes, and when some Britons returned from their stay in the Far East, they brought with them a taste for Chinese cuisine.

An influx of Cantonese immigrants arriving from Hong Kong in the 1950sbrought with it a wave of Chinese restaurants in the UK. These restaurants really gained popularity. In fact, the restaurants became so popular that Billy Butlin introduced chop suey and French fries to the restaurant menus at his holiday camps. A trend also seen was Chinese families taking over former fish and chip restaurants. That's why you still see things like fish and chips or battered sausages and chips on the menu at some Chinese restaurants. Around 1960, The Mandarin opened in San Francisco, introducing Americans to Chinese food beyond chop suey, such as sweet and sour soup and dumplings.

Cecilia Chiang, the restaurant's owner, wasn't sure what food customers would want, so she added more than 300 dishes to the menu. President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 began to normalize relations between the countries and Americans were influenced to try more Chinese food. In 1989, the National Restaurant Association concluded that Chinese food was actually the most consumed cuisine nationwide, and over the next few decades, the number of Chinese restaurants increased by thousands. In 2007, there were more than 43,000. Currently, there are more than 23,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States. In the 1950s, there were only 36 Chinese restaurants in the UK, but in the following decades that number increased rapidly.

By the late 1990s, that number had increased to more than 5,000. Today, there are just over 7,000 Chinese restaurants across the UK. According to a survey, Chinese food is the second most popular cuisine in the US, just behind pizza, as of June 2023. A 2001 survey said that Chinese food was Brits' favorite foreign cuisine. This was backed up by another survey 20 years later, which said 25% of Brits will still choose Chinese food as their favorite foreign cuisine. That's really good. I love duck. I think there is a direct correlation between how cute an animal is and how good it tastes. Because ducks are pretty adorable and, damn, they're tasty.