Chi? Chi?
Chi?
Hello? Chi?
Yeah.
Are you ready? Yeah.
Hi!
Give me that dish and for the oil I need water.
Oil. Water.
Give me the brush. I need a brush.
1
2
What is General Tso's chicken?
General Tso's chicken is usually...
chicken legs.
Dark meat of the chicken.
Best made from dark meat.
They, cut about, uh..
Inch square.
Marinade that was thick white.
Deep fried in a wok.
And is quickly tossed in the sauce.
- Garlicky. - Tangy.
Intensive heat.
With sweet intensive taste.
- Salty. - Outside little crisp.
Inside still tender.
A glorious, sweet, fried chicken dish.
I don't think that General Tso's chicken's
The most popular ethnic dish in the country
Only because there's pizza.
Restaurant after restaurant
It's become american food, almost.
My customer, they come here 7 times a week.
Unbelievable.
I can't wait to start chowing down on this.
I don't know that there was a manual
For restaurateurs, but you'll find
A random Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere
And all of a sudden selling General Tso's chicken.
How did that happen?
Almond chicken, walnut chicken
Chow gai pan, which is boneless chicken
Crispy baked chicken, sesame chicken.
Oh, there he is, the General, $10.95.
In 1981, I was new to New York City
And I was alone in an apartment on the upper westside.
And I heard a riffle at the door
And I thought, "Oh, great, I've been here three days
and I'm about to get robbed."
And I peeked out from around the corner
and saw something slide under the front door
and few minutes later I got up the nerve
and went and looked at it and it was from
Hunan Royal Restaurant. A Chinese takeout menu.
Thus began, uh, what's now a quarter century of
Collecting Chinese restaurant memorabilia.
This is my Chinese restaurant memorabilia archive.
It starts up here with large format menus.
It fills these shelves.
And these shelves.
I have over 10,000 restaurant menus
From all 50 United States
From over a 100 nations around the world.
This is my Guinness World Record
For the world's largest collection of restaurant menus.
Rosticceria Chinese, a Chinese roast shop.
For some reason in Italy
Chinese takeout menus are squares.
Lucky 8 Chinese Restaurant
With Bruce Lee on the cover.
I don't think they're paying the Bruce Lee family
any royalties, but I don't know.
Beyond the menus I collect matchbooks, postcards
Toothpicks, chopsticks calendars, magnets
Baseball caps, t-shirts.
Wooden stir fry slicing play set.
Our son was given this when he was born
And I stole it immediately from him
And leave it in the package.
You can just throw pins at this menu
And get great stuff like fresh snake stem with bean curd slice.
If you see on a menu, you see these little pen ticks.
Um, most people don't see those
But I'm a menu professional.
A pen tick around a dish means that the waiter
Has recommended it many times.
Menus are like mystery books.
You know th... they answer a lot of questions
And they are a lot of fun to read
But they end up asking more questions.
The mysteries of the Orient.
I must have 15 different spellings of Tso
In my menu collection.
It's t-s-o, so it's Tso. How do I pronounce it again?
Uh, I don't know if you say the t or not.
I just kind of blur a bit, and that way no one really knows if I'm saying it right or not.
But I get mine over brown rice.
It's my healthy thing for the day.
Well, up in Chico they call it General Chicken.
You know, it's been called, General Toes
It's been called... I think the Naval Academy calls it Admiral Toes.
I feel like no matter what restaurant you go to
There's always a different spelling of General Tso, so..
So there's a lot to find about him.
I haven't a clue who he is.
I guess he must've came up with the recipe himself.
I think he was a... a General in the Chinese army
Who died during the time of Chairman Mao or something
And that was his favorite dish and they named it after him.
He, uh, had his private chef cook this dish, you know?
Uh, even when he went to battle.
I don't think it was a dish that was made for that General.
Maybe it was made in honor of him a 100 years after his death.
I think they just named it because it sounds exotic
After somebody nobody's ever heard of.
I imagine General Tso as almost
A bearded mongolian warrior, who's on a horse for sure
Riding wildly.
He's a General, so he obviously has a hat.
And he has a military uniform.
But maybe it's bulging a little bit
Because he's so chubby from eating all that chicken.
Beautiful armor, you know, with jade maybe and gold pieces.
He probably looks kind of fancy
With an army of thousands.
Did he love chicken? We don't know.
Nobody knows.
I know that the General's name is a Chinese name.
I can say it if I knew what it was.
"Zuo Zong Ji"
Or they also say it "Zuo Zongtang Ji."
I've only eaten it when I would have
American-Chinese takeout when I was little.
I was surprised, I have to say
That I haven't seen it directly on a menu in China.
General Tso was a 19th century General
In the Qing Dynasty.
And helped put down the Taiping Rebellion
Uh, which was a great peasant rebellion.
He was a great patriot.
He had tremendous loyalty from his men.
He was obviously a very intelligent
and strategically sophisticated person.
And also, I think, ruthless.
Zuo Zongtang was very much part of that mentality
Of trying to strengthen China and maintain Chinese values.
General Tso played a critical role
in keeping together what is now modern-day China.
At that point, there was truly a threat
you know, during the age of colonization.
And he always wanted to keep the Westerners out of China.
So if you told General Tso that this dish was named after him
I think he'd raise his eyebrows.
General Tso's chicken, it's a very sweet dish.
And the Hunanese
although they have some sweet dishes
they don't really like mixing sweet and savory foods.
So not only have people not really heard of it
but, um, it's not really the kind of flavor
they'd like to eat anyway.
I have no idea.
We don't have a file on General Tso
At the Chinese Historical Society.
It's amazing to me how a pattern developed.
Did several people have the same idea at the same time?
I mean, it cropped up in different places.
East coast, west coast, you know.
So this map gives you the number
according to the 2010 census
of Chinese
in every state of the union.
Chinese are 1% of the US population
which is a drop in the bucket.
Yet, probably most americans have eaten Chinese food.
So how do you explain that?
And how many have eaten General Tso's chicken?
Even though there's now General Tso's chicken
in restaurants coast to coast
there was a time when Chinese food
was completely new to America.
The biggest reason Chinese began to come to the US
Was the California gold rush of the 1850s.
The early Chinese are primarily Cantonese.
Chinese in the Guangdong area
Started coming to California in droves
through the port of San Francisco.
And the Chinese Quarter got more and more crowded.
For Americans, the Chinese were the space aliens.
They had their hair in long braids called queues.
They eat with sticks, not with forks.
And americans were sort of amazed by Chinese food
but also little bit repulsed by it.
The mainstream audience saw Chinese food
as scary, you know.
I mean, they thought of... they had ideas in their head
about Chinese people eating rats and things like that
and so you really were risking something
when you went into Chinatown.
The white authorities saw it
as a quarter of vice and slums
and prostitution and opium dens
and they said, "Let us rid," uh, you know
"San Francisco of its Chinatown."
They saw the Chinese as the competition.
"The Chinese must go," was the slogan that a lot of them used.
There were laws that were put in place
that would make it legal to prosecute violence
against Chinese, and, of course
this culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
1882, the law was passed and it made it difficult
for anyone except for few people
in protected classes to, uh, come to this country.
Uh, made it particularly difficult for women
uh, to arrive.
The whole idea of these laws
is to somehow stave off this generation.
They would have white mobs coming through their communities,
burning them out, tossing their stuff
out on to streets.
There's a quote, it said
"They say exclusion, but they mean extermination."
The exclusion act basically forced them out of labor.
And so they have to be self-employed.
And this is where two very important professions
came in being.
One is providing laundry
and one is providing food.
Restaurant work was one of the few jobs
that the Chinese could find.
And Chinese restaurant owners discovered
that if they adapted simple dishes
to American taste that they could make money.
Hey, how you doin' today? Is it wet and cold out there?
It's startin' to sprinkle. Oh, man.
Wish it would have rained a little while earlier.
Believe it or not, she says she doesn't eat it. So..
My name is Harlan Lee and, uh, we are at
Sing High Chop Suey House here in Phoenix, Arizona.
And, uh, this is my mother.
She is the senior partner of Sing High.
My name, uh... Ella Lee.
My grandfather opened Sing High, uh, in 1928
in downtown Phoenix.
You know, Chinese food was not that popular here yet.
I mean, if you looked at our business
we've changed our menus based on
the demands and the tastes of the people around us.
This awareness of having to make yourself
acceptable to a wider world
was very much on the minds of Chinese restaurants.
Even then, I mean, at that early time
they had experienced outrageous racism.
And to deal with it they got pretty savvy
I mean, all kinds of dishes frying up
that would appeal to white audiences.
You know, Chop Suey is, simply means, you know
just bits and pieces of different things.
It's very, very obvious that it caters
to the more Americanized palate.
Chop Suey is basically two things.
One it's a meat, like pork or chicken or beef.
So all meats that Americans recognize
accompanied by sort of these exotic vegetables
which are cool, but very much flavorless.
I... I don't come in my collection every day.
And... and look and... and..
This is from the age of Chop Suey.
This is a replica of one of the oldest menus in my collection,
it's from 1916.
Uh, and I don't handle the original
'cause it's crump... crink.. It's falling apart.
It's... it's very, very old.
Chop Suey is 15 cents, 30 cents, 25 cents.
I don't think the General was part of that scene.
You could get steak with mushrooms, was 40 cents.
But how you know that a menu is from 1916?
Scrapbooks, where people
Had this quote-unquote "exotic meal"
And saved the menu as a souvenir.
They would have, you know, menus
steaks or whatever potatoes.
And yet they would have Chop Suey on the menu.
And so it's this mash up
of being kind of exotic and kind of unfamiliar
but not too different.
You know, it's that foreign yet familiar thing
that was the real beginning of what
Chinese-American cuisine was.
It was a way in for people.
I do vividly recall I was 18 years old
and got off a Greyhound bus from Dayton, Ohio.
Got in late at night, saw the neon signs.
The first thing I ordered when I got off the bus
Was Chop Suey.
I've been eatin' in here for, well, since the '50s.
Quite frankly I didn't know what I was eating.
They've served this food forever.
It's just been very popular in Flagstaff.
I knew Fred's dad and his uncles.
Same here, Gina. Haven't seen you in a long time.
I know.
This right here is a postcard
of the restaurant
back in, probably, the '50s, you know.
My dad started the restaurant.
Half of my orders is Chinese food
and the other half, American food,
steaks, fried chicken.
This is clubhouse sandwich.
Big sandwich.
All of a sudden, in Chinatowns all over
you would find these huge neon signs
advertising Chop Suey.
Chop Suey became a national phenomenon.
It basically allowed for the proliferation
of Chinese restaurants
all across the United States into little towns.
And in a way it sort of laid the groundwork for
what was yet to come.
Chinese are very enterprising people.
So..
I think anywhere in the world where they can find a place
to put a restaurant they will do it.
If you were to look at a map of the us in 1850
you would find all of the Chinese
in California.
Then over time
after 1882, the exclusion era
they began a very pronounced migration
into sparsely populated counties
all across the country.
Midwest, east and even the south.
One of the motivations for the dispersion
was to escape persecution on the west coast
and earn a living in a safer environment.
But the major reason was an effort to find employment
uh, in a way that didn't compete with other Chinese.
My restaurant's name's Golden Dragon.
We are the only Chinese restaurant in town.
We are the only Chinese family in town.
It's hard, you know, to stay in a small town.
A lot of people think I'm crazy.
One of my... lots of my friends, my family.
But I like it in this town.
When we first come, this restaurant want to sell.
So we just came, we see it, and we think
"Oh, yeah, that... that good for a family," you know.
And then we have kids.
1, 2, 3, 4. We got 4 kids.
But for me it's okay.
You know, somebody when tell me, Tammy
"I always travel from New York to San Francisco.
You are the best!"
They drive me... makes me so happy, you know.
Hmm.
I am David R. Chan.
I am a tax attorney and certified public accountant.
And in my spare time, I like to
uh, eat at different Chinese restaurants.
And over the years, I've managed to eat at
over 6000 different Chinese restaurants.
Rice noodle in clay pot.
I don't know, I'm not sure if that's enough for us.
Maybe we should add a couple more items.
Steamed chicken buns?
I never thought of that as a dessert.
Here we have some, uh, curry fish balls.
Rice pancakes with minced beef stuffing.
You know, if somebody asks me why I travel all over
to seek Chinese restaurants to eat at,
it's really part of a, uh, seeking of an identity.
And to see where, as a Chinese-American, how
you know, how that fits in with the overall American culture.
I started to notice
most Americanized Chinese restaurants
they have names that would be not threatening
to the local population, like Golden Palace or China Inn.
I don't know how many China Inns there are.
Some restaurant names
people just don't quite understand what the words mean.
So for example, I mean, in New York Chinatown
there's a restaurant called Strange Taste.
Well, I mean, would you really wanna go
to the Strange Taste restaurant?
I noticed even when I was a kid
whenever we traveled anywhere in the country
there was one Chinese restaurant
at least one Chinese restaurant in any city
of any particular size.
Actually what happened is
the regional Chinese association
basically assigned territories.
Even to this day, if you go to Chinatowns
you'll see a lot of buildings that say
you know, Wong Association
or, you know, Fujian Association.
All the takeout restaurants sell these dishes.
Everywhere.
You know, I know.
I'm in charge of this organization.
This is one of the oldest organization in Chinatown.
We are 130 years here.
This is the first step, you know.
A lot of the new immigrant they just come here
and if the organization can help them
to set up the business in a proper way.
I mean, register them.
They teach you how to cook step by step.
Chinese restaurant owners, uh, to a great extent
relied on the traditional Chinese networks.
Family associations, district associations.
They would get information about the popular dishes
to help each other in a strange place.
It's not easy to settle here in Chinatown.
Because the rent is high.
The organization gives you some information
where to go, which state or which town is better.
That's why they spread out. All over in the country.
In a lot of the smaller town, it's very lonely.
Because they have no relatives, no entertainment there.
No place to go. They don't understand.
They don't speak English that well.
And then sometimes they have some trouble.
I'm not exactly sure where General Tso's chicken
originated from, but I do know
where cashew chicken came from.
Pensacola, Florida.
My father came over from Canton, China in 1940.
A famous physician tried my dad's cooking
and loved it and asked him if he'd be willing
to move to Springfield, Missouri.
During that time my dad opened up his own restaurant
for a while, and he was not very accepted.
He had people picketing his restaurant
protesting his restaurant.
"go back to China." things like that.
Actually our restaurant was blown up before we opened.
It was bombed.
There was a lot of prejudice about a Chinese person
owning a business here in Springfield, Missouri.
What won, uh, the people over though was
once they started eating the food they loved it.
He knew that in the midwest, people like comfort food.
They love their food fried.
What he did was, he, uh
took off the bones on a fried chicken
deep fried it and put a brown gravy sauce over it.
Hence, that's how he came up with cashew chicken.
And it just took off like wild fire.
There's over a couple of hundred restaurants
just in the Springfield area now that serve cashew chicken.
There's a little story about the cashew chicken.
Late '60s or early '70s, McDonald's corporation
actually came to see how the technique
was to bread and fry the chicken nuggets
and they wanted my dad's recipes and..
But they didn't wanna pay for it.
My dad's, "Well, I'm not gonna give it to you."
A year later, Chicken McNuggets come out.
So, you know, tell me is that a coincidence or what?
I, uh, I tend to think that, you know, they owe me royalty.
Now, I'll show you
The General Tso's chicken that we do.
We use the same chicken nuggets we use on the cashew chicken.
People ask me, "Wing, do you think you'll be frying chicken
till the end of your life?"
I said, "I probably will."
Even when I'm dead I'll be frying chicken.
Cashew chicken really hit upon this formula.
It was chicken, it was fried, and there was sauce.
Interesting thing about Springfield cashew chicken
is the fact that it's kind of mind boggling to find
a Chinese dish becoming so widespread, popular
in an area which has virtually
no Chinese population of its own.
Springfield cashew chicken
it's not a traditional Chinese food.
It's something that's Americanized.
And one thing that most of the immigrants from China
have learned is to adapt.
My brothers and I were born in Hong Kong.
We are a family of 5 boys
and my father passed away when I was 5 years old.
So my mom was widowed with 5 boys in Hong Kong.
She didn't see much future there.
When we first opened up in Hammond
we were the only Chinese family there.
And it's a smaller town. It was kinda..
It was culture shock, it was kinda unique.
Well, I'm gonna get to that because Dr. Fanning
who's with us today is here from Albuquerque.
So I was explaining, I was givin' him the history.
What they did was blend
the best of Louisiana with the best of Chinese.
It is divine.
Wherever you go you know you not cook for yourself.
You gotta cook for what the local people like.
It's alligator leg. This is a baby alligator.
So it's sweet and sour.
You know, I do flounder, cod fish, alligator.
Chinese gumbo!
Louisiana Chinese gumbo.
This lady came and said, "Oh, Eve... every Sunday
my dad used to take us after church and eat Chinese food."
And, "Can you make it for me?" I said, "Yeah, just tell me what it was."
I walked back by the table and she had the biggest smile on her face.
She said, "Oh, yeah, this is just like I remember with my dad on sundays."
I said, "You know, I'm... I'm thinkin', ain't this ironic
that Chinese food has become comfort food?
That, um, it replaced meatloaf and fried chicken?"
I was growing up in Saratoga, New York.
And we were an orthodox Jewish family.
We would go, um, a couple of times a year
to a restaurant in Schenectady
called Lum Fung's, a Chinese restaurant.
I remember my mother would always order
uh, shrimp with lobster sauce.
My father would look at this as just abominable.
And my dad who's still alive, he's 95
would never eat pork or shellfish.
Then we get these egg rolls and I'd say what are these little brown bits in it?
And then his comment was, "Well, if you can't identify it, it's okay to eat."
And I always thought that, it's called, "safe-treif."
"Treif" meaning forbidden.
And for years, I thought that was actually rabbinical statement.
Until I asked a few rabbis' and they said, "No, no, no
if you can't identify it, absolutely don't eat it."
I can't remember which year, you know, it was Christmas Day, when I open.
- Wow! - Yeah.
Over 90% of Jewish people.
They say, "Jewish people either Christmas or Thanksgiving."
It's Christmas, yeah.
Only-only Chinese food and the movie.
There's an old joke that..
Jews have been around for well over 5,000 years
and the Chinese culture has been around for... for a bit over 4,000 years.
Which means that, there's been about 1,500 years that Jews had to survive without Chinese food.
Lot of Jews just wanted to become Americanized.
Part of that is going out to Chinese restaurants.
We ate Chinese food growing up once a month on a Sunday night.
My mom's from Brooklyn.
And we're Jewish and that was a Jewish thing.
I... I met Sandy Koufax this past summer.
He liked Chinese food too.
I ate two ethnic foods as a child.
Uh, well, I ate some Jewish food from my grandmother.
But clearly when we wanted to go out for something different.
Chinese food was at the top of the list.
It's part of the American tradition now
to go to Chinese restaurants.
I'm from a small town in Montana. Missoula, Montana.
And I remember going to, you know the pink and the red boots
With the neon and getting the... um, white takeout boxes with the fortune cookies.
We had a favorite Chinese restaurants, it was called "Wai-Wai."
W-A-I, W-A-I. "Wai-Wai."
And it was about, maybe about a mile?
- From... from the house. - Not even.
- Yeah! We were there a lot. - Yeah, yeah.
They had the best Chinese buffet you ever had.
Mom doesn't wanna cook, "Oh, let's call in for Chinese."
It's fast, it's easy and you don't have to do any dishes.
'Cause everything is right there for you.
They even throw in the plastic forks. So..
For Americans this small restaurant
where the lone Chinese family lives
is their invitation into the world... of Chinese culture.
Even though it is..
As american as anything else.
This is one of the tradition.
That lasted for more than 100 years in..
In United States.
People when they go to a Chinese restaurant
expect that, after the dinner, they'll have dessert.
And also they can see the fortunes.
We have some freelance writers to help us to write, some students help us to write.
Nowadays, we have more than 10,000 pieces of message in our database.
I used to say that, I've never seen a fortune cookie... uh, in China.
It's a product of a America.
By the 1940s, despite the fact
that there is this prohibition for Chinese immigration
Chinese food becomes one of the ways in which Chinese and Chinese-Americans
gain social acceptance and cultural acceptance in the United States.
And at the same time, as the United States enters the second world war
um, China becomes, you know, an ally of the United States.
And by 1943, the Congress is persuaded
To abrogate the Chinese exclusion acts.
So the kind of really virulent and violent
Anti-Chinese movement subsides,
and Chinese restaurants becomes ubiquitous.
Wherever you go.
You know, there's sunshine... sunshine on the land
there's a Chinese, there's a Chinese restaurant.
My favorite fortune..
"Everything you have prepared, will be paid off soon."
And also like the message, "No pain, no gain."
One of the interesting things about Chinese food
is that, it's always been linked with international relations
between China and the United States.
In the 1950's, particularly after the Chinese communist revolution
the image of China and Chinese, uh, in the United States begins to change quite dramatically.
United States is gripped with, uh, anxiety about the rise of... of Communism.
Particularly in Asia.
So many Chinese families feel very vulnerable.
China, mainland China was now enemy, particularly during Korean war.
And, so everything about China was negative.
Including Chinese-Americans, including Chinese food.
When I came here, 1950s
there was Chinese food in the USA.
Everywhere you go, pretty much the same, same menu.
It just taste so... pretty bad.
Bland.
- Yeah, no flavor. - No spice.
Yeah, nothing.
I... I tried to introduce the real Chinese food to Americans.
I opened the Mandarin Restaurant in 1959 in San Francisco.
Um, Polk Street.
It was food that she grew up with.
That she, you know, served at the Mandarin.
It had that, sort of... refined elegance to it, you know.
I really had a tough time.
Those days, a lot of a... what you call "discrimination."
They didn't give me any credit. Everything I have to pay cash.
We try to rent..
A apartment in a good location.
American won't rent for me.
Because they said that Chinese person is very dirty.
They weren't assimilated, they were marginalized.
And... this thing went on, uh, for a very, very long time.
After Mao took over China
the same time Chop Suey was being forgotten.
There was nothing new in Chinese food. It was in the doldrums.
It's really hard for me to date menus
so there's a certain esthetic, you can just tell these are... are '50s.
Let's see if General Tso appears.
"Chef special chicken salad."
"Hacked chicken."
This is gotta be '60s.
Let's see what kind of chicken they had here.
"Pineapple chicken, curry chicken"
and "steamed chicken and sausage."
I don't believe General Tso has reared
his armor at this point in history.
Premier Zhou Enlai on behalf of the government of the People's Republic of China.
Has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China,
at an appropriate date, before May 1972.
President Nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure.
There can be no stable and enduring peace
without the People's Republic of China.
When nixon visited China, the bamboo curtain lifted.
On February 21, 1972
Nixon was hosted at a banquet by Premier Zhou Enlai
in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.
And live on national television, Americans saw him eat real Chinese food.
And they salivated.
Raising a toast he drank that very powerful
Chinese wine called the Maotai.
It's like 120 proof, kind of thing, you know, if you ever..
It's like jet fuel.
It's sort of sparked a trend, I think, in terms of all things Chinese.
Right after Nixon visit China
I got so many phone calls.
And they said, "Can you duplicate Nixon's dinner."
Suddenly all these Chinese restaurants
had lines outside the door.
It ushered in, kind of the golden age
Of fine Chinese cooking in the United States.
The first Szechuan restaurants, the first Hunan restaurants
Fujian styled restaurants.
All of a sudden, here came this wonderful, well-seasoned food
from the cooler regions of China, and this stuff tasted great to us.
But this one dish just stuck out.
The renaissance in Chinese food in New York began
with Michael Tong, the pre-eminent Chinese restaurateur in America.
He opened his first restaurant in New York, Shun Lee Palace.
Michael Tong, sort of opened the door to the Szechuan and Hunanese food.
American people, late '60s and the '70s
they urged for something different.
In 1971, we opened the, uh, Shun Lee Palace.
1972, we opened Hunan.
Then suddenly, Hunan become a superstar.
Chef T.T. Wang of the Shun Lee restaurants
Devised a dish that he called General Tso's chicken.
There was chunks of chicken, it was put it in a batter, it was fried
brown sauce, a little sweet, a little garlicky and spicy.
And the restaurant got a 4 star review from the New York Times.
Shun Lee and Hunan were a great great success.
We are the first one who has General Tso's chicken in the US.
Because we opened the first Hunanese restaurant in 1972.
Before anybody else and we do have General Tso's chicken on the menu.
But I do have to say, I have to confess
Taiwan do have General Tso's chicken in the '60s.
Timing is everything, right man in the right place
at the right time, with the right dish.
But whose dish was it?
Chef T.T. Wang was really inspired
By this restaurant in Taiwan which was this..
The most famous Hunan-style restaurant there.
In the early 1970s, businessmen from the Shun Lee restaurants
went to Taiwan looking to do something new and interesting and came back
from there, with dishes from this particular restaurant called..
Chef Peng's Hunan Yuan.
Chef Peng, p-e-n-g
Emigrated to Taiwan from China.
Peng Chang-Kuei as a young boy was taken on as an apprentice
by one of the great Hunanese chefs.
He was very talented.
He quickly rose to the position of chef to the nationalist government
who are fighting the Communists in the Chinese civil war.
There is this association in Hunan
um, between eating chilies and having a fiery military spirit.
His style of cooking was so influential, you know
he was really regarded as one of the great Hunanese chefs.
In 1949, when Chairman Mao's Communists finally conquered the mainland
Peng Chang-Kuei fled to Taiwan with the nationalist government, with the army.
He cooked for the government there.
His inspiration was the sour and hot flavors of his much missed home province Hunan.
Which he had to leave.
You know, Hunan was the home province of many leading figures
in Chinese military and politics like General Tso.
He is one of the famous people of Hunan province.
People are very proud of him.
So, Peng Chang-Kuei invented many dishes and one of the dishes that he invented..
Was General Tso's chicken.
In Taiwan, Chef Peng understood very early
that a couple of restaurateurs from New York had come and seen his restaurant
and went back to New York and copied it.
And Whef Peng was..
"Hey.
"These guys are ripping me off, I'm gonna go there and show them, you know..
The real goods."
Early in 1970, the Eyewitness News team decided..
"Here is a new feature, it'll be called The Eyewitness News Gourmet."
We'd go to visit a restaurant, once a week
and would film the preparation of one of their signature dishes.
And I've heard that there was this hot new Chinese chef in town.
He had come to New York from Taiwan.
So we went to meet the, Chef Peng and film the dish.
This is Bob Lape, Channel 7, Eyewitness News.
He was this, long skinny fellow.
Spoke not a word of English.
He knew precisely what he was there to do which was to cook.
He came out into the dining room where we'd wheeled this display cart
full of pre-chopped ingredients
so that could just go, bing-bing-bing.
And he'd throw them into the wok one after the other, give them a quick stir,
you got the sizzle of the oil,
the cloud of steam rising that you could smell.
He just whipped through that dish in the wok
with all sorts of elements and colors and textures.
We put it on the air and it was over a thousand requests for that particular recipe.
But to Chef Peng's dismay, Americans didn't get the whole story.
People thought that Chef Peng was coming and copying Chef Wang.
Well, in fact it was the other way around.
But Chef Peng never really convinced everyone that he was the original.
It would be great to have the 16 millimeter film that was shot of Chef Peng
but that stuff was just thrown out.
And so, that stuff was probably gone before 1980 arrived, sorry to to say.
I never spent enough... quality time with Chef Peng.
To get into his emotions, I mean, firstly, he was, primarily Chinese
And spoke not much English.
What's happened though is, because chefs and restaurateurs
Feel like they have a certain, shall we call it "poetic license"
to rename or recreate things
that when Chef Wang came to making General Tso's chicken
He felt the american palate was a sweeter palate than the Chinese palate.
So he gave it a touch of sugar.
Everybody have their own sauce.
Our General Tso's chicken
It has a little sweet taste, this is the most american people like that taste.
Little vinegar and little sugar is little sweet.
Vinegar, little bit sugar.
They've got some honey in it. That's the most secret in here.
The dish, in many cases has become sweeter than it was originally.
Full of fire, spice and all these other things but not sweet, per say.
I think it is a simple matter
of people playing copy cat.
"This works, let's do it."
And in the end it becomes an entirely different affair.
Crispy chicken
is a national dishes for Americans.
You can buy chicken nuggets and adding soya and sour spicy sauce
You can make your own General Tso's chicken today.
By the time, General Tso's chicken appeared, there was this
infrastructure of Chinese restaurants and Chinese associations
And Chinese chefs and Chinese menus.
The dish spread just all over the place.
And places where you wouldn't expect to find it at all.
Here's General Tso marching at the door.
There are about 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States.
The killer combination is to find an item that everyone likes.
And keeps ordering time after time.
Yet, it's something that we could produce for a relative price.
How many orders does the average restaurant sell a day?
Maybe 10?
10 bucks an order?
You start to talk about a business just in General Tso's chicken.
That's in the billions of dollars.
General Tso's chicken is an icon in the Chinese food.
It's huge, it cover the whole country,
cover the whole United States.
I think if Chef Peng were looking at the scene today
I think he'd be amazed at the fact that this dish has become so iconic.
As I know when I was very young.
Chiang Kai-Shek who is the President,
asked my father to prepare to present dinner.
My father tried to make something unique.
Uh, different.
He tried to make some name for it and then he find
that hunanese very famous General, who's General Tso.
He is a General, never lose the battle.
The people honor him, especially Hunanese people.
General Tso, he likes, he personally... preferred chicken.
He liked the chicken.
My father is a very happy to name it as a General Tso's chicken.
But the name is, is so popular, is so popular, is so famous.
This name of General Tso's chicken.
And he makes all kind of different version.
In a way, General Tso's chicken really did come from Hunan province
Because Chef Peng himself was inspired by his own native cuisine.
But one of the ironies about General Tso's chicken is that the General himself
Was very much about preserving Chinese culture and Chinese tradition.
Then this chicken dish that is named after him has in fact evolved, become anything
but authentic Chinese.
The world's most magnificent culinary culture
and the world's most diverse cuisine
has been represented in the west by such a narrow range of dishes.
And it's not just about eating and the pleasure of eating.
But also about the culture.
Because food is really at the heart of Chinese culture.
Food is about love, it's about doing business, it's about the family.
It's how you stay connected with your living relatives.
And all your ancestors.
It's just particularly important in Chinese culture.
It's so integral that actually it's the greeting.
Um... You'll see all these old timers would say...
Which means "Have you eaten yet?"
But that's their greeting, it's your hello.
Because it's so important
But becomes a short hand for your well-being.
Growing up, we learnt to pick the meat out of crab.
Here, there's no way a child in America would sit down.
You know, painstakingly, just to nibble
a little piece of meat from a crab. There's no way they do it.
I have some nephew's kids came here
and visiting me, so, I give, give them... and they said
"Oh, grandma, too much trouble."
At home, we now, everything pour it in the blender.
That's real funny to me, everything put in the blender
Liquid diet.
Then, they just drink it.
I think in America, there is a downward appreciation of Chinese food.
If you want French food
You have a lot of labor and you get charged for it.
Chinese food is a lot of labor, but they can't get away charging a lot of money.
So that is a question of attitude.
The culture attitude, the perception, China has a place.
Their currency worth nothing and their labor worth nothing.
Chinese restaurants still are the first job for immigrants coming to this country.
You don't speak the language.
You can't find a job.
You know how to cook.
You try to make it work.
You try to make this restaurant stick, in a place where another restaurant wouldn't stick.
These dishes are the economic necessity
and would help you succeed and survive.
Regarding, the General Tso's chicken and a different taste
My personally it's kind of honor.
Is honor.
Is honor to have this people like to serve this dishes.
I'm proud of to be my father's son.
We are making some... ah, joke.
The most famous people in the world is Mr. Zuo Zongtang.
Because every... every day, everybody order Zuo Zongtang, Zuo Zongtang, Zuo Zongtang.
This is the General Tso's chicken we serve.
We started P. F. Chang's, about 20 years ago.
My mother's food..
At the Mandarin, it was food of the courts.
We have Peking Duck.
Uh, we had dishes that needed more preparation, more care.
In my style... part of the generation gap, I think was..
I like, I wanted something more casual.
We call it Chang's Chicken here, it's one of our most popular dishes.
You know, there's different, everybody has their version
version of this dish and anyway this is our version here.
Americans embrace certain ideas about ethnic food.
You know, whether it's the taco or french fries or..
You know, Swedish pancakes. They make it their own.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, Chinese-American food is, it's a style.
You know, it's a style of cooking.
It's a cuisine in itself, I think.
Our idea about authenticity, we've created this value of authenticity.
But I don't there is such a thing as authenticity.
You know, the idea that there is some original Chinese cuisine.
Chinese cuisine has changed everywhere.
You realize that every country has it's own version of authentic Chinese food.
Because to them, that's the version of Chinese food which is a taste of home.
We are at Chinese mirch in Manhattan.
We are actually, the first Indian-Chinese restaurant to open in New York.
Indian Chinese is Chinese food, but with Indian flavors.
It is Chinese, the way we eat it in India.
This is western style Chinese vegetable fried rice.
Some of the Mexican restaurant and Italian restaurants
think that this is a good idea and have fortune taco cookie and fortune cannoli cookie.
Nothing is authentic here in our restaurant
We are not authentic Chinese, we are not authentic Mexican.
And isn't that American?
So this our General Tso's veal rib
And Mission Chinese food.
I'm gonna make a General Tso's tofu sandwich.
I just order General Tso's soft boiled egg.
Actually, they had General Tso's snake
At this restaurant.
In fact, you can now get General Tso's chicken in China.
I admit that I don't often look for it when I go to a restaurant.
I've never ordered it.
I did it have a four year General Tso's love affair.
I don't think, this dish will disappear.
People will still like enjoying that sort of groovy sauce.
They like it.
And why not?