What do you order from your local Chinese restaurant? Do you order it every time or mix things up?
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A Not-So-Closely-Held Secret
You’d think an out-of-the-way town in Alaska wouldn’t have a lot of great restaurants, but Fairbanks has a lot of great Asian restaurants. My son moved back here from Phoenix in part because he couldn’t find any good Asian eateries there.
Most Asian restaurants — plus a few other cuisines — are owned by Koreans. This is a legacy of our large military population. Men stationed in Korea marry Korean women who fall in love with Fairbanks and open restaurants here. Sometimes they sponsor relatives to immigrate and they open restaurants here. But you can’t have all Korean restaurants, so they venture into other cuisines. There’s two Korean ladies who are quite entrepreneurial. One owns a handful of restaurants and a flower shop. The other owns several cuisine restaurants with her husband, an Iranian ex-pat. We must have 15 Asian restaurants — a couple are Korean cuisine, most are Thai, and several are Chinese.
My Favorite Asian Cuisine
I love to mix and match and used to really enjoy a pan-Asian restaurant that didn’t survive covid. I love Thai food, but because I’m allergic to coconut, I usually only order pad Thai to prevent a reaction. I like Korean food, but I don’t know what most of it is called because my exposure to it was at a church we attended for many years and I’ve discovered what they served at the potlucks doesn’t translate well in restaurants. Homemade is way better.
When it comes to Chinese cuisine, I have a lot of “favorites”. Chicken and snow pea, broccoli and beef, egg rolls, barbequed pork, and shrimp lo mein were what I had the last time I ordered Chinese. But I also love almond chicken, steamed dumplings (gyoza or xiao long bao), stir-fried pork, chow fun, any sort of Chinese greens, dan dan mein (Americans often call this “drunken noodles”), and jellyfish. In fact, I’ll try all the weird seafood Asian people cook. I’ve even enjoyed calamari (octopus) Asian style (though I must admit Korean squid still feels like I’m chewing rubber bands). So, yes, I mix it up because I can’t eat all of those dishes in one sitting. Over the course of a year, I can eat all my favorites.
And because I love Asian cuisine, I have several home recipes that are Asian-inspired.
I go to lunch with a Taiwanese coworker every few weeks. We often eat Asian, though there’s no Taiwanese-style restaurant. Her mother has given me food from time to time, and it’s not quite Chinese. It’s less sweet, for one thing. But one thing that surprised my coworker is that I can eat with chopsticks. It’s a necessary life skill, like driving stick, or knowing how to sew a button, so of course, I know how to eat with chopsticks — even rice.
I wonder what my fellow authors are saying about their Chinese food experiences.
aurorawatcherak 