Apparently some Chinese restaurants have two menus. One is for those with "...narrow eyes, black hair, Chinese, speaks the language...." The other is for the likes of me, whom they call gwai lo. And, according to Kevin Pang , the "other" menu is much better!
Pang says:
quote:
I'm not ready to brand this as reverse discrimination (or simply, "discrimination"), but it is, as George W. Bush coined, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I think I'd call it discrimination.
[Edited to fix link]This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,
My brother tells the story of being in an Indian restaurant with friends. When the food came his friend's wife, who is Indian complained that it wasn't what she ordered and wasn't cookedproperly anyway. The owner's response was to say that he hadn't realised she was Indian and that he would cook it again properly.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
Similar to that, Bob, I liked this from the article I have tried to link to (not sure you can access it):
quote:
Plump chicken chunks simmer in soy sauce, Chinese rice wine and sesame oil, a savory and sweet lacquer that's liquid manna on steamed rice. The chicken is cooked with scallions and ginger slices, plus whole garlic cloves that absorb as much flavor as they impart in the sauce. Almost no non-Chinese customers order this, I'm told, because there's nothing appealing about its name, and even if they do get this, they don't care for bone-in chicken and the delicate mouth dance required to extricate the pointy shards.
Nor would they go near Mao shi hong shao rou — Chairman's Mao red-braised pork ($12) — the childhood dish of Mao Zedong growing up in Hunan province. Here is another dish of abundant richness, too heavy perhaps for Western sensibilities, using cubes of skin-on pork belly that's more gelatinous fat than meat, and cooked in a viscous soy-sugar braising liquid similar to three flavor chicken. It's another spoon-over-rice and keel-over dish.
"No, too fatty!" Our waitress told my white dining partner, steering him away.
"No, he's not like most of your gwai lo customers," I said in Chinese, "he actually wants the fat pork."
