100 years, but is it authentic?

The Brits are celebrating 100 years of Chinese food in their country. From the Daily Telegraph

Making the Chinese sexy
Adam Edwards

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/08/2008

After 100 years, Britain is still the place for original oriental food, says Adam Edwards

Next week, as our Olympians prepare to wave the flag at the opening ceremony of the 2008 games at Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium, a lower profile celebration will occur in London. Not only is it 100 years since the British capital first hosted the Games, it is also a century since the first Chinese restaurant in these islands opened its doors.

	Ching-He Huang: 'There's nothing more British than a chinese restaurant'

That first dish was served to curious London diners in 1908. Since then, the Chinese restaurant has become an integral part of most of our lives.

It was that summer that Chung Koon, formerly a ship's chef on the Red Funnel Line, opened Maxim's in Soho, the first mainstream Chinese restaurant in Britain. The food was Cantonese and the most popular dish was pork in a sweet and sour sauce called "jarjow".

But it was not until after the Second World War that the Chinese restaurant emerged as an integral part of our national life. Its genesis was the result of the British government recognition of Mao Tse-tung's Communist regime stranding scores of staff at the Chinese Embassy in London. Some, including the diplomat Kenneth Lo, opened restaurants in Soho.

A decade later, in 1958, Chung Koon's son, John, opened the Lotus House in Queensway, Bayswater. This was so popular that customers who couldn't get a table asked for food to take away. Thus it became the first take-away in Britain. That same year, Billy Butlin introduced chop suey and chips in his holiday camps, turning what had been an exotic food into an English high street staple.

Today our love affair with Chinese food shows no signs of waning. According to recent figures from the Restaurant Association, Britons eat more than 110 million Chinese meals a year, while a survey earlier this year from the food company Amoy found that three out of five Britons said that their favourite food was Chinese.

"The Chinese restaurant is part of modern British life," says Ching-He Huang (pictured above), host of the current BBC2 series Chinese Food Made Easy. "Everyone talks of having a 'Chinese' on a Friday or Saturday evening," she says. "The food may often be Anglicised and not representative of all of China, where there are more than 50 different regional foods, but there is a place for everything in our cuisine." Now, as the sweet and sour restaurateurs celebrate the centenary of "The Chinese", it is beginning to change.

"The food is getting more authentic, more regional and more sophisticated," says Alan Yau, proprietor of London's stylish Hakkasan.

"Chinese food has not changed very much over the past 20 years. But now chefs are moving on. They are using healthier food and making mainstream cuisine much more discerning." Sir David Tang, owner of China Tang in London's Dorchester Hotel, agrees that there is now a broader acceptance of what he calls "the non-standard chop suey food".

"Like all cuisine, a niche was found from a broader range," says Sir David. "It will probably take a little bit of time to move on, but eventually people will understand the different kinds of regional Chinese cooking - just as the distinctions between northern and southern Italian, or urban and provençal French, are already appreciated." This new sophisticated approach to Chinese food is a long way removed from the world of monosodium glutamate that most of us were weaned on. And that MSG culture bore even less relation to the early Chinese restaurants in Britain, which were crude cafés in the docks of London and Liverpool, catering exclusively for Chinese seamen.

"Until the Seventies, Chinese restaurants served British-style food such as chop suey, curry and sweet and sour," says Tatyan Cheung (pictured left), who has been running Tatyan's restaurant in Cirencester for 20 years.

"Then Yang Tzu Kune, a Cambridge graduate, founded the Rendezvous restaurant chain in London and introduced more truly Chinese dishes such as shredded beef and crispy duck." The Chinese restaurant moved from being a cheap and cheerful after-pub joint to a middle market establishment for a more upmarket customer. But today most of those restaurants still offer the simplified Hong Kong Cantonese menu that we have all come to know by number and love by name. Now the move towards more regional dishes is about to change the menu once again.

"London is the innovator and the city has made modern Chinese food sexy," says Alan Yau.

"This will be followed by an uptake in provincial England. It has happened before - there was Ken Lo in the Sixties, Mr Chow and the Rendezvous in the Seventies and Zen in the Eighties. They were all players who set the agenda." But while the food is changing, there are fears that the traditional "Chinese", which Culture Online - part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport - recently nominated as an English icon, is losing out to the new ethnic restaurants.

Tatyan Cheung says that in the past 10 years there has been a gradual decline in both the restaurant and the take-away business.

"The British are travelling to more exotic places and now want different food - Thai, Mexican and Malaysian food are all currently cutting into our core business," he says.

Meanwhile, with a bit of luck our Olympians will be enjoying the food in Beijing, confident ordering from menus they first encountered as children from the 100-year-old British institution that is "The Chinese".

I had a "Chinese" meal with my cousin at a restaurant on Wardour Street in London once, a few years ago. Actually it was twice. We agreed that the food was terrible and terribly 'Anglicised' for the local palate.

After 100 years, "Chinese" food may be a favourite there, but British (English, Welsh, Scottish) people still don't know how to eat it. They do not order dishes to share communally, nor can they use chopsticks.

Australia had Chinese restaurants way before they first appeared in Britain, although those that began appearing in small country towns initially served steak and chips along 'Australianised' fare . Thankfully, the restaurants in the cities eventually served authentic food. With increasing numbers of students from mainland China now studying in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney especially), there are now plenty of cheap places to eat real Chinese food.

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I feel asleep on the couch after I returned home from work today.