I’m not sure if the “when-in-Rome” rule of choosing Chinese restaurants originated in the Analects of Confucius or in a 1926 fortune cookie dispensed at a San Francisco chow mein house. Regardless, this principle of choosing among not just Chinese but other exotic ethnic restaurants endures. The low-tech method was to press your nose to restaurant windows and choose the one with the most (and preferably the happiest) native diners. The new method is to google for guidance from critics, bloggers and reader reviewers who themselves are wont to base their judgements on ethnic profiling. Like The Observer’s Jay Rayner I am reluctant to assume a restaurant is promising merely because it is filled with diners who share its nationality. Yet I, like Rayner, am heartened to find myself the lone outsider in a popular, insider’s refuge.He acknowledges his ambivalence in his thoughtful 7/9/08 review of Gourmet San, an East London Szechuan:
Generally I am a little suspicious when Chinese restaurants are venerated solely because so many of the customers happen to be Chinese. I’ve seen a whole bunch of Chinese people eating at Wong Kei in Soho. That doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the grimmest Chinese restaurants in Britain, staffed by some truly nasty, aggressive people who have turned intimidating their customers into a sport.
And yet, when the menu is as unfamiliar as this, it is curiously reassuring to look up and realise that you are literally the only two non-Chinese people in there…
The limits of the “when-in-Rome” rule are most apparent when you are in Rome. There are thousands of Romans eating in bad restaurants, just as there are many informed tourists dining in very good ones. But when a restaurant cuisine is expatriated the allegiance of expat diners can be an accurate predictor of authenticity if not quality. As to the question of whether or not authenticity is overrated, I’ll leave that juicy one for another day.
About Daniel Young
I was in aChinese restaurant where there were menu specials on the walls in Chinese characters. I tried to order one by pointing at it (I used to be braver, then), but the person behind the counter refused to let me order it. I pointed to something else and got the same response. Finally, I gave up and ordered from the English-language menu. I think I should have pointed to something that another patron (who looked Chinese to me) was eating . . .
You can get a good (by London standards) and very filling beef brisket noodle soup at Wong Kei for less than a fiver. The quality of service is inconsequential to the food and value offered.