You'll Find Oh So Much More

Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles by Carl Chu

Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles 2003 sounds like nothing more than a restaurant guide for those living in the City of Angels. In reality, this 240-page paperback is much more than that. It is even more than a travel guide and even, I might add, a book that is for a wider audience than the city of Los Angeles.

It is the title that limits the potential of this book, not its detailed content.

What is it? It is a guide to the Chinese dining experience. It takes the reader on a tour of Chinese food by region (north, south, east, and west), sharing with us the variations in cuisine in each area. It let's you know straight off that there is no such thing as a generic "Chinese food." The food you might get in the Guangdong style has unique characteristics that set it apart from, for example, the Sichuan cuisine.

Within the exploration of each region, the book gets into several subcategories of cuisine. It explains why different regions have the food influences that they do-and even how that cuisine is perceived by the rest of the Chinese populace.

The book also provides detailed explanation on the food, ingredients, and basic recipes that are used in various dishes. It is information that appeals to anyone who has ever stared at a menu and wondered what in the heck Dongpo Pork or yum cha is. Nor does this guide stop with the introduction to the food. It also lets us peek at Chinese culture and its influence on culinary traditions. We learn about dining as an experience, not just as food that we stick in our mouth.

Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles is filled with colorful pictures and illustrations. The text size does make it wearying to read for lengthy periods of time, but this is off-set by the high quality of the paper, the beautiful photos and the pure interest of the text content.

Oh yes, and it also tells you which L.A. restaurants offer Chinese food of which type. Admittedly, this is a pretty small portion of the text.

The author, Carl Chu, is a native Californian who claims that Los Angeles, "is singularly the most livable city in the world-exciting and complex, yet with none of the pretense and snobbery that afflict the psyche of other world-class cities."

Ultimately, the book is about Los Angeles because the author believes (and likely rightfully so) that nowhere else in America will you find the wealth of Chinese food that you can find in Los Angeles. He can tell you about the Hong Kong style seafood houses or where to go to get Beijing duck. Los Angeles is a city in which its restaurateurs have an appreciation for the enormous diversity of cuisine that the rest of the country tends to slap under "Chinese."