In Search of General Tso

Why can’t I get any decent Chinese food where I live anymore?

Really, am I asking for so much? Is it really that hard?

Now to be sure, the folks I deal with in the Chinese places in my neighborhood are all very polite and they seem to be quite hard working. I feel really awful dumping on them this way. However I just can’t stand it anymore. The food just isn’t really all that good, at least not as good as the Chinese food of my youth.

(And at this point I have to stop and give another clarification: I’m not talking about Chinese-Chinese food like actual Chinese folks eat in China or even Chinatowns around the world. I’m talking about Chinese-American, not Chop Suey, no, not quite that Westernized but rather Kung Po this and whatever-meat-with garlic sauce that and the one dish that is driving me to write this, a hoary classic that probably exists nowhere in Szechuan province: General Tso’s Chicken).

I did not always have the feelings I have now for General Tso’s Chicken. Growing up in my culinary-challenged childhood home Chinese food meant won ton soup (and incidentally the won ton soups I get from any of the takeout places in my neighborhood are generally good, though a proper Chinese takeout feast is not built on won ton soup alone), egg foo young, spare ribs, rice, and when dad had a little extra money to spend we would get wild and spring for the pu-pu platter although it was always more exciting to order that in the restaurant since they delivered it with a Sterno hidden in a faux-iron pot to char your already-cooked chicken-on-a-stick.

Yes, a pu-pu platter might be more Polynesian/tiki-cocktail type food but out in Staten Island it all blended together, kind of like the guy who opened a restaurant on my corner called Espana Royale but made half the menu Italian food. Ay, it’s all Yoorup, ain’t it?

Anyway….

When I got into my early teens the late, great Kaos introduced me to the truly exotic and esoteric dish called Moo Goo Gai Pan. Back then we had a fine local Chinese joint called Lee’s Imperial Cocktail Lounge, a late-20th century semi-suburban Chinese joint if there ever was one. Red carpeting covered the place while mirrors and golden statues lined a dining room ringed with red vinyl booths and they had a bar where they willingly served anyone over the age of roughly fourteen or so. There was a glass candy counter (!) by the take out register and of course a cigarette machine in the lobby. It was truly the closest anyone in my neighborhood got to Asia itself in the late 1970s and 1980s except for maybe when we went to the Asian sections of a major zoological park although while you did have elephant rides at the zoo you didn’t have two for one Grasshoppers at happy hour or an all you can eat buffet on Monday nights. As a teenage Staten Island sophisticate I would wow my family by ordering some "real Chinese food" from Lee's by ordering Moo Goo Gai Pan. I mean, that sounded like a Chinese phrase so it must be authentic Chinese food, right?

Well, time passed and I advanced from high school to college. I don’t remember if it was at Lee’s or somewhere else but it was around that time that I got my taste for the finest the General had to offer. I developed an ideal for General Tso’s Chicken that is similar to the ideal I have for Buffalo wings (which makes sense since they’re both hot and spicy fried chicken preparations). A proper General Tso’s Chicken:

Is crispy.

Is spicy, but not run for the dairy-product-or-sugar spicy. It should build in intensity as you eat it.

Is a little sweet but only enough to balance the spice. If I wanted fried chicken nuggets in duck sauce I’d go to McDonald’s, it’s cheaper.

Should have nicely steamed broccoli that is lightly coated in the spicy sauce from the chicken, and speaking of the sauce..

The dish should NOT be drowning in sauce. Even those pictures in Wikipedia are wrong to me. There should be streaks of sauce on the plate, splatters even but never, ever pools of sauce.

That last point is the real death of Chinese-American cookery to me. All the restaurants around my neighborhood drown every dish in sauce. Nobody knows restraint or textural differences or anything. It puzzles me because it’s not like any of these places are by-the-pound salad bar type joints. It must cost more money to have all that glop spooned in over the protein and the vegetables. So why do it. WHY? I shake my fist at the heavens over this one, friends. It is an epidemic. I can’t find a neighborhood Chinese place that doesn’t drown the food in sauce anymore.

Now this isn’t the disaster that say, lacking a good pizza place or a place to get decent bagels would be. If that happened I would just have to move. It is making me lose my faith, just a little, in downscale ethnic food in non-hipster areas. Is it possible that someone living in an average middle class neighborhood in this area can no longer expect decent Chinese American food because all the competent cooks are moving on to Williamsburg and Queens to do “real” Asian food and leaving the average Joe behind? Or, God forbid, are they all becoming cupcake bakers or something? I shudder to think of the implications.

The one upside to living where I live is Chinese places come and go all the time and they keep expanding their delivery areas. So there is still hope, however faint, that I may one day once again recapture the General Tso of my youth. I pray he is still out there, and that he has not drowned in a pool of reddish-orangish sauce.