I admit that when I first saw the title of this LA Weekly article, “L.A.’s Idea of Japanese Food vs. What Japanese Really Eat,” I wanted to hate on it. Say that the writer Andrew Froug was wrong and didn’t know what he was talking about.

However, no matter how many times I read the article, I couldn’t find anything that I disagreed with. So instead of doing that, let’s just say that this is a great article to read if you want a brief but accurate insight into Japanese cuisine.

[Venn Diagram courtesy of LA Weekly]

Whenever I see an article like this titled “Filipino Cuisine Poised to Break through Gastro Ceiling,” I think “yet again?”  Over twenty years, I ate at Cafe Glenda on Solano Avenue in Berkeley and thought, “Has Filipino food finally made it?”   Efren wrote about Filipino Food becoming the In Thing four years ago.  A few years later came a discussion on how and why Filipino food was unassimilated.  So what’s new and different this time?

I think that a couple things are different now.  Vendors like the Adobo Hobo and many other Filipino restaurants have shown that Filipino food can be a viable option.  Filipino food is getting buzz at places the the Winter Fancy Food show, and a product line like Kusina ni Maria (Maria’s Kitchen) is now available in the Whole Food Markets grocery chain.  Even more extreme Filipino foods like Balut are being served in restaurants.

Filipino Food is also adapting to deal with mainstream American trends.  Chefs have been experimenting with adaptions to Filipino food to make it healthier.  There is now Vegan Filipino food, a concept which I still have problems wrapping my mind around.

Will Filipino food make it?  It would be great to see it happen and give  Filipino Entrepreneurs and Filipinos Americans in general more exposure.  Not far from where I live in Silicon Valley, there are Filipino restaurants that are making it and that I go to periodically.  I think that’s a positive sign, but I for now, I am going to wait and see before declaring Filipino cuisine as having it made it into the American Mainstream.

Usually when you take a cold, delicious bite of Pinkberry frozen yogurt, you don’t think about tire irons and homeless people. But maybe you will now, thanks to the latest news that the co-founder of the (still kinda) popular fro-yo chain, Young Lee, was recently arrested for some questionable behavior.

The LA Times is reporting that Lee was responsible for chasing down and beating up a homeless guy.

Young Lee was stopped at a light when he was approached by a transient seeking money, police said. Words were exchanged, and Lee and another man in the car chased the homeless man and “beat him down” with the tire iron, police Capt. Paul Vernon said…Detectives spent several months probing the case against Lee, who was in South Korea for part of that time.

Authorities aren’t reporting on how the victim fared after the attack, except that he definitely earned a lifetime supply of frozen yogurt.

I admit that I totally hopped on the Pinkberry bandwagon back in 2005, when I happened to be in a state of mind that circling the same block in West Hollywood for 30 minutes to find a parking space and then to stand in line for even longer just to eat an overpriced cup of tart frozen yogurt was totally okay. Then I read about how Pinkberry wasn’t even actually “frozen yogurt” and that legally making dairy products in the state of California required more than just secret ingredients. And didn’t the co-founders steal their idea from the original Red Mango?

Regardless of how Pinkberry conducts business (the Pinkberry website doesn’t list any affiliation with Lee) and what “frozen yogurt” really means, beating someone up with a tire iron sounds like a dick move. Also, ice cream rules.

UPDATE: The police are now reporting that the assault happened because Lee was offended by the victim’s tattoo:

The man was changing into a sweatshirt, revealing a sexually explicit tattoo, and Lee seemed to have viewed the tattoo as a suggestion of disrespect, a police official said. Lee rolled down his window and apparently got into an argument with the man, then parked on Vermont and left his car to confront him.

He then demanded an apology, which the man gave, but still chased him down and beat him up. Thanks to a witness calling 911, authorities were able to track down the license plate number, the car and Lee’s whereabouts. Ridiculous!

By Calvin

The Montreal Gazette published an article in November about “vintage Chinese restaurants” in that city, meaning the “dying breed” of restaurants that served Canadian Chinese cuisine. These days, writing on Westernized Chinese food (see my review of Banquet and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles for some good book-length examples) often points out how foreign this cuisine is to Chinese people:

“When I first saw the menu, I was like, ‘What’s that? And what’s that?’ I was really curious,” he recalls. “Everything was sweet and sour, everything was battered and fried, tastes that in China we don’t do so much.”

New cooks coming from China had to be taught the fundamentals of Can-Chi cuisine, he says. “Like chicken balls with cherry sauce; you just don’t see this in original Chinese food. It was made for Western people. We prefer steamed and stir-fried foods, and to taste the actual flavour of the ingredients.”

Taste the actual flavour of the ingredients? That’s revolutionary.

My dad has a nickname for Westernized Chinese food: aak gwai lo tsaan (呃鬼佬餐), Cantonese for “food for swindling white people [into thinking that this is what Chinese people actually eat].” This moniker pretty much sums up my family’s attitudes towards this type of food. Living in the San Gabriel Valley, one of the top places to go in North America for “authentic” Chinese and Vietnamese food, we never went to Americanized Chinese restaurants (of which there were very few, usually situated next to Wal-Marts or Mexican supermarkets). Why would you, when you have hundreds and hundreds of “real” Chinese restaurants to choose from?

I remember being very intrigued the first time I had Americanized Chinese food. We were somewhere in northern New Jersey, on the first day of our bus tour of the eastern US and Canada. My parents insisted on vacationing with a Chinese tour group, and since the tour company figured that the Chinese are about as unwilling to expand their culinary horizons as mainstream Americans are, they dropped us off at all-you-can-eat buffets serving American/Canadian Chinese food almost every day. The only change was when we stopped in Toronto and Montreal, where there were “real” Chinese restaurants to be found.

Having only read about Americanized Chinese cuisine in books and seen it on TV, dishes like moo shu pork and crab Rangoon were possibly more exotic to 14-year-old me than to your average mainstream American. So many fanciful names! So many different shades of brown! This jade-dragon-subgum-wonton stuff is what the rest of America thinks is Chinese food? I was amazed… until I started eating.

I was primed to expect something horrific, and horrific it was. The food tasted like a farcical imitation of “real” Chinese food, a culinary caricature made by overemphasizing the most pronounced flavors and covering them all in MSG, grease, and corn syrup. My taste buds were the first to revolt against this explosion of sugar and fat; soon afterwards, my stomach joined the protest. I never wanted to eat this type of food ever again.

Only after moving to small-town Pennsylvania for college did I begin to develop a taste for Americanized Chinese food. I became re-acquainted with this cuisine that I rejected, mostly because there weren’t too many other dining options in the tiny borough of Swarthmore, and pizza gets old very fast. Eventually, I discovered that I actually like this stuff. The food is so familiar and yet so unfamiliar at the same time. It’s a new cultural experience, but one that’s familiar enough to (excuse the pun) digest with ease. I came to love dishes like moo goo gai pan and beef with broccoli, which remind me of my mother’s cooking, except with the much heavier sauces that Americans have come to expect. I haven’t had General Tso’s chicken, egg foo young, or chop suey yet, but those are at the top of the list of things to try the next time I order delivery.

As my relationship with Americanized Chinese food changed, I started to realize that Westernized Chinese food isn’t a pale, gloopy imitation of “real” Chinese food, but rather a cuisine in and of itself. Westernized Chinese food is a lot like Westernized Chinese people, created out of cultural encounters and the negotiations that followed. On the surface, it looks like the food indigenous to China, but it is definitely much more at home here in the West, being made with Western ingredients and according to Western preferences.

Purists may decry that it’s not “real” Chinese food, but what is real Chinese food, anyway? Is there some sort of ancient recipe canon, saying that this is how Chinese food should be? Saying that there is a difference between “authentic” food and “inauthentic” food is denying wonderful cultural mixes like Westernized Chinese food and Westernized Chinese people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Calvin N. Ho is a graduate student in sociology at UCLA, where he studies race, ethnicity, nationalism, and immigration. He has discovered that only non-Asians find it interesting that his hobby is eating around town and taking pictures of everything.

Considering how few Asian Americans there are at the CEO, upper management or board of directors level, I was pleasantly surprised to hear about Shih’s news. And women are notoriously poorly represented in Silicon Valley board rooms. In fact, women in general are poorly represented in all businesses (only 16% of all board seats in the U.S.). So it’s a bit ironic that Shih was named a director at a non-tech focused company, where she could probably add a lot more value.

I’m not sure what Shih knows of the coffee and retail business, but her knowledge of social networking – having worked on social and enterprise related products at Google and Salesforce.com, as well as her work at Hearsay, will I’m sure bring a different perspective to the Starbuck’s board. I use Starbucks all the time to meet up with friends and business partners (as well as for my coffee fix). Congratulations to Shih on her new role!

Editor’s Note, 12/29/11 @4:53pm: The article originally stated that Clara Shih was with “Hearsay Labs,” but has been corrected to “Hearsay Social”