8 "Chinese" Dishes Chinese People Don't Eat

Hey everybody, Mikey Chen here. Now I'm sure everyone's probably been to a Chinese restaurant before, and the Chinese restaurants in the West really fall into just two categories. They are either authentic or not. And you can pretty much tell if a Chinese restaurant is authentic by the number of Chinese people who are actually eating inside. Whether you have been to an authentic Chinese restaurant or not, it is probably safe to say that most of you have had food items in these Chinese restaurants before that Chinese people would never eat. I'll let you in on a little secret. If you go to an authentic Chinese restaurant like the ones in New York, LA, Chicago, and you order these dishes that Chinese people would never eat, we judge you. I mean, not to be mean, but most Chinese will go to these authentic Chinese restaurant and then look around and see what other people ordered. We all do that. We do this for two reasons. One, we want to see if there's something that someone's ordered that we never tried before but looks really good. And two, we want to see what other people ordered that might not be so authentic. That's like a ritual. You walk in and then you take a look around all the tables as you're walking to your table. Then you sit down and you look around some more. Then the conversation will typically go, oh, whoa, look at that. That looks really good. Have we tried that before? What is that? Or it'll go, can't believe those guys ordered that. I mean, if you wanted that, why don't you just go to like Panda Walk down the street, you know? So to prevent this from happening to you, I have compiled a list of dishes that typically a Chinese person would never order. Number one, the infamous crab rangoon. All right, confession time. I love them too. They're like guilty pleasure food. And I used to sneak them out of our buffet without my parents actually seeing me do that because my parents will never let me eat crab rangoon. If they caught me eating something like that, they would say, ay-ya, so fat. Too much is no good for you. All right, here's why these things don't exist in China. First of all, we don't eat a lot of cheese. I mean, a lot of us are basically lactose intolerant. Speaking of that, when I first came to this country, I was in second grade and my school made me go eat breakfast in the cafeteria and they served me cold cereal with cold milk. I thought I was in a torture chamber. Not only do we not eat a lot of cheese, we don't eat fried cheese, but we do like fried dough. But I just want to say, I know these can be really addictive guys, but come on, you're basically eating fried cream cheese and then dipping them into a sweet and sour sauce. I think the only thing worse for you than a crab rangoon is like this fried stick of butter that someone invented right before they had a cardiac arrest. Number two, General Tso's chicken. This is arguably the best selling dish in Chinese restaurants. Some say that this dish was invented in the US, actually in New York City. General Tso was indeed a general from the Qing dynasty, but probably never even had a bite of his own chicken dish. This dish can also be transformed into other popular dishes like orange chicken or sesame chicken. Basically, same cooking method and similar sauces. And sesame chicken is basically General Tso's chicken with some sesame on top. Now, for a Chinese dish that is so popular in the US, it would be really hard to find a restaurant serving this dish in China. Also, this is a dish that my parents would never ever let me eat because they said it's always cooked in dark oil, which is an oil that Chinese restaurants use that doesn't get changed very frequently. Although, again, I got to say, it does taste kind of good. Number three, chop suey. No joke, but I actually played the role of chop suey in a skit competition in my college. Like now I think about it, it's like super racist. Anyway, why would you want to eat a dish that essentially means garbagy chopped up pieces and is used as a swear word in Chinese? Like you chop suey, except for in Chinese, which is not a good thing to say. So don't ever say that. I actually never had this dish before in my life and doubt that many other Chinese have. Number four, Mongolian beef. You know, the greatest thing the Mongolians ever brought to China, in my opinion, is the hot pot. And I thank them every single weekend for that. But Mongolian beef, I mean, basically this is just beef stir-fried with onions in some spicy dark sauce. There's nothing Mongolian about this dish. Number five, egg rolls. Okay, we like spring rolls, which are nice and crispy with thin layers of skin. Egg rolls, like the ones you see here, are like mutated spring rolls with an ugly crater-like impenetrable thick skin and some sort of weird cabbage and ground beef mixture inside. It's just like the worst thing ever. You could literally throw an egg roll at someone and kill them. Number six, any dish with Western broccoli. So kind of like your beef and broccoli, your chicken and broccoli, whatever with broccoli. I'm not just saying this because I actually really hate broccoli. Not the Asian broccoli, which looks like this and it's delicious, but I hate regular Western broccoli. Is that vegism or broccasist? Also Western broccoli does not belong in any authentic traditional Chinese dishes because this vegetable didn't even really exist in China until modern times. So all those dishes that you like to order, like I said, beef or broccoli, chicken or broccoli, happy family or anything else, just not authentic. Number seven, the duck sauce. Okay, I have no idea why this sauce is called duck sauce. I mean, we don't eat duck with the sauce. The sauce is also not made with duck, so why is it called duck sauce? To be completely honest, I don't even know what people put this sauce on. Probably those nasty egg rolls. Anyway, this sauce is made with dried Turkish apricots, which is not a fruit typically seen in Chinese cuisine. Number eight, my favorite, the pupu platter. When I first started working for my parents at a restaurant and looking through the menu, I thought this dish was like a joke because pupu platter, really, pupu? Shouldn't anything that contained the words pupu not be on a menu? So if you don't know what this is, take a look. It's a combination appetizer platter that typically comes with four apps, including egg rolls, a teriyaki beef on a stick, spear ribs, and chicken wings. The absolute worst thing about this dish is that they give you this little stove in the middle, and the fire for the stove is this gelatinous alien blue gel substance, and you're supposed to cook these apps on this little stove. Now, keep in mind that these apps already come cooked, so I don't see the appeal of roasting an already cooked chicken wing on this alien fire stove. Also, I really don't think egg rolls really benefit from extra roasting when they just came out of the fryer. I mean, when was the last time you gathered around a campfire and roasted egg rolls? You know, you go camping with a bunch of people, you build a fire, some people start roasting hot dogs, some people start breaking out the s'mores, and then you bring some egg rolls. That's one more stereotype that we Asians don't need. All right, you guys know what would be really funny is that we were all wrong about this, and there's actually some small tribe in Mongolia all mad because their secret Mongolian beef dish recipe is being served all around the world. And also, what if right before General Tso died, he gave out his secret chicken recipe on his deathbed? All right, guys, just batter the chicken and fry it, and put some sweet sauce on it. If you add some sesame, it becomes sesame chicken. All right, guys, thanks so much for watching. I know probably some of you are going to say, oh, what about the fortune cookie? Well, you don't have to order the fortune cookie. It's brought to you. And of course, that's not authentic Chinese, but the fortune inside is accurate. Anyway, please subscribe to my channel. See you later.