Highly enjoyable New York Times article on "hyphenated Chinese cuisine" (with some pix):
[…] I call them second-generation Chinese restaurants," said Cheuk Kwan, who has directed a documentary film about the spread of Chinese restaurants around the world. "These restaurants always have a hyphen: Chinese-Venezuelan, Chinese-Norwegian, Chinese-Mexican."Chinese-Malagasy," he said, on the island of Madagascar, "was the best food, with lots of coconut milk and spices." […]
The city's first hyphenated version of the cuisine - after Chinese-American, of course - was Chinese-Cuban, which arrived in the 1960's, when thousands of Cubans of Chinese descent came to New York after Fidel Castro's rise to power.
"My grandfather was born in Zhanjiang, but his whole life was in Havana," said Manny Liao, a musician who lives in Washington Heights. "He always ate Chinese food, but he cooked Cuban." […]
Cheuk Kwan's Chinese Restaurants is a 13-part documentary series, airing on TV in Canada and at select venues in the U.S. (San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (New York), for two). Maybe PBS will pick it up? Someone should make this available to a wider audience in the U.S. Happily, it looks like there will be a DVD available in December.
Posted by rv at September 22, 2005 08:01 AM to food