Egg rolls and more queries for prolific Chinese food eater

David Chan is a third-generation Chinese American who has eaten at 6,297 different Chinese restaurants around the world.

Trained as an accountant, he’s kept track of every Chinese restaurant he’s dined at on an Excel spreadsheet starting in the early 1980s.

He grew up with few real Chinese influences. He can’t speak Chinese and he has never gotten the hang of chopsticks. But each meal helped bring him that much closer to his culture -- even though he always had to ask for a fork and an English menu.

He was the focus of a Column One -- “6,297 Chinese restaurants and hungry for more” -- which prompted numerous reader questions. Here’s a recap:

Question: How did The Times hear about David Chan?

Reporter Frank Shyong: I was actually Googling Chinese restaurants in search of a place to take my parents. They were visiting from out of town and they’re pretty specific about what they like -- it has to be authentic, but also cheap so we can eat without feeling guilty. I found David’s top 10 list published on Asia Society, found his blog, and started reading news pieces about him from there.

Question: What meals did Chan share with The Times?

Shyong: Our first meeting took place in the Times cafeteria, but I think I just had coffee. Our second meal was at Lunasia, a menu-driven dim sum place that offered some of the freshest, piping hot dim sum I’ve ever eaten. It was the first time I had ever had dim sum that didn’t come from a cart.

Our next meal was at Green Zone, an organic Chinese Restaurant in San Gabriel that serves up a mean Hainan chicken. We’ve also eaten at Paul’s Kitchen, a really old Chinese restaurant in the produce district in Downtown Los Angeles. It was a taste of the kind of Americanized Chinese food that David had grown up eating -- cheap, fast, and cash only. Our most recent meal was at Huge Tree Pastry in Monterey Park with another food writer, Clarissa Wei. It’s a Taiwanese breakfast place that’s pretty popular.

Question: Has Chan written a book?

Shyong: No, and Chan says he has no plans to write one.

Question: All that Chinese food can’t be healthy. How does Chan stay so slim?

Answer: “I’m on medication, but that’s not from eating,” Chan said during a Times Web chat, adding that his family has naturally high cholesterol levels. Chan also controls his portions and tries to cut down on pork and beef, electing to have fish and chicken when possible.

Question: Why doesn’t Chan take pictures of his food?

Answer: “People assume that having been to thousands of Chinese restaurants that I’m a foodie. My kids are foodies. They photograph all their meals,” Chan said. “I’m not a foodie. I began eating Chinese food as part of my quest to learn more about Chinese Americans and Chinese American communities across the country.”

Though his blog mentions food occasionally, there are no pictures. His posts focus more on history, demographics and origins rather than taste or texture.

Question: Chan’s top 10 list seems to focus on Cantonese food and dim sum. What’s his experience with different regions of Chinese food, like Taiwanese food?

Shyong: Chan has been to, by his own estimate, 99% of the Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley from Monterey Park to Rowland Heights -- Taiwanese places and boba shops included. But the list reflects his own personal tastes, and he readily states that he is not a fan of most Taiwanese food.

Question: What about Chinese food in Orange County?

Shyong: Chan said he likes to eat in Orange County, primarily in Irvine. Branches of San Gabriel Valley restaurants have opened in South Orange County. “There’s serious Chinese eating there, but obviously the critical mass isn’t the same as in the San Gabriel Valley,” he said.

Question: What constitutes American Chinese food and how is it different or less authentic than Chinese food?

Shyong: The authenticity of a particular dish or restaurant is always passionately debated by foodies and critics.

But who’s to say the way your mother cooks is more correct than my mother’s style of cooking -- if they’re both from Taiwan, and they both make it the way their mothers made it? Who’s to say the Americanized Chinese food in the United States isn’t its own regional variety that is valid in its own way? Everyone makes their own version of their favorite dish, and they call it whatever they want.

I posed this question to Chan, and his definition is purely functional: “A shorthand answer to authenticity is whether a typical Chinese person living in Monterey Park would consent to eating there.”

“As to what is authentic or not authentic, there’s no one factor, but rather an amalgam of what dishes are offered on the menu. Obviously, if the restaurant serves chop suey there are severe questions. If the menu has jellyfish, it’s authentic. But obviously there are gradations.”

Chan wrote about the topic for an online food site.

Question: How do you keep track of all your meals?

Shyong: Chan keeps menus, business cards, and tweets. Then he regularly and methodically updates it his list. If you follow him on Twitter, you can see him noting unusual or tasty things about the restaurants he’s eating at. Though, these days, unless he gets on a plane, it’s tough to find a new Chinese restaurant. The new ones that crop up he can hit at lunch pretty quickly.

“The reason why I originally set up a Twitter account was as a personal diary of my eats,” Chan said. “I never imagined that anybody else would read it.”

Question: What sorts of insights into Chinese culture have come of your passion for Chinese food?

Answer: “I really didn’t realize how food-centric Chinese culture was,” Chan said. “I mean, yes, you greet people in Cantonese by asking if you’ve eaten yet. And it’s only intensified with the milleninials. I swear the young people in the San Gabriel Valley probably eat out a dozen times a week.”

Question: The Springfield Convention Visitor’s Bureau hosted Chan as he traveled to Missouri to sample the city’s famous Cashew Chicken. It asked: What recommendations would you give fellow Californians seeking unique Chinese food experiences outside of the state?

Shyong: American Chinese food varies across the country much like pizza and hamburgers. Chan recently wrote an article about Springfield Cashew Chicken, a deep fried, gravy-drenched version of the buffet classic. The dish was created by a Chinese immigrant about 50 years ago and dozens of Chinese restaurants serve it in Springfield, Mo. It’s even promoted as a tourist attraction. “Just because [food] doesn’t seem to be Chinese by our definition doesn’t mean it can’t be tasty,” Chan said. Here’s a link to that Menuism article.

The Springfield Convention Visitor’s Bureau discovered Chan through social media and last year invited him out to meet the dish’s creator, David Leong. Tourism officials have even submitted the dish to be in a traveling exhibit created by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Question: Reader Laurence Borenstein is looking for the classic NYC egg roll from the 1950s and 50s: “They were about 1 1/2 - 2 inches in diameter and about 6 inches long, had pieces of pork and shrimp, cabbage, sprouts(?)carrot(?) and were usually served cut in 3 pieces accompanied by Chinese mustard and a sweet and sour sauce (called duck sauce then).”

Answer: Chan says, “If you go to the Chowhound Los Angeles message board, the New York egg roll is the holy grail for many people. Nobody has found it, though supposedly Los Angeles’ Genghis Cohen on Fairfax comes the closest.”

Question: How’s the Chinese food in Canada?

Shyong: The best Chinese food in North America is in Canada, according to Chan. If he could make a top 10 Chinese restaurants for North America, two-thirds of his picks would be from Vancouver and one third would be from Toronto. He says it’s because immigrants from Hong Kong fled to Canada in droves around 1997, when many believed Hong Kong would become controlled by China. However, the gap in quality has narrowed significantly. “At one time, everything in Richmond, B.C., was better than anything in L.A.,” Chan said. “That’s no longer the case, by a wide margin:

Question: What dishes do you order all the time?

Answer: Chan says, “I’m very partial to fish dumplings. If I see it on the menu I’ll order it. Strangely, that dish is unheard of in New York. I mentioned it to a New York writer and got a completely blank stare.”

Question: What was the most interesting thing about reporting this story?

Shyong: One of the most fun things was playing with Chan’s spreadsheet. Sorting and graphing it revealed all kinds of trends in his eating and I spent quite a bit of time just scrolling up and down and looking for weird places he had eaten at. It also serves as a rough record of his travels, so I could use the insights gleaned from the spreadsheet as fuel for questions.

I don’t know if another data set exists like Chan’s list. You can see all kinds of geographic trends, and even trends in naming conventions of restaurants. All Chinese restaurants seem to name themselves with combinations of the same 10 words, including “dragon,” “happy,” and “China.”

Plotting it on a chart, you can see that Chan’s eating began to accelerate in the mid-1980s and really peaked in the early 90’s -- that’s when he started hitting 300 new restaurants a year. You could tell, by the numbers, that the list was more than a hobby.

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