Chinese restaurants: “Do you know why Americans don’t like eating meat with bones in it? They’re too lazy!”

A long time ago – 2005, to be exact – when downtown New Albany was as yet moribund and revitalization meant anywhere else except here (on second thought, it still does), we returned from a trip to Chicago and it immediately struck us that metro Louisville needed an Asian community like the Windy City’s thriving Chinatown. We looked at the empty buildings downtown and thought, hmm, this looks like a fine place for it; if we Americans can’t muster the chutzpah, I bet the Chinese could. China has the investment capital and the work ethic. Just let ‘em have the buildings, and get out of the way.

Chicago’s Chinatown is touristy to an expected degree, but filled to the brim with, well, people from China (and some from Vietnam, Malaysia and other Asian locales). Sometimes none of the voices to be heard are speaking English. It’s easy to catch yourself thinking that you’re somewhere else, not Illinois.

Stand at the right spot, and the aromas of cooking fill the street, emanating from ubiquitous restaurants with dining rooms often tucked away on upper floors, eateries relieving tourists like us of our cash while pulling extra duty as community centers.

Early Sunday morning we entered a bakery and were shooed into the almost hidden rear section, where the satellite television was entirely in Chinese. The staff spoke English, but the customers in the crowded room paid little heed to it. I checked off breakfast choices, including dim sum and doughy pastries, on a card and handed it to the waitress, who returned with tea and hot sauce.

What were the men talking about? I’ll never know what the men smoking by the no smoking sign were talking about, but their conversation was animated and filled with laughter.

Nine years later, it still sounds like a plan.

Probably the best Chinese food I've ever eaten was in London's Soho district. Given that alcoholic beverages were involved, perfect recall eludes me, but there were four communal dishes of the sort I'd never seen in Louisville-area Chinese restaurants, one of which include w hole pigeon, including the head.

I hate pigeons, and so I enjoyed that dish very much.

The Kitchen Network: America’s underground Chinese restaurant workers, by Lauren Hilgers (The New Yorker)

... There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. There is one in Pinedale, Wyoming (population 2,043), and one in Old Forge, New York (population 756); Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania (population 1,085), has three. Most are family operations, staffed by immigrants who pass through for a few months at a time, living in houses and apartments that have been converted into makeshift dormitories. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.