Kung Pao: Reflections on immigration and food

My husband and I visited my parents in Wisconsin last weekend. As we often do when we visit my hometown, we got Chinese take-out for lunch one day. And so I found myself glorious slurping a bowl of Hot and Sour Soup, and reflecting on one of life's greater mysteries. I grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. It is the first county south of Milwaukee. We are a town trying to grow past its industrial roots, famous for our Danish kringle and still home to Insinkerator® and Johnson's Wax®, so there's a good chance that most American households have a lot of Racine unknowingly clustered around their kitchen sink. We have about 90,000 folks. We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a culinary tour de force. However, Racine has a relative embarrassment of riches when it comes to excellent hole-in-the-wall Chinese food. By contrast, Rogers Park, my neighborhood in Chicago, is one of the most diverse census tracks in the entire U.S., with a sizable Asian population including many immigrants. And the Chinese food stinks. As a sociologist by day, and a food blogger when I'm attempting to procrastinate, I thought I would turn my training to this perplexing and irksome culinary puzzle: why is there better Chinese food in Racine Wisconsin than Chicago?


I start my search with a simple, and perhaps incorrect assumption: the best Chinese food will be cooked by Chinese immigrants or Chinese Americans. This is certainly not exclusively true. There are plenty of examples of chefs who gained fame cooking from a tradition that was not theirs by birth (Rick Bayless and his love of Mexican food comes readily to mind). However, in the very non-systematic inventory of all of my Chinese dining experiences, the best were I was eating food prepared by folks who spoke and wrote in Chinese fluently. So I think its a decent place to start.

Working from this starting point, the first thing I did for my little investigation was hop on the US Census Bureau's homepage to find some quick facts. In the zip code where I was born and grew up until I was 18 years old, only 3.3% of our population was foreign born. Only 0.6% of residents are Asian. That works out to 155 people in the whole zip code. By contrast, it turns out that my zip code where I live now in Rogers Park (Chicago), 7.9% of the population is Asian, more than double the U.S. average. Fully 35% of our residents are foreign-born, which is more than three times the U.S. average. I thought that might be just an effect of being in a big city, but the Chicago average foreign born population is only 22%.

But "foreign born" and "Asian" population wasn't enough. So I went probing deeper into the pages of the Census Bureau, and found a file that listed all foreign-born individuals by state of admission and country of birth. Now we're cooking. Here I discover that the state of Illinois welcomed 2571 Chinese Immigrants in 2005, whereas all of Wisconsin received only 593. Only California, New York, and Texas received more Chinese immigrants than Illinois.

If anything, the population data just seems to make our culinary mystery more surprising. Lets just say one out of every hundred people is a good cook. That should mean that each year the entire state of Wisconsin receives just 6 good Chinese cooks, most of whom go to Milwaukee or Madison. But Illinois receives four times as many good cooks, most of whom are drawn to Chicago. But this huge population difference in favor of Chicago doesn't seem to produce local quality Chinese food. So I have to suspect that the way good cooks migrate, and then whether they decide to set up a restaurant, has some interesting pattern to it that helps explain why I can't get good Chinese food even in my highly diverse neighborhood.

After some thinking, this is what I believe is happening. Truly high-end great Chinese cooks are drawn to areas where they can get the highest profile for their cooking. According to the simple data, that means most of them are disproportionately likely to immigrate to New York City or somewhere in California. Those who don't go to California or New York City, who somehow find themselves in the Windy City, are then more likely to concentrate their wild talent in Chicago's Chinatown. This creates some sort of vaccuum: good (but not great) cooks also set up shop in Chinatown or decide the competition is too fierce and so they don't open a restaurant at all. Then, at some point, a number of very average Chinese cooks look around their various other neighborhoods and say to themselves, "Hey, there aren't enough Chinese restaurants here. We should open one up. There's almost no competition!" By contrast, in Racine the good (but not great) chefs know in advance that there isn't much stellar competition. The cost of starting a business (rent, supplies, ingredients) is relatively lower, the competition is lower, and so good cooks who might be nervous entrepreneurs also enter the market. They set up many small but delightful dining establishments. Most serve a variety of Americanized Chinese standards with a few regional or family favorites thrown in. One makes the best kung pao I have had anywhere.

So in the end, it is absolutely true that you can find more stellar, gourmet Chinese food in Chicago than in Racine, but that would require you to drive to Chicago's Chinatown. If you want to get local, delicious take-out in your own zip code, you would be better off in Racine.