Category: Chinese

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East Ocean Chinese & Seafood – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

In 2022, Freddie Wong posted a TikTok video that went viral on several social media platforms. In the video, Wong, purports to find the most “authentic” Chinese food by utilizing restaurant review website Yelp in a unique way.  “The easiest way to find authentic Chinese food, assuming you’re living in a major metropolitan area, is to go on Yelp and to look for restaurants with three-and-a-half stars,” declared Wong in his TikTok video, which garnered an astonishing 7.2 million views in only two days. “Exactly three and a half, not three, not four. Three-and-a-half stars is a sweet spot for authentic Chinese food.” Again, the assumption is based on living in a major metropolitan area where there are a preponderance…

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China Luck – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

A few years ago,  The Daily Meal, an online resource which purports to produces more culinary content than any other resource published a feature entitled “Chinese Food You Won’t Find in China.” The list was replete with many popular favorites you’ll find at virtually every Chinese restaurant in America: General Tso’s Chicken, Crab Rangoon, Fortune Cookies, Chop Suey, Sweet and Sour Pork, Egg Foo Yong, Orange Beef and even Egg Drop Soup. Many of these dishes were, in fact, invented in the United States.  You can’t accuse Americanized Chinese food of being subtle.  Brash, gaudy and maybe even over-the-top, but never subtle. In fact, the flavor profile of Americanized Chinese food is generally so gunked up with MSG, sugar, salt…

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ABC Cajun Seafood & Noodle House – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Although popular myth attributes the introduction of pasta in Italy to Marco Polo, pasta’s origins in Lo Stivale can be traced back as far as the 4th century B.C.  That’s when the Etruscan civilization-which existed in the Tuscany region from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE–began the centuries old love affair between Italians and pasta.  Culinary historians agree that pasta’s earliest roots begin in China, during the Shang Dynasty (1700-1100 BC), where some form of pasta was made with either wheat or rice flour. Pasta also appears to have been part of the ancient Greek diet in the first millennium B.C.  Africa also had its own form of pasta (made with the kamut crop). Despite being first to create…

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Tasty Noodles & Dumplings – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

The first time I noticed that the dishes served to people of Asian descent weren’t covered in neon bright sauce, I wondered why those strange looking dishes weren’t on the menu.  Or maybe I just didn’t see them.   I asked my server (who was barely conversant in English) and was essentially told I wouldn’t like “authentic” Chinese food.  “What the heck am I eating?” I  asked myself.  That was the beginning of my explorations into the ancient and traditional culinary culture of China.  I delved into just what dishes are considered “authentic” and just what “authentic” means. Dogmatists and purists insist that dishes that weren’t “invented” in China are spurious, not legitimate.  They use such terms as “Americanized” and…

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Hanmi Korean-Chinese Fusion – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Popular culture is defined as “commonly known information that briefly holds the public interest. It is typically discussed in various mass media, including TV and the Internet, and becomes a topic of everyday conversation (what used to be called a “water cooler conversation” before that term fell from popularity).  Apparently you’re out of touch with pop culture when you believe Game of Thrones is a video game and that Taylor Swift is a sprinter, the female equivalent of Usain Bolt. Approaching forty years of youth, I’d probably be completely out of touch with pop culture were it not for our interns at UNM Information Technology.  They do their best to educate this old fogey on what’s lit, cool, on fleek…

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Nio Szechuan – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Several years ago Mike Muller, my friend and former colleague at Intel was sent to Chengdu, the capital of the providence of Szechuan in Southwest China.  It was an assignment I would have loved.  Unfortunately I could barely spell the name of the enterprise asset management application Mike would be training our Chinese counterparts how to use.  From an application and business knowledge perspective, Mike was the perfect man for the job.  From the perspective of culinary culture, Intel should have sent me.  Our counterparts may not have learned much about the asset management tool, but we would have had a great time feasting on the incendiary delights for which the Szechuan region is famous. Mike is “bizarro Gil,” my…

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Zu Hot Pot – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

“You have tattoos and others have piercings, but for me, there’s nothing that says more about me than the food I choose to carry every single day. As a kid trying to maintain my identity in America, my Chinese was passable, my history was shaky, but I could taste something one time and make it myself at home. When everything else fell apart and I didn’t know who I was, food brought me back and here I was again.” ~Eddie Huang, Fresh Off The Boat Food: It triggers memories that provide a sense of identity and belonging. It feeds the soul and nourishes the body. It impacts the environment and geopolitical politics. It inspires song, art and lore. It affects…

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BUDAI GOURMET CHINESE – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

“The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection.” –Ludwig Bemelmans By definition, gourmets are connoisseurs, taking food more seriously than most and embodying the axiom “live to eat rather than eat to live.” True gourmets, as Ludwig Bemelmans would define them, appreciate food of the highest quality, exalting only in the rarefied experiences–those which require the most discerning palates and noses to cognize subtle nuances in complex and sophisticated flavors and aromas. Bemelmans, himself an internationally known gourmet, posited that the true gourmet will find joy only in tasting, smelling and appreciating perfection, not in its pursuit. I’ve known several true gourmets…

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Dragon House – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

Admit it–every time you dine at a Chinese restaurant, you peruse the Chinese Zodiac paper placemats at your table describing the characteristics of people based on their birth year. Every new year of the lunar calendar is represented in Chinese mythology by one of twelve animals, only one of which is mythological. That would be the dragon. People born on the year of the dragon are considered very fortunate as presumably a long, happy life awaits those with a dragon birth year. So that you don’t have to look it up, the last six years of the dragon were 2012, 2000, 1988, 1976, 1964 and 1952. If you were born before 1952, simply subtract 12. Long before Hungarian Horntails, Swedish…

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Heaven Dragon – Rio Rancho, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

From Norbert, the Norwegian Ridgeback of Harry Potter lore to Smaug, the greatest and most powerful of all dragons in The Hobbit, dragons are a familiar icon in modern literature, movies, music and pop culture.  Dragons are symbols of fantasy, whimsy and magic, often representing ancient legends and far-off lands.  They range from the malevolent, fiery tempered, scaly fire-breathers (insert your favorite mother-in-law reference here) to the affectionate benefactors of mankind.  What could possibly explain the popularity of dragons?  Could it be because dragons once existed?  Stories of dragons are pervasive in such ancient cultures as the Chinese, Australian aborigines, Babylonians and Welsh.  Ancient Chinese cosmogonists actually defined four types of dragons.  The Heaven, Heavenly or Celestial Dragon (Tianlong) guarded…

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Noodle Works – Albuquerque, New Mexico

Gil Garduno

“To witness the birth of a noodle is a glorious thing. I have listened, spellbound, as an 85-year-old noodle chef in Beijing told me why the act of making noodles helped him make sense of the world.” -~Terry Durack, Noodle In the movie Mr. Nice Guy, martial artist cum actor Jackie Chan portrays a  chef with a successful television show.  In the movie’s opening scene, Chef Jackie is presiding over a flour-dusted table, stretching, twisting, and pulling a piece of dough into fine strands of noodles, a process the TV host can only describe as “alchemy.”   For the culinary obsessed among us, that was the highlight of the movie, all the “special effects” we needed.  Later on, Chef Jackie…