Upscale Chinese American restaurants fight culinary stereotypes
Upscale Chinese American restaurants are trying to reshape how diners view Chinese cuisine—especially in pricing and “fine dining” status—by spotlighting the work, technique, and cultural intentions behind their menus. In San Francisco and New York, chefs and owners said they are pushing back against the idea that Chinese food’s place in the restaurant hierarchy should be limited to low-cost takeout staples.
George Chen, a Taiwan-born chef whose family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1967, said he still remembers how his school lunch of braised pork and Chinese sauerkraut looked to classmates. “Oh, God, what are you eating? That’s gross,” Chen recalled while dining customers filled the lunch hours at his San Francisco restaurant and bar, China Live, near the edge of the nation’s oldest Chinatown. He said the shift in interest has been dramatic and added, “And now everybody wants the braised pork and Chinese sauerkraut. Hopefully, perception of Chinese (food) has now come a long ways.”
At China Live, Chen runs open stations intended to show craft—dumplings made for the room, a stone oven roasting Peking ducks, and a noodle station and dessert station including sesame soft serve. He also said he hopes to revive his upstairs restaurant, Eight Tables, where course-by-course dinners had ranged from $88 to $188, and that he and his wife, Cindy Wong-Chen, are preparing to launch a similar concept, Asia Live, in Santa Clara.
Chen said resistance to Chinese fine dining often shows up in the conversation about price. “Why shouldn’t I?” he said about his restaurant’s costs. He argued that location in Chinatown should not be a reason for lower expectations and rejected the broader premise that Chinese food is only “good if it’s cheap,” saying, “It’s not true.”
Chen is part of a wider wave of upscale Chinese American restaurants that has expanded from San Francisco to New York City in recent years, often advertising refined tasting menus and themed adaptations for Lunar New Year. The article described that some restaurants use creative spins on traditional dishes for the Year of the Fire Horse, which starts Tuesday, while others try to keep the menu grounded in traditional techniques.
New York’s Yingtao, named for Bolun Yao’s grandmother, opened in 2023 in Hell’s Kitchen with a stated mission to present “contemporary” Chinese food as an elegant dining concept. The Michelin-starred restaurant offers a $150 chef’s tasting menu, and Yao said the purpose is to break what he described as “this bias, this boundary of people who only think about like Sichuan food, Cantonese food, the takeout box.” He said he has respect for casual Chinese takeout restaurants but wants diners to see Chinese cuisine as suited for fine dining as well.
Yao said he has pursued that goal through training and creative decisions that link traditional Chinese cooking to the dining styles that New York diners recognize. He told the story that after earning a master’s degree in food studies at New York University, he knew he wanted to “build a bridge between traditional Chinese and the fine dining scene that New York people are familiar with.” The restaurant’s executive chef, Emily Yuen, joined the effort and said representation has mattered to her since her education emphasized French cooking and her identity shaped what she wanted to explore. “I want go back to like, who I am, and kind of explore that,” Yuen said. She added she was “really like struck by his (Bolun’s) mission statement” and described it as matching her desire “to elevate Chinese culture and Chinese food.”
Yuen said she wants to work with dishes associated with Cantonese cuisine—such as the custard egg tart known as “dan tat”—and rework them in a fine-dining format. “Egg on egg on egg,” she said.
Another Michelin-starred chef, Ho Chee Boon, said his approach is rooted in making Cantonese cuisine understood as fine dining in the United States. He transformed the long-dormant Empress of China into Empress by Boon in San Francisco in 2021. Boon, a Malaysia-born restauranteur who has operated Cantonese Hakkasan restaurants from Dubai to Mumbai and in the U.S., said he was accustomed to high-end Cantonese food in China and India and wants younger diners to know the cuisine. “I try to do something for the Cantonese cuisine and for the culture as well, for the young people and to know about and for other people to know about it,” Boon said. He added, “We can try to something better here,” and said, “and let people come back to Chinatown.”
The reporting also traced how stereotypes shaped the U.S. reception of Chinese food. Krishnendu Ray, director of NYU’s food studies PhD program, said that more than 200 years ago Europe highly desired Chinese silks, ceramics and tea, but that China’s defeat in the 19th-century Opium Wars contributed to a view of China “as a poor country.” Ray said racist myths about Chinese people and their cuisine being strange and dirty persisted after Chinese railroad laborers arrived in the U.S. and were segregated into enclaves, and he said Asian American restaurants today still face “tired stereotypes.”
Ray also tied the “ethnic” food prestige to the economic rise of its country of origin. In Michelin’s New York City guides, which highlight between 300 and 400 restaurants, Ray said he found the percentage of Chinese regional cuisine mentions rose from 3% to 7% between 2006 and 2024. Luke Tsai, food editor for San Francisco Bay Area PBS station KQED, said he is glad restaurants exist and also added, “It’s fine also if you don’t think it is worth it. But at the same time, I’m really glad that these restaurants exist.”
The chefs said they also want to clarify what their menus are and are not. Chen and Yuen said they do not present the cuisine as “fusion,” with Chen describing the approach as “more East to West rather than West to East.” Yuen, who said she sees “fusion food” as something that appears in dimly lit venues with “trendy cocktails,” argued, “What we’re trying to do is just Chinese.”
They said authenticity also shows up through cooking technique rather than a shift toward European methods. At Empress by Boon, the article said Boon and his staff maintain four wok stations with woks shipped from Hong Kong. Boon said, “We want to do exactly everything the same operation,” and added that the team wants to keep the traditional while still working in a modern way. Chen said his restaurant takes pride in an open kitchen that lets diners see woks and clay pots being used, and he argued that showing the range of Chinese culinary disciplines is part of what helped China Live’s approach succeed. “You actually look at the greater culinary disciplines of China and because you have the space, you can showcase the cuisine,” Chen said. “I think that’s really served us well.”