I like to think that my love of Chinese food dates back to my childhood days, when I salivated at the thought of eating at Dragon Island restaurant in Centereach, NY—the town adjoining mine on Long Island. My favorite dish back then was shrimp with lobster sauce. When I later learned to make it, I realized that it contains no lobster, and that it’s not really a Chinese dish.
So I laughed when shrimp with lobster sauce came up in today’s screening of The Search for General Tso at SIFF. There will be two more opportunities to see the film, which uses General Tso’s chicken to show how the Chinese created a cuisine customized to American taste buds in order to survive and thrive in the United States. Chop suey would be the breakthrough, with cashew chicken, honey-walnut prawns, and my beloved shrimp with lobster sauce being similar adaptations. Now it’s General Tso’s chicken that’s the ubiquitous dish around America. But bring that dish to China, and no one knows what it is. Most find it a bit bizarre, much like the fortune cookie, which one Chinese person in the film questioned in terms of edibility.
The Search for General Tso traces the roots of the General Tso’s chicken, ultimately finding its inventor in Taiwan, who calls the Americanized version “crazy nonsense.” Meanwhile, Jennifer 8. Lee (co-producer of the film and author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles) describes the dish as contrary to everything Tso stood for: preserving Chinese culture and tradition.
The Search for General Tso is a fun and interesting ride for food lovers and non-lovers alike. It’s transporting, making you think about your relationship to Chinese food, just as it took me back to that “exotic” Dragon Island restaurant. And it will likely make you hungry.
As SIFF is again featuring a number of food-related films, this food writer would like to offer you some pairings. Like wine for food, this is food for films. For The Trip to Italy, how about splurging for dinner at Altura? In honor of Sweden’s Love and Lemons, I’m tempted to suggest the IKEA cafeteria if you’re going to the screening at the IKEA Performing Arts Center in Renton; otherwise, try the Swedish Cultural Center. For the conservation-minded Seeds of Time, try Tilth. For cooking competition-focused Final Recipe, go to Aragona, where Seattle’s most recent chef contestant Carrie Mashaney is cooking. Thinking about Cannibal, I tread lightly. Maybe the smoked pig head at Whiskey Radiator?
As for combining food with the The Search for General Tso film, I don’t have a recommendation for General Tso’s chicken. Like many of the “experts” in the film, I don’t order the dish. (If you have your heart set on it, my friend Surly Gourmand joined other friends in doing a General Tso’s chicken crawl a couple of years back.) Given that General Tso’s chicken is to real Chinese food what much of Seattle’s ramen (what I call Wramen) is to real Japanese ramen, I went American after the movie and marched over to Loulay for a French-influenced burger.
