This is funny. I totally get the sentiment of the post, but this genre of Chinese restaurant is wholly unfamiliar to me. Where I grew up in NJ we had Chinese restaurants with the menus exactly as you describe - the metal teapot, fried noodles, duck sauce, egg rolls, secret "if you can read it you can eat it" menu - but they were all 20 table restaurants in strip malls, definitely nothing big enough to be called a hall with an event stage or anything even remotely like that. So the nostalgia over the physical space isn't hitting me. As for the food, I don't get the impression that the canonical menu of Americanized Chinese dishes is becoming a rarer thing, but I definitely have the sense the quality has slipped big time since my youth. While my tastes have shifted towards real Chinese food (usually Sichuan) over the Americanized stuff, I do still get the occasional hankering for one of those good ol' strip-mall lo meins or General Tso's, and I honestly wouldn't know where to go anymore to get one that isn't crappy.
This is funny. I totally get the sentiment of the post, but this genre of Chinese restaurant is wholly unfamiliar to me. Where I grew up in NJ we had Chinese restaurants with the menus exactly as you describe - the metal teapot, fried noodles, duck sauce, egg rolls, secret "if you can read it you can eat it" menu - but they were all 20 table restaurants in strip malls, definitely nothing big enough to be called a hall with an event stage or anything even remotely like that. So the nostalgia over the physical space isn't hitting me. As for the food, I don't get the impression that the canonical menu of Americanized Chinese dishes is becoming a rarer thing, but I definitely have the sense the quality has slipped big time since my youth. While my tastes have shifted towards real Chinese food (usually Sichuan) over the Americanized stuff, I do still get the occasional hankering for one of those good ol' strip-mall lo meins or General Tso's, and I honestly wouldn't know where to go anymore to get one that isn't crappy.