Jingting Zhao
Shanti features Indian cuisine.
If you want to know a place’s culture, the food is a good way to start. Bloomington has all kinds of restaurants from different countries in the world. You can find Greek, Italian, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese food and any other exotic food here. The diversity in food reflects the cultural diversity in this small town. In a way, it reflects the kaleidoscopic scene and multicultural attitude at IU.
 
With nearly 10 percent of its study body international students, Indiana University-Bloomington (IU) is friendly and welcoming to international students. IU enrolled 3,687 international students in 2006. The top five countries of citizenship are South Korea, India, China, Taiwan and Japan. You can find a large number of international students coming from Asian countries and areas. Besides the top five, there are also many students coming from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Macao.

We often say, “Demand drives supply.” With so many international students, faculty members and visiting scholars at IU, there is a large demand to satisfy the needs of those missing their home countries and ethnic food.

How many Chinese food restaurants are in Bloomington? If you enter “Chinese restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana” into the Internet search engine Google, you will find about 531,000 results. If you narrow down your search results by adding “near IUB” into the key words, you will get 570 results in Google Maps. Together with the brief introduction of the restaurants, you will find their locations, maps and contact information as well.
Jingting Zhao
Chow Bar serves Chinese buffets, sit-down meals and hot bubble tea near the  IU campus.


Near campus, you can easily find some Chinese restaurants, such as Chow Bar, Lucky Express, Dragon Express, and Great Wall. Not far away from campus, you can also find Chinese Buffet and Sunny Palace near the College Mall.

     Jingting Zhao  
A Chinese buffet in B-town.
There are three types of Chinese restaurants that exist in most areas of the United States — sit-down dining, takeout, and buffets. In Bloomington, the most common types are buffets and takeout. The Chow Bar serves a lunch buffet from Monday through Friday for $6.90 per person, $10.50 on weekends. It also offers sit-down dining for lunch and dinner. On weekends it will offer more dishes, such as fresh crab, shrimp and soymilk. Some Chinese students who tried the more expensive lunch buffet said they have more traditional Chinese dishes there on weekends. Want to try it? The owner of the Chow Bar came from Taiwan about 30 years ago and she serves authentic Taiwan hot bubble tea (pearls tea).
 

“My friends and I like Asian food. I like Chow Bar best because I think it’s more authentic and kind of like close to what we experience as the real Chinese food. We come here for buffets, and we also sometimes come here for dinner with my family."
 

An IU sophomore nursing major, Courtney Amelia Oczkowski enjoys the hot bubble tea and lunch buffet with her friend at Chow Bar. She said, “My friends and I like Asian food. I like this place best because I think it’s more authentic and kind of like close to what we experience as the real Chinese food. We come here for buffets, and we also sometimes come here for dinner with my family. The owner here is really nice. She is the best lady I have ever met. I love her. ” Her favorite dish is ginger chicken and noodles.

Her friend Angela Balmer, an IU sophomore majoring in psychology, said, “I brought my parents, friends, and my boyfriend here. This is a really good place for us. Last year I ate three or four times a week at lunchtime. So I mean it’s definitely my favorite place. My favorite dish here is snow shrimp and fried rice.” 
 
 Jingting Zhao
Fried rice is a staple of U.S. Chinese restaurants.
 
Oczkowski and Balmer’s grandmothers and mothers all come from the Philippines originally. But they were born and grew up in the United States. Both of them are members of the Asian American Students Association and Philippine Students Association at IU. IU has a variety of centers and student associations to better serve diversified students on campus, such as the International Center, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, Asian Culture Center, Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, and Tibetan Cultural Center.

However, it’s difficult to cater to all tastes. An IU faculty member from the Department of Folklore said at Chow Bar, “It’s not so good. I have tried better Chinese restaurants in Bloomington and in Chicago. I think Great Wall is better than Chow Bar. Today we have two friends coming from Mexico and one from Paris. They just arrived and want to try some Chinese food. So we came here because it’s right on campus.”

But his two other friends, also IU faculty members, said they like the buffets served here. Their friends from Mexico said in Spanish, “We like it.” The girl from Paris also thought Chow Bar is much better than any Chinese restaurant she has tried in Paris.

Lucky Express and Dragon Express offer take-out food and sit-down dining. You can call in and pick up your order yourself. They put the food and sauce in a box or pan, so it’s very convenient for customers to take out. The dining décor is simpler than Chow Bar and Great Wall. But they don’t lack fans.
                    
 
          "When I go to Chinese restaurants, I mostly want
   traditional Chinese food. Lucky Express is more 
 authentic."
 
 
An IU faculty member from the Department of Economics, Bill Witte, who was enjoying his food by himself and reading the Wall Street Journal in Lucky Express, said, “Over the years, I ate at a number of other ones. I ate occasionally at East Bloomington Plaza. Some of ones I ate at no longer exist. I also tried the Sunny Palace near the Target.”

He thought Lucky Express is more authentic. “When I go to Chinese restaurants, I mostly want traditional Chinese food. I mostly come here because it’s close to campus. The convenience is a big thing. I can ride my bike here or even walk. I often come here by myself. And my favorite is Szechwan chicken. It’s very hot.”

When asking about his opinion toward some Chinese restaurants putting salad, sushi and fried chicken into the buffets, which is not traditional Chinese food, Witte said, “There is a lot of different kinds of food in Bloomington. But I think there is also a lot of diversity in Chinese food. It doesn’t go the same everywhere for sure. And the restaurants, too. The place like this, you can come in and get served right away. Some of the others are much more standard restaurants with waiters and waitresses.” 

Chinese food is very popular in the United States in recent years. But the Chinese food served in the United States is usually called American Chinese cuisine, which refers to this type of cooking that typically caters to Western tastes and differs significantly from the authentic cuisine of China.


 
You can find lots of Chinese food in the China Town districts in U.S. cities, such as in San Francisco.
Chinese cuisine originated from different regions of China and has become widespread all around the world. No matter whether you travel in New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, or any other parts of the world, you can always find Chinese restaurants in China Town or downtown.

Regional and cultural differences vary greatly among the different regions of China, giving rise to diversified styles of food. There are mainly eight schools of regional cuisines in China: Anhui (Hui), Cantonese (Yue), Fujian (Min), Hunan (Xiang), Jiangsu (Yang), Shandong (Lu), Szechwan (Chuan), and Zhejiang (Zhe). These eight traditions can represent Chinese food in different regions very well and show the highest level of Chinese cuisine to some degree. Each of them is famous for its own special taste and it has quite a strict requirement for cooking techniques, raw materials selection, utensils, and weights and measures. Good chefs can make a big difference, even using the same raw materials. Different ways of preparation, like the length of cooking, can make the flavor totally different.

American Chinese cuisine has a long history in the United States. During the nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese workers came to the western United States to build railroads, dig mines, and perform other types of hard industrial work. The early California “chow chows” were simple restaurants run by Cantonese Chinese to feed their Chinese compatriots. Soon Chinese restaurateurs began to cook for American workmen, altering their dishes not only to satisfy American tastes but also to better avail themselves of local ingredients. Dishes on the menu were often given numbers, and often a roll and butter was offered on the side.


In the process, chefs would invent numerous dishes such as chop suey and General Tso’s Chicken.
As a result, they developed a style of Chinese food not found in China.
The most common dishes that often
appear on American Chinese menus include: sesame chicken, crab Rangoon, chow mein, lo mein, fried rice, Mongolian beef, moo shu pork, fortune cookie, and orange flavor chicken.

The Chinese menu will nearly always feature a “hot” option in deference to the Szechwan and Hunan traditions. Catering to American health concerns, restaurants also now frequently offer dishes that are steamed instead of fried in oil and vegetarian options. Chinese food has a reputation for high levels of MSG (monosodium glutamate) to enhance the flavor. Because the belief that MSG is harmful to some people is a popular conception, market forces and customer demand have encouraged many restaurants to offer “MSG Free” or “No MSG” menus. The dread MSG is far less prevalent now.

Another interesting food in Chinese restaurants in the United States is the fortune cookie, which does not originate from China. The fortune cookie is a crisp cookie made from flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, and milk, which is baked around a fortune, a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or vague prophecy. Unique to the United States and Canada, it is usually served with Chinese food as a dessert. The message inside may also include a list of lucky numbers and a Chinese phrase with translation. Despite conventional wisdom, the cookies were invented in California.  
 
                              Jingting Zhao                                            
A fortune cookie …                                                  
   Jingting Zhao
… broken with words of vague prophecy and a list of lucky numbers.