[SeattleUte]

I love excellent Chinese food. I could probably eat it every day. It's the French cuisine of the Far East; diverse, subtle, and very difficult to execute. I'd take an excellent Chinese restaurant over excellent Japanese or Thai or Vietnamese any day. Other Asian cuisins are somewhat derivative of the mother country's food. Of course there's a lot of crap that is passed off as Chinese food. Most of it is, that is. This is kind of like calling French fried junk food French food.

"Chinese food" is also a wholly inadequate term to cover the panoply of options if you're talkng about truly great Chinese food. Back in the '70's there came a proliferation of Schezuan and Mandarin restaurants. This was kind of like the advent of the Thai restaurant in the '80's or Sushi bars in the '70's in American popular culture. Back then Schezuan/Mandarin seemed really exotic, sweet and fiery and meaty as it was--General Tsao's, Mongolian Beef, Mu Shu, Kung pao, etc. But the crowning achievement of Chinese cuisines is Cantonese, the delicately steamed fish and vegetables, Peking (Beiging?) duck, hand crafted dumplings and noodles, savory prawns cooked and eaten in the shell, etc.