Paul French writes:
It's an acknowledged fact of the globalization era that pretty much everyone likes Chinese food: From Accra to Zagreb, it's not hard to find a decent Cantonese or Sichuanese restaurant. So why do the Chinese, so adept at replicating and re-engineering everything from Caterpillar bulldozers to iPads, find it so stubbornly difficult to replicate a McDonald's for local food?There are any number of theories. My favorite is simply this: China may have only one time zone, but it has no national cuisine. That's not to say you can't find great food just about everywhere, just that there's no one thing that Chinese crave everywhere -- think of this as the cheeseburger-with-fries problem. It seems so paradoxical: Food in China is nothing if not quick, cheap, and filling, the foundation on which fast food is built. But it is also very much local.
I have yet to go to a Chinese city that doesn't have a superb delicacy to call its own: Gorgeous Shanghai soup dumplings (xiaolongbao) impregnated with pork gravy cost just pennies; crispy fried stinky tofu (chou doufu) in Changsha is equally cheap; and then there's Beijing's salty jianbing pancakes stuffed with fresh chives and also available for almost nothing, just like Sichuan's spicy hot pot, Guangdong's delicate dim sum, and Yunnan's sumptuous "crossing the bridge" noodles (guoqiao mixian). It's all delicious and inexpensive. It's just not the recipe for a national fast food.
Read more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/24/in_search_of_mickey_li_s?page=full
