British Chinese food is all over TikTok. Americans have questions

Ask an American to name their favorite Chinese takeout dishes, and images of General Tso’s chicken, chow mein and egg rolls stuffed into white cardboard containers will likely spring to mind.

Things are a little different across the Atlantic, in the UK.

British Chinese takeout — a much-cherished cuisine but little understood outside the UK — bears so few similarities to its US counterpart that Americans have been sharing their surprise, and sometimes outright horror, on social media.

“I know that people typically pour the curry all over the noodles,” notes one American TikToker in a video, as she digs into her first-ever British Chinese takeaway order.

“I’m just going to pour a little bit on the side. I’m very intrigued by this.”

Raising her eyebrows in approval as she takes a bite of chow mein with curry sauce, she reports, “It adds a little something. I’m into the curry sauce, guys.”

A search for “British Chinese food” on TikTok brings up thousands of videos of both Britons plating up their takeaways and foreign travelers sampling it for the first time.

The uptick in interest can be traced to a 2023 post featuring a British TikToker showcasing her usual Chinese takeout order.

The video has since attracted more than 10 million views and 15,000 comments, many from Americans baffled that the British version of Chinese food is nothing like the typical takeout they eat in the US.

Some poked fun at the presence of so many brown dishes, while others called it “horrendous.” Proud Britons rushed to defend one of their favorite comfort foods.

The culinary conflict got particularly heated around one specific dish, leading many Americans to ask: What do fries and curry have to do with Chinese food?

From jar jow to spice bags

The very first Chinese restaurant in the UK opened in 1908 in London. Little about it was documented, but the menu likely included a few Cantonese-inspired dishes, such as fried rice, sweet and sour pork, chow mein (don’t confuse it with the US version, it’s more like an American lo mein) and chop suey.

Today, most Chinese dishes served in the UK remain rooted in Cantonese cooking, along with some influences from Beijing and Sichuan province.

Iconic items include crispy duck with pancakes (a nod to Peking duck), crispy chili beef (Sichuan-inspired beef strips in sweet and spicy sticky sauce), sweet and sour chicken balls (deep-fried batter-coated chicken in a sweet and sour sauce) and sesame prawn toast (Hong Kong-style deep-fried prawn paste on toast covered with sesame seeds).

Like all immigrant cuisines, Chinese food in the UK evolved according to local tastes and available ingredients, not least chips — the classic thick-cut fries usually found in fish and chips.

For Helen Tse, the third-generation owner of Manchester Chinese restaurant Sweet Mandarin, one dish captures that evolution perfectly: “Salt and pepper chips and curry sauce, with a side of egg fried rice.”

Other British Chinese dishes you aren’t likely to find in the US include crispy seaweed (actually deep-fried cabbage) and chicken satay.

Certain cities also boast their own specialty dishes. When in London, for example, be sure to sample jar jow, which is a stir-fried sliced honey-glazed barbecue pork (char siu) with ginger, spring onion and other vegetables in a thick tomato sauce.

The spice bag (a mix of fried salt and chili chips, chicken and vegetables with different spices) is a classic Irish Chinese dish that has amassed a cult following in recent years and is now found throughout the UK. It even has a dedicated Facebook group with more than 16,000 members.

While some dishes may share names with ones found on US menus, they often differ in seasoning or presentation, such as kung pao chicken and egg rolls/spring rolls.

Other popular American Chinese dishes like General Tso’s chicken and crab Rangoon aren’t found on typical British Chinese menus at all.

And don’t be alarmed when you open your order. As the many TikTok videos show, it’s not served in quaint Instagram-ready cardboard containers. What you will get are fortune cookies. It’s common to break one open at the end of a Chinese meal in the UK as well.

The rise of TikTok posts featuring British Chinese food has sparked a long-overdue conversation about a significant yet underappreciated British culinary tradition and its Chinese diaspora.

“I guess it goes to show how little is known about us,” says Diana Yeh, senior lecturer at City St. George’s, University of London, whose research focuses on the British Chinese community.

“TikTok tells you the first top layer of what’s going on in society. At the same time, it narrows some of these debates into something much smaller than they are. So what can we uncover and learn from underneath that?”

In the case of Chinese food in Britain, she feels it reflects the history of the Chinese community itself.

Few dishes encapsulate this fascinating past better than chips drenched in curry sauce — one of Sweet Mandarin owner Tse’s favorites. And few curries tell that story better than the one served up by her grandmother, Lily Kwok.

Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1918, Kwok’s vitality was legendary.

“When she was in her mother’s womb, she kicked so hard, the midwife thought she was going to be a boy,” Tse tells CNN.

After moving to the British-ruled Hong Kong years later, Kwok’s grandfather — a successful soy sauce trader — was murdered, leaving the family in distress.

To support the family, Kwok, then just 11 years old, began working as a maid for a wealthy British family, the Woodmans. When World War II ended, they returned to their home in Somerset, in the west of England, and invited Kwok to join them.

It was a welcome opportunity after her husband had squandered the family’s savings. Kwok agreed, but at a steep price — she left her two children in Hong Kong and gave her newborn up for adoption, a decision that haunted her for the rest of her life.

In 1950, Kwok embarked on a 35-day sea voyage to England, during which she learned more cooking techniques from the ship’s kitchen staff.

“The ship stopped at different places. It stopped in Singapore, where my grandma learned about Laksa curry with a coconut base. It stopped in India where she learnt about all kinds of Indian spices,” says Tse.

At every port, Kwok refined her curry recipe for the Woodman family, who loved spicy food.

“By the end of this journey, she had made her very own curry, which is a mild spicy curry with a coconut base with fruity apple notes and a bit of a kick,” says Tse.

“And it was very thick — like cement. The reason why Mr. Woodman liked it was because it stuck onto the chips and chicken, instead of rolling off like the thin gravy that the English have on their Sunday roast.”

The rise of family-run Chinese takeouts

After a few years in Somerset, Mrs. Woodman died and Kwok was released from her service. Armed with a small inheritance, she relocated to Middleton, a town near the northern English city of Manchester.

At this time, Chinese restaurants had been in the UK for decades, but xenophobia, tight immigration rules and general British suspicion of anything vaguely foreign had kept them mostly invisible. In towns like Middleton, most people didn’t even know what Chinese food looked like — let alone how it tasted.

Enter Kwok. In 1959, she opened Lung Fung, Manchester’s first Chinese restaurant and takeout. She knew exactly what she’d sell: chips and curry. Everything else on the menu bent to British taste buds.

“John, the window cleaner, came in and said, ‘Oh, I fancy some steak and chips.’ And my grandma said, ‘I’ve got steak.’ Then, someone said, ‘I’d love a liver,” Tse says, explaining how her grandma’s early Chinese takeout menu took shape, leading to the inclusion of dishes like steaks and pies.

By the 1960s, Kwok had opened six takeout joints — known as takeaways in Britain — and a restaurant. Business was booming. She even managed to bring her two children over to Manchester to join her.

“Unfortunately, our family’s success is like a roller coaster,” says Tse, who has authored a book about their history called “Sweet Mandarin.”

Kwok was in a lonely business. With few other British Chinese around — most deliberately moved to towns with no competition — she filled the gap with gambling.

“She realized that casinos were the Chinese hangout. It’s where you can find staff, it’s where you can gossip, have a little flutter on the mahjong, poker and stuff like that,” says Tse.

Soon, Kwok’s gambling was out of control, and one by one, she had to close her restaurant and takeaways. One survived and was taken over by Tse’s mother, Mabel, in the 1970s.

Though the lure of easy money was Kwok’s downfall, the business model pioneered by takeaways like hers surged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Called chippies by some, British Chinese takeaways served quick, cheap meals — everything from pub grub to classic Chinese dishes with a twist.

It was estimated that there were about 7,000 Chinese restaurants and takeouts by 1984 across the UK. For comparison, there were only 200 McDonald’s by 1986.

Over the years, surveys have consistently ranked Chinese food as Britain’s favorite takeout, yet the community behind it has stayed mostly invisible.

“The position of American Chinese is very different to the British Chinese,” says Yeh, the professor.

“Their sense of history, the struggles that they’ve been through, the political representation, the power they have in society — all of these things are radically different.”

She says it’s because of this long history, and the presence of bigger Chinatowns, that Chinese Americans have a much prouder and stronger sense of community.

Chinese workers first poured into California during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. Their restaurants and dishes slowly caught on with local diners — until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 slammed the door on new laborers for a decade.

Still, Chinese food’s popularity kept spreading, and by the 1920s it had become a staple on dinner tables across the United States.

The origins of British Chinese food can be traced back to the late 1800s, when Chinese seamen first began arriving in the UK. A few savvy entrepreneurs opened tiny noodle shops in port towns.

But to put that in perspective, Britain had a mere 387 Chinese nationals in 1901, versus 118,746 in the United States the year before.

“The British Chinese spread across the UK widely, geographically,” says Yeh. “The Chinese are like one of the widest distributions of any ethnic group.”

Much like Kwok, many early Chinese migrants in Britain opened takeouts, often away from other Chinese immigrants to avoid competition. This meant even far-flung locations such as Scotland’s windswept Hebrides islands had a steady supply of chow mein and curry sauce.

“But because of that, there’s a real sense of isolation and a lack of communal solidarity,” Yeh says.

This invisibility has persisted throughout the history of British Chinese, and it’s what inspired much of her research.

“On the one hand, there’s a kind of blanket invisibility when you look at the British Chinese — they’re not present really within politics or within the creative and cultural industries within the media,” she says.

“But when you do get representation, they are sort of hypervisible as these kinds of stereotypes — it might be the Kung Fu master or the DVD seller or the takeaway waitress.”

A trans-generational survival story

Growing up, Tse and her sisters resented the stereotypes and occasional racist incidents they faced in their family’s takeout shop.

They studied hard to “deliberately get away from food.”

Tse became a lawyer. One of her sisters, Lisa, went into finance. Another, Janet, studied engineering.

But one Christmas, they decided they wanted “to do something together as a family again.”

Reflecting on their grandmother Lily’s lost restaurant, the sisters made a bold decision in 2004: they quit their jobs, sold their homes and opened Sweet Mandarin in Middleton, serving gluten-free British Chinese dishes, including Lily’s famed curry sauce.

“The most amazing memory was when we opened the doors of Sweet Mandarin, all together as a family, and walked over the threshold and said, ‘We’re back. We’ve restored the family name,’” Tse says.

With the rise of regional Chinese restaurants and easier access to global ingredients, fusions like American and British Chinese cuisines are beginning to fade, as many second- and third-generation owners leave the industry.

But after 21 years and counting, Tse still revels in the joy of making curry as a family — and in winning the “Best Local Chinese Restaurant” award on Gordon Ramsay’s show, “The F Word,” in 2009.

As for all those negative comments about British Chinese food online? She’s undeterred.

“I think people sometimes forget there’s enough space in the world for different offerings,” she says.

And if her grandmother were alive to hear any doubts, Tse says she would not stay silent, likely elbowing her way onto national television to make her point.

“She’ll be on the BBC news cooking a curry for you. She’d say, ‘You try this first before you say anything.’ She’ll tell you all about her curry. She’ll change everybody’s mind in the world.”

Yeh, meanwhile, hopes the recent surge of interest in British Chinese food will shine a new light on the community and recognize its impact on Britain at a time when anti-immigration sentiments are rising.

“I think it’s really important for us all to remember those interwoven histories between the different communities and how valuable migrants have been to British society.”

The-CNN-Wire
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