Restaurant Culture Analysis

4.4 Communication of Restaurant Culture between the United States and China
From above, it is clear to see that there are, indeed, some discrepancies of the restaurant culture between the United States and China, however, with the progress of globalization, the restaurant culture between two countries have been frequently communicating with each other in social lives. To be more specific, on the one hand, as early as 1849, the first Chinese restaurant was opened in San Francisco of America (Ma, Qu, and Njite 291). It was probably a result of the immigration wave of Chinese people from South China to America due to the Gold Rush in 1848, during which Chinese immigrants had begun to build up Chinese communities, as well as Chinatown in America

In her childhood, she had to go to the Chinese restaurants buying Chinese take-out food for her family, when her mother was too busy to prepare the foods. That was the early experience that she had direct contact with Chinese restaurants in America. In order to order dishes on the menu, her mother taught her corresponding Chinese words, and she points out that, “without exception, the vocabulary words that Chinese-American kids—and immigrant kids ingeneral—know best are almost always related to food (Lee 16)”. In fact, Chinese restaurants here can be regarded as a good medium for these Chinese immigrants to recall or regain their Chinese heritage, just like Jennifer who could barely understand complicated traditional “Chinese philosophical classics like Confucius’s Analects and the I Ching” (qtd. in 17), but she might acquire knowledge about Chinese culture through eating Chinese food. However, Jennifer was bewildered about that the take-out foods from Chinese restaurants were greatly distinct from what her mother usually cooked at home, as she describes

The author, Yunxiang Yan, in his essay, “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald's in Beijing”, points out that quick-service restaurants or fast-food restaurants is not intrinsic in Chinese history and culture (451). In actuality, the advent of fast-food restaurants in China can be traced back to the late 1980s when Kentucky Fried Chicken established the first restaurant in China in 1987 (Lozada JR 273). After that, fast-food restaurants have begun to expand their business in Chinese market, among which McDonald’s that opened its first restaurant in Shenzhen, China in 1990 (Lozada JR 273), has gained its enormous popularity in China because Chinese consumers are allured by its sanitary, modern, cozy dining environment (Yan 451). In terms of cultural communication, the expansion of American fast-food restaurants also reflects the output of American culture in China, since Chinese people regard American culture as modern culture, and thus, the way that Chinese parents pay money for their children to eat food from McDonald’s restaurants can be considered as a way of equipping their children with the knowledge about modern social life (Yan 457). In addition, Willy Schneider (2007) adds that “Parallel zur Expansion wird auch geplant, traditionelles chinesisches Essen leichter