I went and got proper lo mein noodles. I had leftover fried chicken and used the wings for the protein.
I have one more bag of noodles. They are $2.99 for 8 ounces. I will not be buying them again. They are just a egg pasta. I’ll make my own.
Cost per person $4 Cost of I make the noodles: something close to $2.50
Growing up in New Jersey, lo mein was my favorite Chinese dish (American style takeout Chinese–we didn’t have authentic Chinese restaurants at that time).
Imagine my surprise when I moved to the west coast and lo mein simply wasn’t a thing on menus! Like, ever, at all. Every Chinese restaurant in New Jersey had multiple styles of lo mein.
I thought at first that this must be because we had takeout Chinese in Jersey and very few Chinese people in the area. So I thought it must just be a very Americanized version of Chinese food.
But it’s not! It’s a common Cantonese food and is pretty much always called “lo mein” or “lao mian” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_mein). And the west coast has a pretty huge Cantonese population.
So I don’t know. We have tons of similar dishes at restaurants here, but they don’t use the name “lo mein” and none of them are especially similar to what I grew up with.
I still wonder about it.
That’s curious. In San Diego every 99¢ Chinese Food place had it. Might not find it at the more upscale places, basically any places with shrimp, but the bargain places always had it.
My favorite was the Dim Sum place in downtown. It wasn’t the best lo mein. But it was the kind of ply where someone would piss off the owner and you could get dinner and a show. And if you looked carefully enough you could see that they were totally a front operation for running illegal cigarettes.
A person would walk up to the door, inconspicuously touch some spot on the frame, and someone would come out from the back to complete a deal.
On the weekends they would offer a very un-Asian breakfast special of 4 eggs, 4 bacon, 4 sausage, 4 toast, for $4. In 2002 it was the best deal in the whole city. I miss that place.
To be fair, I am including only the three states north of California on the west coast. Interesting that they have it down in California, though.
And back in Jersey, even the cheapest places had shrimp lo mein or combination lo mein, which would include shrimp.
They didn’t have lo mein elsewhere???
THEY DON’T HAVE SHRIMP LO MEIN ELSEWHERE???
NJ is the best state and we must protect it. For that and diners. And salt water taffy.
But we must continue to pretend it’s the worst state.
Grew up in Edison. Everyone see’s/smells Newark getting off the plane (or more often, never going outside of) and it perpetuates the stigma of NJ.
If it keeps people away, it’s working! I’ll just be over here enjoying the pine barrens and my shrimp lo mein. (I’m more a fried rice person though)
I do miss the diners. Nowhere beats NJ diners.
The shrimp thing might be more of an north vs south California thing. San Diego is not a great source of seafood. Almost everything you do find isn’t local. By the time the ocean current works its way down there it hasn’t got much left in it to feed stuff. No San Francisco dungeness crab, no Alaskan king crab. The whales eat all the shrimp. It’s on the edge of swordfish but no one is putting that in their noodle dish. You want sea urchin? All you can eat. But the shrimp gotta be imported.
Interesting. When I lived down in Oregon (I’m in Washington now), shrimp was one of my go-to protein sources because it was usually only six bucks a pound. And I eat a diet which is more balanced in protein than the standard American diet–bit of protein, some veggies, a carb, which makes $6 a pound very affordable.
I was shocked when I spent a little bit of time out in Florida. I’d heard all about Gulf Coast shrimping (thanks, Forrest Gump?), but shrimp was so expensive there. Now that I’m back in the northwest, I still see it as a cheap source of protein.
I guess I figured seafood would have better availability in San Francisco than that because they invented cioppino.
It’s weird how seafood works. Some of the best is in the middle of the country where people will pay more for it. When I lived in Virginia Beach I could get gulf shrimp cheaper than something more local.
But now the best local option for shrimp is very literally the guy that parks near the railroad crossing four miles away and sells out of the back of his trunk. I’m 2.5 hours from the coast.
yeah, west coast us chinese food is different from east coast us chinese food. they’re both great, it’s just different. i haven’t had enough east coast us chinese food to really describe the difference tho