Chinese Food Doesn't Need Cleaning
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A recently-opened Manhattan restaurant called Lucky Lee’s is billing itself as “clean,” guilt-free Chinese food by relying on a marketing concept based on a mix of stereotypes and food guilt.
Nutritionist Arielle Haspel recently opened Lucky Lee’s in Union Square, an establishment that sounds, based on a description in The New York Times, more like a place where people who love Instagram but are scared of food can go to take pictures than an actual restaurant:
“Arielle Haspel, a Manhattan health coach with a sleek social media presence, wanted to open the kind of Chinese restaurant, she said, where she and her food-sensitive clients could eat. One where the lo mein wouldn’t make people feel “bloated and icky” the next day, or one where the food wasn’t “too oily” or salty, as she wrote in an Instagram post a few weeks ago.”
She chose a name for her new restaurant, Lucky Lee’s, that sounded stereotypically Chinese, even though she and her husband, Lee, are not Asian. She decorated the restaurant with bamboo and jade touches, and designed her logo with a chopstick-inspired font.”
Of course, Asian-American chefs are not thrilled by the insinuation that there was something wrong with Chinese food to begin with. The idea of Chinese food as “unclean” is a nasty stereotype that has persisted for years, and the idea of a white savior coming in to purify the food has angered chefs who say they were already cooking with organic, non-GMO, and gluten-free ingredients, thank you very much: