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It seems there are two issues: Chinese food not being properly represented in the States, and Chinese food not being "hip." Good points on the former, Ed, and to that I might add the frustrating problem of "real" or authentic menus being printed only in Chinese while Western customers get tossed a blah Americanized menu at so many good restaurants. Who's to say what becomes hip or when it will, but by declaring that a whole national cuisine is un-hip, I smell (or hope for) a backlash in store! (I totally disagree with foodinmouth, obviously.)

There are a number of problems:

Quality. Unless someone starts making Chinese food of the same quality as one gets at high end restaurants in China then it will be the Wal-Mart of foods.

Authentic. Until most Chinese restaurant owners realize that Americans actually are quite adventurous in their eating, you will get the boring bland food served from the American version of the restaurant's menu.

Marketing. Quite frankly Chinese restaurant owners need to understand the meal is more than the food. Contrast this to, say, Japanese restaurants. Many Chinese owners start sushi places because they feel they can charge up and get higher margins because they will be selling an already marketed product (sushi).

When I go into a Japanese restaurant I generally assume it will be high quality, have some wacky menu items, and will be reasonably authentic. With a Chinese restaurant I assume low quality, generic menu items, and stuff no one in China actually eats.

My uneducated guess is that price is a factor. People seem to be okay shelling out upwards of $200 for quality Japanese and Italian meals, but bulk at investing the same in a Chinese meal. There's a Chinese saying "yi fen qian yi fen huo" which literally translates to "one cent of money gives you one cent of goods" -- you get what you pay for. As an example, one of Australia's top restaurants is Flower Drum, which serves exceptional Cantonese cuisine. You wait three months for a table and pay an average of $40 for a main. Most of us wouldn't expect to get quality sashimi for under $10, so why expect sashimi quality at that price in a Chinese restaurant?

Polynesian-Chinese fusion restaurants have a kitschy, hip aspect. I know of only one, though, and it's in NoNJ . . . called Chan's Waikiki. It's a good time. Pu-pu Platters and Mai Tais galore.

Taiwanese cuisine -- Chinese in origin -- was entirely overlooked by Sokolove. I love Taiwanese bubble teas, which I still think are pretty hip. Though they definitely had a fad thing going for a while. Beef Noodle Soup and San Bei Ji are my favorite dishes. Mmmm.

There's an authentic Taiwanese place here in the Pittsburgh, the Rose Tea Cafe. I'm gonna be in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood around dinner time (post music lesson), so I just might eat there tonight!

At least in Los Angeles we can escape to pretty dang fine Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley. I don't think there's any place else like it in the US.

Part of it might be that Chinese food is hard to make as architectural in presentation as French food. Food is chopped into chunks that are easy to pick up with chopsticks. Hard to get height and drama if everything just falls into a mixed-up pile. And who's going to pay $50 for a plate of mixed-up stuff?

All the comments on this post show that people have very strong feelings about Chinese food. I don't know how adventurous American palates are in general, but I don't think that most Americans who love Chinese food are clamoring for more authentic fare. But I don't think authenticity has anything to do with hipness. Faux authenticity, maybe. Americans have always resisted paying a lot for Chinese food, so onedaylingers raises a really good point. But does the price of a meal say anything about the hipness of Chinese food.

Regardless of how you feel towards these two cuisines...chinese and french have always been considered classically the two greatest, most influential cuisine in teh world.

Chinese cuisine has been "hip", particularly in the asian countires so greatly influenced by it. In america, i simply attribute the lack of hte great, grand chinese restaurants that exist in other countires, simply because the fact is the chinese restaurant fad was at its peak in the eighties...

But i suspect thats all going to change.I really bleieve.. as even ruth reichel says, grand chinese cuisine is going to be making a big impact in the american dining scene

The problem is the ignorace, such as the ignorace displayed by HARLAN.

I understand the lack of interset or understanding as i'm not exactly preaching to the choir here in America.

There is a differnece b/n say bistro french food, and then haute cuisine french food. One is obviously more geared toward casual eating, the other being a dining expereince. The same goes with chinese. To suggest chinese food is limited too chopped displays the problem. Its just not true.
Its a differnt type of beauty, which is why classicaly chinese/french have been consdiered worlds greatest cuisines..

Look to Steingarten, Reichl. They understand, and they're probablywondering the same thing too about chinese food in america.

American's adventurous eaters? That's a joke. Aside from a tiny minority of people who read food blogs on a daily basis, American's are known as laughably UN-advanturous eaters. American tourists are responsible for hamburgers and hot dogs on menus throughout the world. American's by in large generally EXPECT to be able to eat these wherever they go.

The short answer is we don't have the good stuff yet. The long answer has something to do with how heavy the stuff we do have can be.

Here's a lovely article on the subject by Nina and Tim Zagat:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/opinion/15zagat.html

hip? who cares? it's delicious. unfortunately, i haven't really been able to find any good chinese food here in houston, and have to load up when i go back to new york to visit.

a lot of it probably has something to do with the majority of the first chinese immigrating to america being day laborers.
also, with the end of the gold rush, a lot of chinese were out of a job. however, there are always jobs in the restaurant business.
although for a time in the us, chinese people and its culture were a novelty (see kaplan's yellowface: creating the chinese in american popular music and performance), exotic foods need to be downplayed A LOT to fit american palates.
because it's been around for so long, and because what is considered good food might scare people off - shark fin soup, sea cucumber, etc - compared to sushi, it's hard for chinese food to be hip.

If you are going to those restaurants to eat Chinese food, then you are obviously not going to the right places. A lot of the "hip" Chinese restaurant serve awful food because the owners realize once they get popular to the Americans, they must cater the taste of the food to the American palette.

The problem why Chinese food is not hip is not because of the food its because of the marketing and how the business is run. Chinese food has already a very low market price and now that it is established many people do not want to pay more if they already got it at a low price. Low price of food usually means the food isn't refined. Chinese people are everywhere and they build awful Chinese take out to trick stupid people everywhere. Because the food is so prevalent like hot dogs, it is never seen as something very special. Chinese culture stresses prosperity. So when Chinese people want to go to to eat, they like to see giant plates of food, not small cuts of fish on rice. Because of this Chinese food is often looked at not being refined.

I think part of it is due to portion sizes and America's preconceived ideas of what chinese food is. Chinese restaurants typically are family style and people go in expecting, fried rice, bbq pork, Genral Tso's chicken (invented in America!) and stir fries. I think if chinese restaurants branched out into high end tasting menus and use more "chinese" ingredients like dried and fermented products as well as branch into some molecular gastronomy or modern techniques, Chinese cuisine will become elevated to hip. Recently italian cuisine has had a resurgence due to the additions of modern innovations.

Restaurant marketing also plays into it. Thai restaurants have been great at reinventing Thai cuisine into a hip atmosphere (lots of ikea/futuristic style looking restaurants).

But most of all it's education. Right now there aren't any real innovative American Chinese Chef Stars other than Ming Tsai. And and he's not really that innovative! Michelin stars people. There needs to be world calibre chinese restaurants. Also, most people don't know that the chinese food they get in the US is different from the different regional cuisines in China.

I have to agree with Cathy (Comment #2) and this is because of very direct knowledge of the different menus in Chinese restaurants. My father married a wonderful woman from China almost twelve years ago and her family owns several well known Chinese restaurants in various suburbs around Chicago. When I visit them, I always sit at the "family table" (the big round table in most mid-grade Chinese restaurants that seems to always be reserved) and eat what is prepared for the cooks and family. It is outstanding, authentic and definitely NOT on the American menu with the meal typically consisting of whole fish that is roasted or fried in a wok, incredible vegetables, dumplings, and broths along with all the seasoning sauces made from scratch from peppers you would never see on the American menu.

When I tell my dad's wife's family that if they would serve what they serve at the family table and they could not only charge more for it but would make their restaurants stand out in the sea of take out places around Chicago, they tell me that American's would never like it so why bother.

Because wealthy white people, for the most part, love bashing all things China and love praising all things Japanese.

How many people do you think would know that China and the US were both allies in WW2? Allied against - yup, JAPAN.

I had to laugh at oneday's comments about American diners dealing with fish heads or suckling pig heads, funny but true, at least we can enjoy watching Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern eating such things, and not have to worry about confronting them when we hit the buffets LOL.