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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.

I'll go on record and say I didn't think it was anything special. It was good but it wasn't particularly nutty or 'porky'. $20 for 1/4 pound was overpriced. I'd pay maybe $10.

Have you actually tried it or are you just postulating? I don't come to this site for food snobbery. I come for objective opinions.

I love tofu but soon dubu is truly a lame dish. Try the spicy tofu special at Ippudo to see how this dish should have been made all along.

I agree. I think the focus on something being authentic misses the point. It drives me crazy, for example, when people say Tex Mex is not real Mexican food. We know! That's why it's called Tex Mex. I'm all for culturally authentic experiences. But if something tastes good, it tastes good. Who cares what it is called.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.