[PLUG-TALK] Open-Source Restaurants

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2016, Aaron Burt wrote:

> On 2016-04-29 08:29, Rich Shepard wrote:
>> Chinese restaurants outside of China, and especially in the US, are 
>> the restaurant equivalent to linux while McDonald's and the other 
>> chains are the equivalent of Microsoft's Windows.
>
> Interesting perspective.  I can see how the nature of immigrant 
> communities (somewhat insular because of social/language barriers, 
> with a strong ethic of information exchange and mutual support) 
> would lead to a similar result (emergent standardization.)  Same 
> thing happened with "Mexican", Thai, Vietnamese and "Teriyaki" 
> (Korean?) restaurants. It happened pretty early.  The Canton Grill 
> by my house opened in 1943 as a standard-issue Chinese restaurant 
> (same year my house was built) and "Comidas Chinas" has a long 
> history in Mexico.

I read this article a while back at NPR on the relationship between 
Chinese immigrants and restaurants:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/22/467113401/lo-mein-loophole-how-u-s-immigration-law-fueled-a-chinese-restaurant-boom

In the early twentieth century, at a time when the US was severely 
limiting Chinese immigration,

     Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special
     merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring
     back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this
     status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list.
     Voila! A restaurant boom was born.

Providing support to new restaurants opened more jobs that could be 
filled by family members still in China. The vested interest wasn't 
maximizing profits (by keeping recipes secret) but maximizing 
opportunity.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/