Partly this is down to size. China is just far too big and too regionally diverse to have one unified style of cookery.

t’s a funny thing, but there’s really no such thing as Chinese food. Oh there’s Cantonese, Sichuan, Shandong, Fujian, Hunan and Anhui cuisine, but you can’t point to one plate of food and say, ‘Yep, that’s Chinese food that is.’

Partly this is down to size. China is just far too big and too regionally diverse to have one unified style of cookery.

So why does every clichéd ‘Chinese’ restaurant from Seattle to Sydney serve the same old fare – lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork, fried rice with peas and carrots – you’d never see on a plate in Shanghai or Xi’an? It’s basically down to the first and second generation migrants in the 19th and early 20th century, who left China behind and brought their traditional cuisine to the West. Most of these original emigrants were Cantonese, which is why ‘western Chinese food’ features a lot of stir-fries and noodle based dishes. We just replaced the wok with a pan, daikon and chou sum with broccoli and carrot.