A lot of it is real Chinese food. It's just not Cantonese Chinese, which is much lighter, a little more elegant, has a lot more seafood dishes and not as heavily flavoured (think Dim Sum). What you see at buffets is mostly Peking cuisine along with *******ized food, like ginger beef, sweet and sour chicken balls, beef + broccoli, and salt and pepper squid. Even then, there's very similar dishes in "traditional" Chinese cooking. They're just taking what's available here and making similar dishes using the local ingredients.
Traditional stuff you see at a Chinese buffet include fried rice, deep fried chicken wings, noodles, black bean stir fries, s+p pork ribs among other things.
MSG is pretty popular in Asian cooking. Heck, I've never been to a Chinese person's house who didn't have a huge freaking jar of MSG in their pantry.
Go to that restaurant beside the Lambda market on Centre Street south of 16 Ave. There's lots of "regular" Chinese food there, it's dirt cheap and damned delicious. Order one of the congee dishes (rice porridge), a vegetable dish and something with black bean if you want something traditional. A Chinese meal usually has very little meat, as it's usually pretty expensive.
|