ok, ten minute
There should be a visa program for Chinese people to come to America and open Chinese restaurants where there are none. No such program exists. I checked.
The Panda Buffet in East Aurora closed maybe a year ago, and Kim and I have been hard up for solid Chinese food ever since. The new hibachi takeout place by the laundromat is pretty good and scratches the Asian food itch, but what we both want is low-quality General Tso's chicken and vegetable lo mein crammed into little cartons. Stuff that might occasionally give you food poisoning and keep you coming back for more.1 We have ranged as far as Lancaster to the north and Arcade to the south for a suitable replacement, but no place that we've tried has successfully replicated the middling Chinese chow we took so much for granted.
Truly, I had the notion that every town came with a generic, hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. It was a default fixture, like a library or a police station. Furthermore, the ubiquity and the near-identical offerings of these restaurants led me to theorize that there was some kind of starter kit that Chinese entrepreneurs got when they moved to America.
And why shouldn't there be? It would streamline things. According to the American Immigration Council, there are five tiers in the "employment-based preference system" that doles out a limited number of work visas each year. Highest precedence is given to "persons of extraordinary ability in the arts, science, education, business, or athletics." That's Tier One. An average Joe just looking to open a restaurant would probably fall into Tier Five, "persons who will invest $500,000 to $1 million in a job-creating enterprise that employs at least 10 full time U.S. workers."2
Unfortunately, this does not bode well for a restaurant like Panda Buffet that--according to the best info I could dredge up--brought in about $186K per year and employed only four people, all Chinese nationals.
Under my Chinese Restaurant Visa Program, towns lacking a Chinese restaurant would be able to crowd-source the startup capital for a family of ambitious immigrants. Fundraising would be a cinch. Just solicit donations with a QR code taped to the empty storefront and watch the Benjamins stack up. Back in China, families looking to relocate could browse a catalog of towns needing takeout joints. Come to America and you'd have a unit at the strip mall waiting for you, first month's rent and a box of disposable chopsticks courtesy of Uncle Sam. The deluxe package would include an aquarium with a single outsized koi, a cooler full of generic colas, a gumball machine no one has ever touched, a pile of cardboard boxes from the liquor store for packing orders, and two backlit landscape paintings on Lucite--Song Dynasty reproductions--into which the fluorescent tubes have baked black lines resembling grill marks on chicken breast.
To paraphrase an old Chinese maxim, "The best time to open a Chinese restaurant was yesterday. The second-best time is now."
1 stuff that might occasionally give you food poisoning: Panda Buffet absolutely did give me food poisoning once, in 2017. I was shitting and puking for a week and lost about ten pounds. Weirdly enough, it was kind of fun staying home from work and watching The Lord of the Rings. Didn't stop me going back to Panda Buffet. Who doesn't cross-contaminate every now and then?
2 $500,000 to $1 million: Per US Citizenship and Immigration Services, as of 2022 the minimum investment is $800,000, but I still believe any sufficiently motivated small town could raise this sum.
The Panda Buffet in East Aurora closed maybe a year ago, and Kim and I have been hard up for solid Chinese food ever since. The new hibachi takeout place by the laundromat is pretty good and scratches the Asian food itch, but what we both want is low-quality General Tso's chicken and vegetable lo mein crammed into little cartons. Stuff that might occasionally give you food poisoning and keep you coming back for more.1 We have ranged as far as Lancaster to the north and Arcade to the south for a suitable replacement, but no place that we've tried has successfully replicated the middling Chinese chow we took so much for granted.
Truly, I had the notion that every town came with a generic, hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. It was a default fixture, like a library or a police station. Furthermore, the ubiquity and the near-identical offerings of these restaurants led me to theorize that there was some kind of starter kit that Chinese entrepreneurs got when they moved to America.
And why shouldn't there be? It would streamline things. According to the American Immigration Council, there are five tiers in the "employment-based preference system" that doles out a limited number of work visas each year. Highest precedence is given to "persons of extraordinary ability in the arts, science, education, business, or athletics." That's Tier One. An average Joe just looking to open a restaurant would probably fall into Tier Five, "persons who will invest $500,000 to $1 million in a job-creating enterprise that employs at least 10 full time U.S. workers."2
Unfortunately, this does not bode well for a restaurant like Panda Buffet that--according to the best info I could dredge up--brought in about $186K per year and employed only four people, all Chinese nationals.
Under my Chinese Restaurant Visa Program, towns lacking a Chinese restaurant would be able to crowd-source the startup capital for a family of ambitious immigrants. Fundraising would be a cinch. Just solicit donations with a QR code taped to the empty storefront and watch the Benjamins stack up. Back in China, families looking to relocate could browse a catalog of towns needing takeout joints. Come to America and you'd have a unit at the strip mall waiting for you, first month's rent and a box of disposable chopsticks courtesy of Uncle Sam. The deluxe package would include an aquarium with a single outsized koi, a cooler full of generic colas, a gumball machine no one has ever touched, a pile of cardboard boxes from the liquor store for packing orders, and two backlit landscape paintings on Lucite--Song Dynasty reproductions--into which the fluorescent tubes have baked black lines resembling grill marks on chicken breast.
To paraphrase an old Chinese maxim, "The best time to open a Chinese restaurant was yesterday. The second-best time is now."
1 stuff that might occasionally give you food poisoning: Panda Buffet absolutely did give me food poisoning once, in 2017. I was shitting and puking for a week and lost about ten pounds. Weirdly enough, it was kind of fun staying home from work and watching The Lord of the Rings. Didn't stop me going back to Panda Buffet. Who doesn't cross-contaminate every now and then?
2 $500,000 to $1 million: Per US Citizenship and Immigration Services, as of 2022 the minimum investment is $800,000, but I still believe any sufficiently motivated small town could raise this sum.