We have yet to read Jennifer 8. Lee’s new book The Fortune Cookie Chroniclers: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food but we plan to pick it up soon.

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from today’s New York Times review of The Fortune Cookie Chroniclers:

Lee presents an intriguing idea in a chapter called “Open-Source Chinese Restaurants,” contending that “if McDonald’s is the Windows of the dining world (where one company controls the standards), then Chinese restaurants are akin to the Linux operating system, where a decentralized network of programmers contributes to the underlying source code.” She contrasts the decade of “failed experimentation” before the success of Chicken McNuggets to the breathtaking speed with which chop suey, fortune cookies and General Tso’s chicken took hold in Chinese restaurants everywhere thanks to a “self-organizing” system in which good ideas spread like urban legends.

Lee writes in the opening chapter that Continue Reading…