Restaurant: New China 
Address: 1743 Decoto Rd
City: Union City, California

My family had dinner with relatives at a Chinese restaurant near home. I usually order a vegetable dish, but this time I decided to go with a fried rice dish for this blog! There are so many different types of fried rice; I still have yet to try all of them!

I picked the fried rice dish called “Fujian Fried Rice” (福建炒飯). The name was unfamiliar to me, even though my parents said I’ve had it before, and that it comes with a thick, gravy-like sauce on top. And sure enough, it came with a thick sauce!

New China’s Fujian fried rice had a bed of rice mixed with egg, and a thick sauce with peas, carrots, squid, shrimp, mushroom, and pork on top.

Wikipedia tells us what’s usually in Fujian fried rice:

Hokkien fried rice (Chinese: 福建炒飯; also known as Fujian fried rice) is a popular Chinese-style wok fried rice dish in many Chinese restaurants. It has a thick sauce poured and mixed over fried rice with egg. The sauce can include mushrooms, meat, vegetables, etc.

Many Chinese fried rice dishes have names that have no correlation to where it’s from. Christine’s Recipes tells us where it’s commonly found:

[Hokkien fried rice did not originate] from Fujian, yet you’d easily find it on the menu of Hong Kong yum cha restaurants. Traditionally, the chefs would put many expensive ingredients, like shiitake mushrooms, scallops, prawns, chicken and shredded roast duck into the fried rice. Thus, it’s not an ordinary fried rice but a luxury one. What makes this Hokkien fried rice different from other kinds of fried rice is that it’s finished with a thickened sauce cooked with all the expensive ingredients. You can tell it tastes wonderfully delicious.