Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada calls attention to the presence of one of the stalwarts of rural Canadian life: Chinese restaurants. Notably the biculturalism of Chinese restaurants and their menus are legacies of Chinese migration to small town Canada. Their place and role in Canadian social life is analysed throughout this volume, making the case that small town restaurants are critical in discussions of Chinese diasporic communities in Canada and of the Canadian social experience more generally. The themes of diaspora and nostalgia are explored across five thematic chapters: historical presence and diasporic agency; time and the Chinese restaurant culture; nostalgia and the public sphere; the Chinese restaurant as an institution; and the role of memory. Drawing on an array of sources, including menus, literature, photographs, poetry, music, and even artist Karen Tam’s Gold Mountain Restaurants installations, the ambitious range of inquiry is further supported by theoretical commentary to portray small town Chinese restaurants in Canada. At times the strength of the study is hindered by the sheer expanse of information and gamut of ideas. Cho posits that small town restaurants, while historically owned by ethnic Chinese migrants, were not exactly Chinese. Nor were they wholly Canadian. These restaurants served mixtures of Western and Chinese fare, and also anchored small town communities as social centres for all residents. Therefore their weight in small town cultural life was markedly different than Chinese restaurants in urban centres, whose patterns of cultural production developed out of different social contexts and served different clientèle. To address the importance of these eating places in small town Canada, Cho relates the Chinese restaurant to the narratives of Chinese diasporic culture. As she points out, this work drifts away from other literature on the Chinese diaspora in Canada, which she maintains has been weighted primarily towards the experience of those in urban centres in the Chinatowns of Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto (132). By engaging with Chinese restaurants in small towns, Cho attempts to widen scholarship on the Chinese diaspora in Canada to be more inclusive of the rural experience and to the unique role that these establishments hold in small town life. Focusing on agency, Cho transgresses the often monolithic approach towards diasporic communities. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas and the theories of the Subaltern Studies Group, she recognises the dynamics and relationships animating the history and politics of the Chinese diasporic experience. Such a focus on agency is strongly reflected in her first chapter, which situates diasporic agency through the historical narratives of two Chinese cooks. Attention to diasporic agency persists throughout the book, and is also raised through discussions of authority and menus, authenticity, nostalgia, memory and the senses, power and institutions. Cho maintains that the small-town Chinese restaurant draws far less attention in academic debates, and that they also hold a curious position in public consciousness. In some ways they are almost brushed aside, left behind by modernity. On the surface they do not fit debates on globalisation, transnational migration, and multiculturalism, which dominate discourses of modernity. Yet small town Chinese restaurants persist. They are “strangely visible and yet invisible – a sign of the passing of time and the death of prairie life, and yet still one of the last places where one can find a proper beef dip sandwich” (7). These establishments perceived to be dying out, as Cho defends in the chapter, “Disappearing Chinese Café”, yet persist in perpetuating supposedly Canadian values and practices, as obviously demonstrated through menu offerings of classic Canadian comfort food. Chinese restaurant menus have an “absorptive power” wherein they have …