The Search for General Tso (2014)

Have you ever gone to a Chinese restaurant and wondered just who General Tso was, and why nearly every Chinese restaurant serves his chicken?  This documentary attempts to answer that question.

This turned out to be a cute, rather short documentary on the history of Chinese cuisine in America, with a side trip to the Hunan province of China.

If it was only a tiny bit shorter this would be an excellent film for history class or Home Ec classes if they still taught Home Ec in High School (don't get me started).  That is not my way of saying it's boring... far from it.  I think I would have been more interested in Nixon if I'd known he was single-handedly responsible for re-igniting America's interest in Chinese cuisine.

As a crafting movie, it has its good parts and its bad parts for that... during the tour through China while learning about the actual General Tso (yes, he's real!) there are a lot of native language parts with subtitles you're going to want to pay attention to.  After that, it's smooth sailing.

I even laughed out loud twice during this film, mostly at the restaurant memorabilia guy and his descriptions.  Over all, it was an informative and entertaining film, and isn't that what you want in a documentary?  They could have gone a bit more in-depth on the recipes, maybe shown a sample recipe for making it at home (although there are so many variations it was probably too hard to pick one) and as a result I gave it a four out of five.  It definitely made me hungry.  It's available on Amazon Instant and Netflix.