According to most estimates, there are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, and it seems as if you can find some version of beef and broccoli at almost all of them: velvety wok-fried meat in brown sauce, served in a forest of green. The dish has been part of the Chinese-American restaurant-food canon since at least the 1950s, a few decades after broccoli first rode to popular heights on the backs of the southern Italian immigrants who championed it on our shores. The dish is a standard at high-end restaurants and scruffy takeout shops alike, wherever there is a market for the sweet-salty-crisp flavors that Americans claim as a birthright.

But it would be a trial to find such a dish in China. “It’s diaspora food,” said Jonathan Wu, who until it closed recently was the chef at the elegant dim-sum bar Nom Wah Tu on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, “a genre unto itself.” Wu, an American of Chinese descent, ate the dish a lot when he was growing up outside Hartford, a home-cooked variety in which his mom reversed the proportions to provide a lot more broccoli and rice than beef. The broccoli was his favorite part, he said, lightly tossed in a wok that never got very hot on her electric-coil stove, and mixed with a sauce she never thickened beyond its base of pungent oyster cut through with soy. “She kept it simple,” he said. “Streamlined.”