Not Your Average Charlie, This Chan

The city in which I live is not exactly the most diversified place on earth in terms of ethnic food choices. The first Pho restaurant just opened recently, and there are a few other Thai places and one German restaurant. Otherwise, it's mostly fish, steak and burgers with the requisite pizza and Chinese buffets. The paucity of chinese restaurants wouldn't matter to David Chan, a man who admittedly grew up favoring meatloaf and spaghetti but now dines almost exclusively on chinese food...a LOT of Chinese food from a OT of different places: 6,297, to be exact.
Chan, 64, a lawyer/accountant in Los Angeles, grew up in an era when there was an immigration quota on chinese people: 105 per year; in fact, a chinese person living outside San Francisco was considered a rarity...and probably an oddity as well. Anyway, Chan's parents tried to get him to eat traditional cuisine, but he preferred American staples...until 1955 when he tried some sweet and sour chicken and began an odyssey to eat as much Chinese food in as many restaurants as he could. He has the Excel spreadsheet to prove it as well! From Los Angeles to Toronto to Springfield, Missouri, and probably most everywhere in between and around, Chan has eaten them all. His Twitter account is full of tweets asking for dining suggestions. Wow. He eats at more than 300 different Chinese restaurants each year, even stopping at six dim sum places in Toronto in six hours! I'm sure his parents were gratified when all of this began...they may think he's a bit odd by now...
especially since he does not use chopsticks...he uses a fork.