Because garlic's role in Chinese cuisine is unfamiliar to most Westerners, our perceptions are just plain distorted. Used as we are to the stereotypical garlic dish -- a pile of pasta topped with marinara, dotted with florets of "the stinking rose" -- typical Americans don't even register a Chinese restaurant as a blip on the radar screen when searching for that all-important garlic fix.

But the fact is, garlic has played a starring role in Chinese cuisine for over 4,000 years. The fragrant lily sizzles in woks in the kitchens of authentic restaurants and is piled high in produce markets among more exotic foods like bok choy and bitter melon.

"I love the smell, the way it feels in my mouth, the way it tastes. I do not care if people notice garlic breath, I think it's wonderful," says Chinese food connoisseur Shirley Fong-Torres, who claims she is a true "garl-a-holic." Here is one of Fong-Torres' favorite ways to quench a garlic craving -- whipping up a batch of Garlic Chicken Broccoli.

"All restaurants in Chinatown use garlic," says Chinese food connoisseur Shirley Fong-Torres, owner of Wok Wiz Chinatown Tours & Cooking Center in San Francisco, California. "It's essential in Chinese cooking. Also, garlic is sold at food markets in bulbs and is easy to find."

She ought to know. Fong-Torres leads tourists and locals on culinary tours through San Francisco's Chinatown and writes about Chinese cuisine. She learned to cook while growing up in Oakland, California and working in restaurants that her parents owned. Yet even she admits that among the melange of distinct ingredients flavoring Chinese cuisine and sharp smells permeating Chinatown streets, the scent and taste of garlic is only detected by an aware and experienced nose and palate -- like hers. It's just not the garlic the rest of us are used to.

General manager of San Francisco's Golden Phoenix restaurant Bill Wong explains that garlic is difficult to recognize in Chinese cuisine because the Chinese cook with garlic thoughtfully, by blending it with other complementary flavorings, rather than mindlessly throwing a bunch of cloves into a dish and letting them dominate the flavor -- a common practice in Western cooking. "You walk by an Italian restaurant and all you smell is garlic. You walk by a Chinese restaurant and there are many smells," Wong says.

The stereotype is pervasive: Garlic is for Italian dishes. In fact, Wong points out that the Golden Phoenix doesn't feature any garlic-heavy dishes because "it's not what the tourists who come here want." Rather, Americans visit the various Chinatowns to try more exotic flavors such as plum sauce and bamboo shoots that are not found in their typical, day-to-day cuisine. Ironically, Wong was once widely known in Puerto Rico for his garlic chicken dish -- featuring full cloves of garlic -- at the only Chinese restaurant in the Caribbean in the '50s.

New York chef and restaurant consultant Eddie Schoenfeld, who currently oversees food service at ABC Carpets' Parlor Cafe, adds that when the Chinese cook with garlic, they create a taste and odor that is a far cry from the sweet, slow-cooked Western style. "The Chinese have a much quicker way of cooking garlic. It provides a more raw garlic taste -- like the taste you get fresh out of a bulb," says Schoenfeld, who in the '70s was the ma"tre d' at the New York restaurant Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan, which was the third Chinese restaurant to ever receive four stars in the New York Times.