I have a hypothesis that every country has a national beer, and it’s crap, like Budweiser. I’ve not had Sapporo or TsingTao in their local markets, but I have had many others in theirs.
Stella = Belgian Budweiser
Peroni = Italian Budweiser
Carlsberg = Danish Budweiser
Bitburger = German Budweiser
(And so it goes; all of those I have had locally)
I just don’t know why it’s only the Americans who get shit for their crappy beer especially since there are hundreds of great American beers.
You didn’t ask, but the best light lager IMO (and proof that I’m not anti-lager) is Pilsner Urquell. And before someone says otherwise, Pilsner is a form of lager.
True-ish. Bitburger is at least made with barley malt and only barley malt, unlike Bud, Sapporo, TsingTao and others that use rice as an adjunct.
You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. - Frank Zappa
It’s the norm on the East coast. The Chinese menu is almost never online.
Also I’d like to take this opportunity to partially debunk “look for restaurants filled with Asians, it must be good/authentic.” This may occasionally be true, but it’s also true a lot of Asians are really cheap frugal, and they intentionally choose places that are inexpensive, regardless of quality. For example Asian buffets are always full of elderly Asians, but it’s not because the food is good.
It would be more accurate to say “look for restaurants filled with Asian Intl university students”. That’s a pretty reliable metric for a restaurant’s authenticity. They are looking for a taste of home and money is not a factor, they are already attending the local university at full pay.
My favorite Chinese restaurant in the DC area was Hollywood East in its original location. The menu in Chinese was written on poster board up on the wall.
My Chinatown spot used to be Eat First. They just wrote the Chinese stuff on copier paper and taped it up to the walls so you kind of had to walk around the place to read it all. Or you just asked them for something that may or may not actually be on either menu and they would more often than not just make it.
I had an experience somewhat like that. (Bear with me as I explain context.) My grandmother-in-law was born (c. 1900) and raised somewhere in a small village in the Hunan province of China as a child of missionaries. By the 1990s, no one in the family knew exactly where that was. The only clue was an airmailed letter from her parents that had a return address in Chinese characters.
The grandmother’s daughter (my mother-in-law) wanted to visit her mother’s place of birth. In those pre-internet days (and China also wasn’t open to tourism much in those days) it was quite a feat to turn that one clue into a trip to wherever-it-was. My mother-in-law faxed the return address to my husband in Jakarta. We had a friend who had recently moved to Jakarta from HongKong, and he faxed the address to a Chinese friend who ran a travel agency there.
That friend was able to set up a trip for us, starting in HongKong, flying to Beijing, and then flying to some tiny airport in Hunan and from there taking a taxi to the location of the village. The visit was pretty tightly controlled; we had a clearly written schedule in Chinese which we showed to everyone at each step of the way. I gather that we stayed at the one hotel where foreigners were permitted.
Almost no one spoke a word of English the entire trip. We were the only non-Chinese around for miles, as far as I could tell. To eat, we just had to point to what other people were having.
So from a culinary standpoint, it was a great trip! One day we went walking around Beijing and just stopped at various little dim sum stands, pointed to what looked good, and tried it.
Everything was delicious, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was.
Hollywood East was out in the burbs, but then it moved further out into Wheaton Mall and was never the same. There Chinese menu was posted in strips on poster board all over the place too, so Chinese readers would have to walk around the dining room to see it.
Lol. My (not elderly) Asian friends complain that their parents drag them to terrible Asian buffets. They say their parents claim to like it, it’s not just that it’s cheap.
Gored gored? Yum! The restaurant here doesn’t make it that hot…although definitely more heat than my wife likes.
Kind of a tangent, but I used to go to a Vietnamese restaurant where they had a dish “lemon beef” and every time I ordered it, the server always said, “No, it’s raw.” But, when I said that’s fine, they would let me have it. The “No” was very jarring but helped me to learn how “No” in English is very strong compared to other languages (like Vietnamese, apparently) where I guess telling someone “No” is not so jarring, more of a negotiating position.
On my first visit to Japan, we went to Tokyo famous fish market and then went to a restaurant in that area. Especially in those days, the way that you could order through the language barrier was to lead the server outside to the plastic replicas of the food and point (and, in fact, as a foreigner they pretty much expected you to do that). I ordered some tuna sashimi that way. At some point, the server came back and was trying to ask me something with an English word that I couldn’t really understand but I eventually decided what he was trying to say “rice”. I was actually kind of ambivalent if I really wanted any rice, but decided to go with it. Well, the tuna sashimi came but I never got even a kernel of rice with it. It was at that point that I realized that what he might have been trying to say was “raw” and I was very happy that I had said, “yes” to the “rice” as otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten my food at all!
…On that same Japan trip, I was on the train and went to get some food at the concession in the dining car. I pointed to something that looked sort of like it was some sort of box of sashimi or something. He tried to tell me “no” but I was quite insistent so he eventually sold it to me. I got back to my seat, opened the box and discovered it was something quite different, some sort of pickled sausage or something that looked sort of strange and decided to wait until later to open the sealed plastic and try it.
In the meantime, a Japanese man sat down next to me and started talking to me in English. He had traveled extensively in the U.S…in fact, much more extensively than I had! Well, when he saw what I had been sold, he told me it is not something a foreigner would like, even he doesn’t like it, and was incensed that they had “taken advantage” of me by selling it to me and was quite determined that this must be rectified. I tried to tell him that it was my fault as they had tried to resist, but he would have none of it and marched up to the concession with me sheepishly following and had a somewhat heated conversation with the man there who was clearly telling him how I insisted that I wanted it. They eventually did take it back because I hadn’t opened the sealed plastic. However, I still feel guilty about the whole thing and also a little bit sad that I didn’t get to try what it was even if he was right that I would not have liked it.
Not yet, but thanks for reminding me. My culinarily adventurous offspring returns from her semester in Europe next week, she’s my best bet for a dining companion.
I find it interesting, that we are many generations in, of enclaves of Culturally Chinese people but from different areas and they guard their food and culinarily won’t quite assimilatee by throwing up artificial, lingual, barriers. But it speaks to their own monoculture and biases. Chinese are conservative bigots. Lots of prejudices and superstition. Doesn’t make for a pleasant ntercial family reunion, when your “barbarian” relatives show.
Is inappropriate in many ways. It’s off-topic, and had nothing to do with the thread. It’s bigoted, painting all Chinese with an extremely broad brush. And it’s being a jerk. Please avoid these features in future posts.
I apoligize, but I really wasn’t trying to be controversial or even biased. Anyone who has Chinese Parents or Family, this a common life experience. And if saying that Chinese are “conservative and prejudiced”, why isn’t there a similar pushback against “Tigermoms” and that stereotype… must be because it is true.