In Kyushu, Japan I dined at Mexican, Thai, Italian, French and Nepalese restaurants. Unfortunately most Mexican,Thai and Italian food is changed to fit the Japanese palete. Mainly that means that Thai and Mexican is not spicy. Also the Japanese put some odd things on their pizzas.
Went to a fantastic French restaurant in Kagoshima. There are great French restaurants in Japan. Mainly in expensive hotels and they are very expensive.
There are great French-style bakeries in Japan. That really surprised me.
Tanggu in China had a good Italian. Shekou has a fair few Indian and general western style restaurants plus the usual mix of Mandarin, Mongolian and Schezuan food. Once you are out of the special economic zones, it get very local very quickly.
Balikpapan on the island of Kalimantan has a range of tepenyaki, Indian, Chinese and western eating in the main hotels, plus there is a good indian cafe bar and a steak place on th main coast road.
KL in malaysia has everything, not surprising for a major city.
Almaty in Kazakhstan has Shushi and one of the best braised lamb shanks in a french place, I have ever had. Atarau and Aktau however have nothing and even ran out of vodka in the bars we were in, not high on my list of recomended places to go.
Ashgabat in Turkmenistan - pretty much it was mostly turkmen food - lots of BBQ skewers and once again greta lamb. Also Russian food, which I guess counts as ethnic in Turkmenistan. I would expect to see quite a few Chinese places opening up there.
Azerbaijan had a full mix of Thai, Indian, Chinese, Western,along with Georgian, Turkish and Persian food. Not much by the way of armenian places,who would have thought that given they are next door neighbors
Brunei had a Thai and Chinese places.
Tripoli had the expected med type food, but ethnic wise a smattering of western food places. Didn’t see any asian food places there.
Mumbai - could not say I only saw the inside of hotels and the inside of car in traffic jams, but the hotels was the expected mix of local and western food.
Abu Dhabia nd Dubai - everything is possible
Saudi had a mix of western places, no beer though.
Argentina , Buenos ares, well now days you can get anything , Asian and Shushi is very popular now, although never too spicy. one has to request extra super deadly hot to get a tingle on the tastebuds.
So to answer the OP, yes lots of the non western places have food from elsewhere in the world, as a rule of thumb, the less wealth the country and the further you get from the major cities, expect the food to get more local.
cheers
nbc
When I was in Caruaru, in the northeast of Brazil, I most often ate at the local Chinese place. (Echoing what someone above said about the frequent scarcity of vegetables in South American cooking … )
Is there any city in the world without a Chinese restaurant, I wonder?
I ate at a Mexican place in London (England) once and ordered nachos (it was the only place in the UK where I had seen them on the menu). As I live in Toronto, which (as noted) has something of a dearth of Mexican restaurants,* I have quite low standards and expectations in this regard. Yet even I was horrified when they arrived: salted corn chips with whole canned tomatoes dumped on top.
So yes, there are ethnic restaurants everywhere. GOOD ethnic restaurants are a whole different story.
I have a pet theory that while pizza may be the most universal food (aside from Chinese, of course), pizza toppings are incredibly local. When I asked my French roommate what she wanted on her pie she said “The usual … you know, corn, egg …”
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- I know of two - one on Bloor near Christie, the other on the Danforth near Broadview.
There are or were three Tibetan restaurants on Queen Street in Toronto. I’ve also seen Peruvian, Mexican, and “fusion” (whatever that is), in addition to the bog-standard Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Indian places (which are probably extremely-Canadianised).
When I was in Helsinki, I noticed a number of Irish pubs.
I’d like to know whether there’re Canadian restaurants in China or India, and, if so, what do they serve?
To avoid a hijack I have started a thread about Regional Pizza Topping Preferences for further discussion of this important issue.
In Bahrain, aside from the Dairy Queen, I had Mexican food (it was awful, but still…and I didn’t try the jalapena shwarma), Chinese, Indian, and Phillippine.
Poutine. Or Tim Horton’s.
Try Bandidos, on King just west of John, Mexicalli Rosa’s on Wellington or Margarita’s Fiesta Room on Baldwin. All are pretty authentic. Bandidos has a great lunch special, Tuesday through Friday, with home-made soup or salad and an entree for $4.95 or $6.95. The owners are a husband & wife team; he’s Mexican, as are most of the staff. If you like spicy, ask to try a side of their mango hot sauce with your meal. Margarita’s has a great chocolate chicken dish, and their hottest hot sauce will take the top of your head off.
Stay away from Hernando’s Hideaway unless you’re not picky about authenticity. I’m sure I’ll think of half a dozen more good ones shortly after I post this.
I am really glad I started this thread, I’m fascinated!
I assume the least cosmopolitan world capital is Pyongyang. I wonder what kind of restaurants they have there. (Or if they even have restaurants, or just factory canteens.)
“Several”??? There are at least 5,000 in Chungking Mansions alone. 
There’s also that one in Wanchai that announces on its sign “WE NEVER CLOSE!”, and on the door says “Opening hours, 11am - 10pm”.
One of the weirdest things was going to “Chinatown” in Vietnam. This was the district of Cho Lon in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). It’s weird because a huge number of the locals in Saigon are either straight out ethnically Chinese or they are mixed, and many people speak Chinese, and many shop signs are written in Chinese. And of course in Chinatown, many of the signs are written in Vietnamese, just as they might be written in English in a western Chinatown. The people don’t look any different, and the architecture is the same. So you can be in Chinatown half an hour before you realise that you are.
In central Saigon there is no shortage of things like pizza, but you might have trouble getting Tex-Mex, etc. Also a few international fast food joints, if that’s your bag. I remember seeing a KFC and a Baskin Robbins Ice Cream place.
Another cuisine besides Italian that you seem to be able to find anywhere in Japan is German. (Not surprising considering Japan was an Axis power in WWII.) There are both Italian and German style dishes in lots of places, aside from restaurants that make that their main cuisine. The Chinese food is usually watered down, according to people who have had the real thing (I’ve only had American-style and Japanese-style Chinese food). There are a couple of places I’ve eaten at that make some decent Thai, but the spiciness is low. There are a couple of Middle-Eastern kebab places I’ve seen in the Tokyo area, and one decent restaurant that was actually up in my area (a.k.a: the ass end of nowhere) albiet in one of the few major cities, not my town. There are a few Indian restaurants in the city too.
There are quite a few French restaurants, but like someone else said, they’re pricey. You can get lunch for about ¥2,500, but most dinners in the same place will run you more than ¥5,000 a person; typical is around ¥8,000 if you want wine or anything other than a set menu. Mexican food is upscale, and there are only a couple of places I know of that feature it. One is the El Torito in Shinjuku, and the other is a place whose name I can never remember that my wife picked for a special evening out when we were still just dating. That cost me about ¥20,000, about 5 years ago, as I remember. Tokyo prices suck.
I once ate at a Chinese place in Jerusalem (one delicately asked the waiter to have the dish made with “white meat,” i.e., pork). The most appealing part of the experience was seeing the name of the restaurant spelled out in Hebrew in a bamboo font.
Edit: I confirm the KFC in Ho Chi Minh (“Ga Ran Kentucky”), which I saw in November. However, I heard that because of the avian flu scare, they were only serving fish.
Funny, you should mention Brazil. My parents lived for about seven years in Rio and I didn’t see too many Chinese places while down there. The ones I did see were for tourists mostly. There were a ton of Japanese places, at least two within a two block radius from my parents apartment. I also saw Italian places, French places, a Lebanese Restaurant and a few others while there.
cowgirl writes:
> I ate at a Mexican place in London (England) once and ordered nachos (it was
> the only place in the UK where I had seen them on the menu). As I live in
> Toronto, which (as noted) has something of a dearth of Mexican restaurants,* I
> have quite low standards and expectations in this regard. Yet even I was
> horrified when they arrived: salted corn chips with whole canned tomatoes
> dumped on top.
As has been discussed in other threads, there aren’t many Mexican restaurants in the U.K., they aren’t very good, and they’re somewhat expensive.
Sounds a lot like a Tex-Mex staple, Fajitas. (fah-hee-tahs) Except instead of french fries, you spoon the grilled meat, onions and peppers onto a tortilla and add salsa, sour cream, cheese, or not, as takes your fajita-fancy.
Were the french fries grilled in with the veggies, like stir fried?
Many people in ethnic places like a change as much as you do. The more sophisticated and touristy the place, the more ethnic restaurants.
Big cities are likely to have a KFC, Pizza Hut, TGIFs, etc. You might consider this ethnic food. Chinese restaurants seem to be ubiquitous.
I’ve been to almost fifty countries and almost all have ethnic restaurants – many of which are very mediocre. I worked in India as a student, and loved the food but never did get used to the spicy breakfasts. Indians spice up everything which makes the Chinese food interesting, as said. Japanese restaurants are popular in Peru; good Italian restaurants everywhere in Argentina; the Chinese like their fast food; even Havana has its Pizza Nova.
One thing about Spanish “general” restaurants is that they’re likely to absorb easy dishes from other cuisines. Of course we absorbed Italian so long ago and so deeply that going to an Italian Restaurant in Spain basically means “today I just feel like pasta”, but I’ve seen daily menu places offering goulash, curry…
Yep.
Certainly different places exist (and I did note the prevalence of Indian and Italian), and by American/Canadian standards they are pretty close together. But by Japanese standards, non-Japanese food is really pretty few and far between.
For every one India restuarant, there’s a whole street of izakaya and tsushiyakiya. Not to mention ramen, yakiniku, okonomiyaki, sushi, gyudon, kare-, and various other Japanese foods restaurants. Having two italian restuarants within walking distance of each other still means that they are outnumbered by izakaya, 20 to 2.
Gladly. 
The only good thai-type food I know is a place in Shibuya that, according to my brother, is an American chain… I would love to find some good places.