I’ve never heard of Chicken Maryland, but the description prompts me to include chicken-fried steak in the “nowhere to everywhere” food list. I am sure it’s always existed as a regional specialty, but now it’s ubiquitous.
Yogurt as a common snack.
Fajitas.
Sticky toffee pudding.
Went away from the UK in the early nineties, came back for a vacation a few years later, and it was on every single menu ever. (And not without reason…)
ETA:
The first two I’d categorize as Italian rather than Californian; the third, Greek.
Really? It’s pretty ubiquitous in the South, and I assume it would be in the Midwest as well. I’m pretty surprised, if true.
I don’t like it, for what it’s worth.
I suspect, although I can’t be sure, that chicken-fried steak has become more common outside the South recently:
There’s the whole deep-fried movement. There was deep-fried food when I was a kid but it was just a handful of items: french fries, battered chicken, battered fish, battered onion rings. Now we have meats being directly cooked in hot oil like turkies and chickens and a vast expansion of the foods that are being fried in batter.
Things that have gone out of fashion include what I think of as “cruise ship food” - beef Wellington, baked Alaska, Green Goddess dressing, etc. Which is a shame, because I love Green Goddess dressing.
Anyone who has ever watched a single episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen” knows that (in Ramsay’s kitchens at least) beef Wellington is still alive and well!!! 
Yeah, this is the first one I thought of. It seems like sometime in the late 90s/early 00s chipotle peppers were put into pretty much everything.
Bottled salad dressings in general have a way of coming out of nowhere to be ubiquitous and then vanishing.
I come from a time when chicken nuggets (or fingers or the equivalent) didn’t exist (it looks like McDonald’s introduced them in 1980).
To that list, add chicken a la king. This used to be a fairly ubiquitous restaurant entrée from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. However, it’s nearly impossible to find it now.
When I was a kid in the 50s the only Chinese restaurants were in Chinatown . . . and there was a Chinatown in every decent-sized city.
And when was the last time anyone ordered chow mein or chop suey?
Rice.
When I was a kid, you usually only had it when you went to a Chinese restaurant (although my mom did make a mean rice pudding occasionally, and liked to use up the leftover turkey after Thanksgiving and Christmas by making a curry served over rice, and of course, she did make cabbage rolls), but to have rice was rare at dinnertime – it was usually potatoes.
Now, rice is everywhere. Where before you only saw it in Rice A Roni or Zatarains or things made by Chun King or La Choy, supermarkets are now filled with rice side dishes by a myriad of manufacturers.
To have potatoes with a meal has now become somewhat rare in comparison to how it used to be.
Not any more - last season’s menu didn’t have it!:eek:
Ciabatta bread. I’d never heard of it before 2000. Now, even Jack in the Box is using it.
Other than frozen fries, hash browns, etc., potatoes are labor-intensive to prepare and cook. I only cook them at big meals during holidays, myself. Rice out of a box is comparatively fast and simple to cook, no one has time to peel, boil, and mash potatoes any more. More’s the pity.
I’ll add to the everywhere list baby lettuces/greens. Iceberg lettuce with oil and vinegar was the only salad my mom ever made when I was growing up.
When were you a kid? I’m in my mid-40s (please don’t tell anyone) and I can’t remember a world without rice. Not only was it our side dish at home at least twice a week, it was the fall-back restaurant side (usually in pilaf form) in the days when baked potatoes were only available after 4 p.m.
Most Chinese take-out restaurants around here still have chow mein on the menu. Not sure about chop suey. Someone must be ordering it.
I have never seen chop suey at all ouside of a La Choy can on the supermarket shelf but our local Chinese buffet still sets out “chow mein”.
That’s not saying much because it is in Kansas which is years behind the rest of the country in all trends be they clothing, philosophy or food.