Eh, it works both ways. Those of us who travel have experienced perfectly dreadful “authentic” American, British, Mexican etc. food in other countries. (There are some good examples too, and I have had, for example, both good and bad Mexican food in Thailand.)
If you took a bunch of the glop Thais eat and served it in a restaurant in the US, the restaurant would go out of business before the month was out.
Thailand also has a fairly popular dish called “American fried rice.” It was invented during the Vietnam War by a Thai cook serving the US base in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand. Fried rice with little Vienna sausages and an egg and other stuff thrown in, apparently trying to make the servicemen feel more at home. But that origin has largely been forgotten, and just about all Thais think Americans really do eat that regularly. It’s actually not bad.
Chili peppers are often spelled “chiles.” It’s my preferred spelling, for instance. I personally use “chili” for the Tex-Mex dish, and “chile” for the hot peppers. (And there is also the spelling “chilli” with two els.)
And sometimes the spelling can make a difference, as in chile powder vs chili powder. It’s not a universally accepted distinction, in my experience, so I use “chili powder” for the mix of spices used to flavor Tex-Mex chili, and “powdered chiles” for the pure red pepper powder.
I often find myself reading things aloud to my wife. If I come across a word that will be pronounced “chee-lay,” I’m going to expect it to refer to the country. If someone wants it to be pronounced like “chilly,” they need to spell it in such a way that it can NOT be pronounced “chee-lay.”
No, they don’t, but that’s outside the scope of this thread. (Besides, “chilly” is the common pronunciation for the country in US English, at least, and the first listed in all the dictionaries I checked; and it’s closer to “chill-eh” not “chil-ay” in Spanish. But, anyhow, back to our regularly scheduled thread.)
(Many years back, I was staying at an Israeli hotel that had international-themed dinners. American Food Night featured… some sort of shepherd pie thing).
Y’know, on thinking about it a bit more: There are Chinese foods which are breaded and deep fried, and there are onions in Chinese food, too. With all of the variety of cuisine that you’ll find across China, I’d be kind of surprised if there weren’t anywhere that serves deep-fried breaded onion slices. It’s not a complicated dish.
Oh, and
[Moderating]
Let’s drop the hijack on the spelling and/or pronunciation of South American countries, capsicums, and/or dishes made from them. It’s getting heated, and it’s irrelevant to the topic of the thread.
A somewhat similar blend of cultures can be found in Korean cuisine called budae jjigae, which developed, from my understanding, from using leftover food at American army bases post-Korean War. So it can have stuff like spam, hot dogs, baked beans, etc., whatever proteins can be scavenged up and used in a stew. It is quite tasty. ETA: An, of course, you also have Spam musubi, but that’s Hawaii, so not quite counting as Asia.
Must… not… make obvious joke… even if I am British therefore allowed…
ahem
He might well have a point that Americanised Chinese food isn’t authentic (I dunno- UK Chinese food is different again, from what I can tell), but there’s a way to say that that isn’t just crapping on others.
Like people have said, it’s not as though the people, mostly Chinese immigrants, who opened Chinese restaurants cook the stuff they do because they can’t do authentic Chinese food, it’s because it’s expensive or impractical to get the ingredients or it’s just plain not as popular as the Americanised version.
Calling a whole bunch of other people’s food ‘horseshit’ in an attempt to make his own place sound better just makes him sound like kind of a dick. I doubt he’s tried every single Chinese restaurant in the US, despite lumping them all together, and I also doubt he’d be doing significantly better or more ‘authentic’ food with the same budget and situation most of the people he’s criticising are working with.
Exactly. You make do with the local ingredients and tastes, and you create an extension of your cuisine. I look at Chinese-American and Italian-American foods as regional cuisines propogated by the ethnic diaspora abroad. So, in that sense, I think of them as an “authentic” arm of the source cuisine. So just like you have Sichuan and Hunan and Cantonese regions, I also thing of San Francisco and New York branches of Chinese cuisine, or even one large American region that is heavily influenced by Cantonese food, but modified to local ingredients and tastes.
That said, where I live, there’s plenty of ethnic places where you can get food fairly close to cuisine as eaten in the home country, in addition to more localized variation on the ethnic cuisine.
Seems pretty similar to every other semi-upscale (as in one step above takeout Orange Chicken) Chinese restaurant out there. Also, it has pretty mediocre reviews, but not sure how many of those are just from review bombing after this came out.
I’ve seen Chinese restaurants with a little “American” section: a burger, chicken wings, fries and/or with a kid’s section that has your hot dog and chicken nuggets. But it seemed an afterthought. Still, my Midwestern Chinese restaurant experience is largely limited to the two places near me that do delivery and a handful of other locations.
I did once duck into a dumpy little Chinese food joint in a residential part of Washington DC that also had a full on menu board of pizza, calzones, burgers, fried chicken, etc. I got actual (American) Chinese food which wasn’t especially good. I think that’s less because of the split menu and more because not every dumpy little restaurant is a charming find; often they’re just a dump.
This exactly. And consider Zimmern’s restaurant is blending “Sichuan, Xi’an, and Hong Kong cuisine” which are regions that happen to be about thousand miles apart (well Sichuan from Hong Kong anyway), so how ‘authentic’ is he really getting? Not even getting to the denigration of Chinese folk who own these restaurants who can’t just waste money on hoping the folks in their community will embrace a more authentic East Asian cuisine (it reminds me of that Seinfeld episode when Jerry convinces Babu to make his restaurant Pakistani)
