Wow. Apparently, I am so far out of the loop I didn’t even know there was a loop for me to be out of.
Fat with sweet-salty-garlicky-vinegary-spicy flavorings and an excuse to make juvenile ‘cock chips’ jokes? They’d be fools not to. It’s a junk food match made in heaven.
Yup. Back in the 1970s when I was a kid, we rarely ate out, but occasionally my mom, the queen of bland food, would insist on Chinese food. At that time, depending on where in the country you were, Chinese restaurants still tended to serve unauthentic, Americanized “Chinese” dishes, unless you asked for the “special” menu, which my parents clearly didn’t know about. Which meant, as far as I could see, piles of white rice topped with limp bits of celery, water chestnuts, bean sprouts, and maybe a bit of meat, smothered in sweet & sour sauce. Bleh. I always ended up with a bacon & egg sandwich off the “American” section of the menu because “Chinese” food was vile. I didn’t know there were better options. Yes, I’ve since discovered there are some mighty tasty Chinese dishes out there.
But yeah, as a professional cook I’ve worked in a few places that had WTF items on the menu, going either direction - either too upscale or downscale for the restaurant. I’ve suspected at times that the restaurant changed format at some point, but that there was some elderly regular customer who had been eating there for 40 years who always ate one particular thing, so they left it on the menu for him.
I will say that cooks often don’t like having that one oddball item on the menu. It’s often something that the regular clientele just never orders, so you hardly ever make it and you never get good at making it. So when you get that odd order for it, you find yourself trying to locate the ingredients and hoping you can remember what you did six months ago, the last time somebody ordered it.
I lived in Hawaii for a few years. It took awhile to get used to seeing Saimen on the McDonald’s menu. (I was a poor college student in Hawaii, thus the reason for going to McDonald’s. There weren’t a lot of non-cafeteria restaurants in the town I was in. Especially in my pocket change price range.)
The thing is, while I’ve run into this type of menu before for the reasons you cite, I’ve not done so in midtown Manhattan - this totally stands out to me. Not just because some level of “authenticity” is required to get business amid the huge variety of foods offered in NY, but also because a ton of their business is in the form of delivered food to people eating at their Midtown office desks (1/2 the time I get stuff from them myself) or business meal outings - Midtown Manhattan not being very popular with tourists nor a trendy residential area. Who bothers to get a takeout/delivery menu or to arrange an outing to Marrakesh with chicken salad on whole wheat on their mind? There are plenty of delis you’d go to first for that.
In my hometown in southern CA, there used to be an old-fashioned 50s-style diner, with burgers, fries, shakes, a jukebox that played 50s music, pictures of bobby-soxers and greasers on the walls…along with egg rolls and various other Chinese dishes. Like some of the others mentioned upthread, the owners were Chinese and thought the two would fit together. It was a little weird, but whatever. They didn’t last long, though.
The spouse used to have a “Fluffy Donuts and Chinese Food” in his home town, so I was amused that someone else mentioned “Fluffy Ice Cream and Chinese Food.” What is it about fluffy Chinese food? 
That reminds me of a Brazilian friend of ours whose favourite Brazilian dish is beef Stroganoff.
Personally, I think it’s weird when I go to a Chinese restaurant and one of the dishes they offer is slices of luncheon meat floating in chicken soup. I’ve seen that two or three times, at least.
I think one reason why you sometimes see ordinary American fare in ethnic restaurants like the one you mentioned is because the restaurant-owner may have originally started out serving typical diner food. After a number of years of this, it was decided to retool the restaurant to serve food from the owner’s Middle Eastern homeland. However, it was also decided to keep a few popular American and non-Middle Eastern dishes on the menu as legacy items from the old place.
Incidentally, I looked at Marrakesh’s menu and it seemed to me a more accurate description of the food is Mediterranean rather Middle Eastern or Moroccan because, in addition to Moroccan dishes, it features Greek and Turkish items (but, sadly, no gyros). If that’s the case, that could also explain the presence of the Italian entrées.
(Also, how good is the place? Some of the items on the menu looked tempting.)
I once craved a gyro really badly when on campus and had a limited time frame in which to get one. The first place we found that served them was a chinese/korean place that had all the Kronos gyro posters up, so it seemed legit.
That was a bad choice. Not a “sprint for the toilet” mistake, but not anything I would do again.
You have to remember that a majority of what you see in a Chinese restaurant in America (or a Mexican restaurant or an Italian restaurant) is actually Chinese-American (or Mexican-American or Italian-American) cuisine, which has only a general resemblance to what people eat in China or Mexico or Italy.
When I was a kid in Bozeman, MT, we used to eat frequently at a Chinese restaurant (now long gone, I’m sure) called Wong’s that must have once been a 50’s style diner. It even still had the little tabletop jukeboxes. Well, the last page of the menu did have hamburgers, french fries, etc. Not sure if that was to keep with the diner theme or just there for the person in your party who doesn’t like Chinese food. Even as a kid, I wondered how many hamburgers they sold, and if they were any good.
I live near Jino Pars in Los Angeles- which is a restaurant with both a Persian and Italian menu. Not sure how that came about.
In South L.A. and Compton, it’s very common to see Chinese fast food places that also offer fried chicken.
We have a divey-bar/restaurant type place nearby called Papa Juan’s. The food is pretty good, even if the atmosphere is skeevy. However, while they do have the Mexican food you would expect from a place called Papa Juan’s, they also have a large Italian menu. And yes, it’s split pretty much half and half; in fact, you flip the six-page (or eight, I don’t remember) menu over to switch from the Mexican offerings to the Italian.
And as far as the OP, with a specific out-of-place dish: they serve a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That’s not the out-of-place part, though. It’s part of their On The Lighter Side selection. :eek:
There’s a restaurant in the University of Chicago neighborhood (Hyde Park) called “Rajun Cajun”, which is mostly Indian food, with soul/Southern food favorites like fried chicken, corn muffins, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and peach cobbler thrown in.
Boring options are included on menus because of people like my sister.
When we were kids/young adults, once a year, our folks would treat us to a fancy-pants dinner out in the type of restaurant we couldn’t afford ordinarily. Said sister either got a medium-well steak and baked potatoes or a baked chicken leg and thigh with baked potato. No salad. No veggies. And she’d only take the bread if it was plain white - no seeds, no “weird” grains.
So we were glad the option was available to her - else we’d never have gotten to dine in those nice places.
Last year, my mom took 6 of us on a 12-night cruise. While I won’t pretend that Royal Caribbean offers the epitome of haute cuisine, they did offer a nice variety of all kinds of foods for dinner, the one time of day Mom wanted us all together. We all took advantage of the opportunity to try new and different things - except for my sister. She never got an appetizer, she always ordered a steak, medium-well, and two baked potatoes with butter, and a dish of chocolate ice cream for dessert. Period. Every single night. She’s 58 - she’ll never change. Her loss.
Yep. For example, here’s Alinea’s take on PB&J. Alinea is one of those restaurants that makes the “Top 10 restaurants of the world” type lists (sometimes even making #1, depending on the source.)
That sort of playful humor or challenge to put a haute spin on comfort cuisine or whatever you want to call it is not unusual among that class of restaurant.
There used to be a chain of “British Pub” restaurants locally that served ONE pub dish (fish and chips). The rest of the menu was American style dishes and… Mexican food. The nachos were ok, but the rest of it? Not so much. They are now gone. Won’t miss them either!
I know right? Stupid fucking Merkins are stupid.
From the link.
“A dish created by Grant Achatz, chef at Alinea restaurant in Chicago, USA: single peeled grape coated with peanut butter and wrapped in the thinnest toast wafer.”
And it probably costs $50 and the snobs pay for it because they think they are better than everyone else.
That’s not a pb&j that’s a grape that accidentally got a tiny smidge of pb on it.
I believe Alinea only does prix fixe meals and that the PB&J would end up being one of a dozen or a dozen and a half courses.
It isn’t trying to be a PB&J sandwich. It is trying to convey a PB&J sandwich and also a PB&J sandwich as part of a much larger experience.
This doesn’t really count, because its more of a “mis-translation”. There was a little Japanese food place I used to go to that had an interesting item on the menu. It was simply listed,
Steam Thing
