Ordering chinese via grub hub or door dash is fun. Around here anyway, the actual menus have a chinese language only section where they put the things like intestines and fish head soup and cow stomach. Ordering online means it’s all in english and you can order the interesting stuff without having an argument. (You won’t like it. But I’d like to try it. Why? You won’t like it. etc.)
“You won’t like it” is code for “we’re afraid you’ll ask for your money back.”
Cuban: there better be a counter. With old guys drinking coffee.
What who tried? Beef tendon doesn’t have toes and scales. (I quite like chicken feet.)
Yes. My rule of thumb was that ethnic families, not tourists, eating there was the sign to look for. Our favorite Japanese restaurant in Jan Jose featured that. The homework-covered table mentioned above is also a good sign.
Or may be features at least one cute waitress. I am reminded of a full page cartoon in Playboy, showing a bunch of hulking truckers holding sandwiches to their mouths looking enthralled…
at a pair of legs on the counter in heels, up to mid-thigh…
looming over an American Gothic couple looking upward, dismayed…
and the counterman saying, “You didn’t think they stopped here to eat this slop, did you?”
My brother is the one who ate what I think he said was beef tendon.
Yeah, beef tendon is a common ingredient in all sorts of Asian cuisines (you’ll see them at Vietnamese and Chinese, for instance, especially in soups. I think pretty much every pho place here offers at least one type of pho with tendon as one of the ingredients). It can be a little odd texturally (it basically turns into a gelatinous mass after long cooking), but I quite enjoy it.
Unless it is a bottle of chili sauce.
Yup, lots of variety, the standard “Indian” restaurant in the USA and the UK does mainly north Indian food, plus rice-based dishes that are typical of further south. As time went by there was a move towards Indian regional, such as Sri Lanka. Also Nepalese, which is basically Indian. But after trekking in Nepal I would not be in a great hurry to go to an *authentic *Nepalese restaurant.Three weeks of tarkari dal baht was enough. That said, I did go to a great Nepalese restaurant in the UK, but the food was more what I know as Indian.
The one I ran into recently was when I went to our local ethiopian/eritrean restaraunt and they were using the “vacation” menu. I couldn’t get ketfo because the owner and his wife (she who is the only maker of ketfo) were on vacation visiting family in Ethiopia
Not any veal, but vitello tonnato. In my experience (Europe) if an Italian offers good vitello tonnato, it will be a good Italian. And most vitello tonnato is good, because, frankly, it is fairly easy to cook. But mediocre Italian restaurants do not even offer vitello tonnato on the menu. No idea why.
For Chinese food: a bottle of soy sauce on the table, not packets. It’s not a sure thing but if they only have packets, the food’s likely lousy. One exception: if the packets are genuine Kimlan soy sauce.
My brother has a very easy-to-please palate spent a number of months in Nepal and said the food was about the worse part of it. To hear him tell it, the main ingredients of the cuisine are blandness, plain white rice & grit.
Another “authentic” is not “good” example.
I remember a Mexican restaurant in the SW that went full tilt on stuff. E.g., they had a cage on a pole out back for preparing carne seca.
But the food was slightly off from average. It was apparently considered a tourist draw thing by the locals.
This might sound a bit off-topic, but there have been a few “Cockney” or similar “we’re just like the locals, really,” establishments in London over the last few years.
They could have got it with it if they actually sold Cockney food alongside some other food. But no, their limit of Cockney was usually fish and chips. No pie and mash (and definitely no liquor), no cockles as a starter or side, no eels, mushy peas made in a weird way. Staff entirely under 30, not very good at serving, and trying very hard to talk in whatever they perceive the local accent to be.
Better to go to a greasy spoon instead.
Is that a Boris Vallejo ? 
How about Nuestra Senora AND San Martin de Tours AND a Blackhawks jersey AND a photo of the owner posing with the Stanley Cup?
I grew up near Omaha’s Little Italy. I don’t know where you ate, but the best Cannoli is at Malara’s
Also: “Try the veal. It’s the finest in the City”
And a waitress with large breasts