It think it’s an interesting remark ,and I wonder what that core set looks like. I guess it depends on the size the city and its immigrant population to a certain extent.
Still, I’ve always been able to find several Italian and Chinese restaurants, plus a couple of Indian or French restaurants pretty much everywhere I’ve been to.
Then, Vietnamese, Japanese and Thai are very popular too.
Greek, Turkish, Spanish, Mexican, and North African are not too difficult to find.
South American is bit more of a challenge but doable, and so are Indonesian, Iranian, and Lebanese.
In my experience, cuisine from sub-Saharan Africa is often mixed, i.e. restaurants offer a selection of dishes from Senegal to Congo, exept for Ethiopian, which is really it’s own thing.
You can vote for up to 15 cuisines. I’ve tried to cover as much ground as I could with only 50 entries, sorry if your favourite one isn’t there. I have grouped them by country, but of course there can be a lot of variations in a single country (‘Chinese cuisine’ ?), but again I didn’t have enough slots to capture those nuances.
What can confound this kind of exercise a bit is “lumping” – where similar national cuisines are lumped together and marketed as a singular entity.
Locally, there are many restaurants run by Arab families from diverse parts of the Middle East. There are also a few Greek places. Generally, though, all of these restaurants serve a common “Mediterranean” cuisine with considerable overlap. Greek, Israeli, Lebanese, Turkish – and even Morroccan – would generally all be thrown into the same hat.
Similarly with local Indian cuisine – it’s all “Indian”. “Indian” here is typically a core NW Indian cuisine (Punjabi/Kashmiri) with a few representative dishes added on from many of the other varying cuisines of the nations of India and Pakistan.
In the US, I think that the only ones you can reliably find are American, Mexican, Italian, and Chinese. Maybe Thai. I’d love to be able to add Indian to the list, but for the decade+ that I was in Bozeman, it was a common complaint that there were zero Indian restaurants in town (maybe there are some now, but there weren’t then).
Bozeman did (and I think still does) have an excellent Korean place, but I don’t think that’s typical of towns of that size. And there are a lot of others on the list, like most of the other Latin American cuisines, or Polish or Mediterranean, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see in any given town, but would be even less surprised to not see them.
Oh, and “American” cuisine is mostly indistinguishable from “English” or “German”, but I’m assuming that those refer to places that are specifically those ethnicities, not that just happen to match them.
I’m kinda torn - there are soooo many subsects of regional foods under just, say, “Chinese”, “Indian” or even “Mexican” that are so distinctly different from each other.
I’m not sure that using such general groups is even helpful in determining what’s -core-.
All arguments about sub-categories and regional lumping aside, I’m going to say the ubiquitous ones for me are French (you’re always going to find French-style at the fancy end), Italian (pizza and pasta at the very least), Japanese (even if it’s just Americanized sushi), Chinese (again, even if it’s Americanized) Indian (even if it’s Anglicized tikka) and “Ottoman” (Greek, Turkish, something like that - a bit more specific than your “Mediterranean”, @bordelond ) and Mexican (even if it’s TexMex).
I base this on the kind of restaurants we’ve always had in Cape Town even before the end of Apartheid, when the country opened up to more varieties of global cuisine
I’d then say some others are newer additions but ubiquitous now - Thai, Korean, Ethiopian, I’ve found these in every global city I’ve visited that wasn’t named Venice.
There are many variations of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’ cuisine that are very significantly different, but it seems to me that many restaurants around the world serve the same sort of ‘international’ Chinese and Indian dishes, which makes the lumping doable, authenticity be damned, unfortunately.
Interesting.
Where I live, you could perhaps lump Israeli and Lebanese cuisine, but there’s no way you’d find a Greek-Turkish restaurant, and Maghrebi cuisine is distinctive enough to have its own category in my opinion.
Certainly, you wouldn’t be able to find a ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant here, it would be far too vague.
Right, I certainly agree that you’re unlikely to find a Greek-Turkish restaurant in Europe. The politics is far too close and controversial! I was confused by a thread here a few years ago that referenced ‘mediterranean restaurants’ - I couldn’t figure out what such a place would serve - tapas and pasta? Kebabs and tuna nicoise? Turns out it just means ‘eastern’ mediterranean which certainly has a lot of local crossover but politics tends to keep these cuisines apart.
Interesting. I’d say that “Mediterranean” is actually the most common sort of restaurant in Israel. They’re everywhere, and they feature a mixture of Levantine, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian and North African food. There are also plenty of restaurants that specialize in those cuisines, but a regular Mediterranean restaurant will have a little bit of all of them.
When I use “Mediterranean” it’s as a catch-all for those cuisines, not specifically meaning a combination of all those cuisines. Like I’ve never seen Greek and Turkish here in Chicago, either, I don’t think, but I would classify both as “Mediterranean” restaurants. (Though, to be honest, I’d more likely just call a Greek restaurant a Greek restaurant.)
When I hear ‘mediterranean’, it makes me think of a lot more places than those in the east - Spain, the south of France and Italy, for example. Hence the confusion.
That’s why “Ottoman” is probably a better name. All of those Eastern Med countries were part of the Ottoman Empire and were strongly influenced by their cuisine. For example, everyone there eats doner kebab - some of them just call it shawarma or gyros.
Yeah, that’s certainly understandable. I thought of Italy first when someone mentioned a “Meditteraean restaurant”, as the “Meditteranean Diet” includes a lot of stuff from southern Italy, in addition to Greek, Spanish, and southern French. But in terms of describing a cuisine, it usually means, like you said, Eastern Meditteranean, so you may expect some sort of meat on a vertical spit, served in or alongside a flatbread of some type, kebabs, hummus, baba ganoush, dolma, liberal use of olive oil, that sort of thing.
I’m still not entirely sure what a ‘core set of global cuisine’ is, but assuming the meaning is ‘which type of cuisine has influenced the most others’, I chose French. It seems to me that French cooking techniques and terminology have influenced more different styles of cuisines than any other.
Another, possibly even stronger contender, may be Asian cuisine in general, but that blanket designation wasn’t a choice in the poll, being broken down into ‘Japanese’, ‘Chinese’, etc.
I took it to mean what types (nationalities) of restaurants would you expect to find in pretty much any reasonable sized city in the world. French would certainly be there, but possibly not labelled as such, as French is pretty much the basis for much high-end dining. Go to any 5 star hotel, and the main restaurant is probably serving some version of French food (unless you’re in Italy. They’re funny like that).
Same here. It’s fairly easy to know what kinds of restaurants are plentiful in your hometown, or even in your home country, but it’s harder to get a bead on what kinds of restaurants are plentiful in foreign countries.
In Japan, I’ve seen (in addition to Japanese) Thai, Indian, Italian, French, Turkish, German, Vietnamese, Chinese, British, Korean, and probably some others I’m forgetting. I’m sure there are also plenty of types that I haven’t seen, but that suggests they’re likely present in smaller numbers.
I expect I could find those same kinds of restaurants in any reasonably sized city here in the US, too.
British? I might find a pub or three here in Chicago that might have some British grub, but I don’t know of a restaurant. It’s possible there is one, but I wouldn’t expect British food as a default type of cuisine to find in any larger city.
I mostly agree, although IMHO it’s worse (?) than that. The spread of fusion (and most American-Asian food is already damn fusion to appeal to American tastes and use more easily sourced ingredients) means that a lot of places I’ve been do Pan-Asian food - Chinese (predominantly), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai dishes are all on the menu.
The reason I put (?) after the worse, is that some of the places do a good enough job on all of them so that I enjoy the variety. However, there are more that do 1-2 of them well, and the rest are disappointing.
I by no means had enough exposure during my time in Israel to be more than the weakest possible +1, but that was my experience. It also applied to the home-cooked meal my Israeli cousins made for our last day before heading home.
Which made the one time we stopped by a market for American/European Ex-pats all the more jarring and saw all many splendors and horrors of mass-market and specialty food (at quite the price mind you) - got what my aunt wanted, and got out.
Yeah, I assume that’s the point (I haven’t read the thread that this one was spun out of).
My problem is that I’m reasonably well traveled, but I have no idea what the restaurant scene in (say) Warsaw, Sydney or Durban might be (and so on). The results will be determined by the locations and travel habits of the voters; but there’s no way around that, I guess.