Around here, there’s a popular place called Aladdin’s. The family that owns it is Lebanese, and that’s where they got their recipes from, but they bill themselves as “Mediterranean cuisine”.
It might be partly related to trying to avoid bigotry.
(Wow, I just looked them up, and apparently they’re now up to 30 locations, spread across the Midwest and Southeast. I’d have guessed maybe three or four, across the Cleveland area)
I disagree. American cuisine as it is known around the world - hamburger joints, steakhouses, American-style diners, delis - is distinctly American and has very little in common with English and German food.
In an American town with a population around 100,000, I would be surprised not to find Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, American, and Mexican, so I voted for them. OTOH, in Chicago I can think of restaurants for 30 of the listed cuisines just off the top of my head. I would assume this is true of any city of comparable size in the world, but maybe I’m wrong.
I’d be shocked if there’s anything you can’t find in Chicago. Not only is it a very large city, but it’s also one that prides itself on its multiculturalness.
But I’m not sure that’s the most useful benchmark for comparison.
That’s how I read the OP’s question, at least as applied within the USA.
Those 8 are the “core” of cuisines in a US generic small city / very large town. And I’d probably asterisk Thai as the newcomer / most likely to be absent.
I could easily believe that across similar third-tier cities in e.g. Germany they’d think of Thai as non-core and e.g. Polish as core.
Yeah. I used Lebanese as the place holder there.
Remember the original Japanese version of Iron Chef? There were only three kinds of cusine; Japanese, Chinese, and French.
I’ve lifted the expression from the other thread. I took it to mean something like ‘a set of cuisines that you’re likely to find in pretty much any decent-sized city all over the world’, but I may have misunderstood. On reading, what @SanVito wrote.
Yes. For some reason, I often see Vietnamese-Thai restaurants here and I have no idea why. The cuisines are quite different, and even the cultures and languages have little in common.
In Northwestern Europe, North African would replace Mexican, which is not that popular here as far as I can tell. The others would be the same, but with the Thai-Vietnamese combo I mentioned above as a slight tweak.
I am slightly disgruntled that my own home country, Zimbabwe, did not make it on the list. After all, we are responsible for the global trend of over-boiled corn starch, the home-grown cuisine of fire-roasted whole field mice, dried termites, chicken feet, flying ants and more.
Plus we both multiply and apply for visas, making the culinary diaspora bigger and bigger.
(global trend may be a bit of an over-exaggeration)
I think the widespread appearance of Thai restaurants across the West is thanks to their booming tourist industry - many Europeans have languished on their beaches for a couple of decades and more. I would easily expect to find as many or more Thai restaurants in a German city as Polish. In the UK Thai restaurants are more common than Mexican.
Most probably. I live in Western Germany and have never seen a Polish restaurant, while Thai is quite common, at least in bigger cities. I’m sure there are some Polish places in Eastern Germany, definitely in Berlin, but I suspect they’re rare because Polish and German cuisine are quite similar and there’s not much novelty in eating Polish for a German.
Thanks folks. It seems my Polish was an ill-chosen WAG of an example. My idea was more that some long-established nearby but still materially different cuisine, probably Slavic, would substitute for something newer & more distant.
To me personally, Thai still feels exotic and recently imported while nearly all the other cuisines I encounter in big city USA have been US-assimilated since I was a kid. In truth, Thai has been big in much of the USA for 30-40 years now. But it still feels new … to me. So that was the one I chose to drop in my example.
@SanVito raises an interesting point I had not considered. Namely that interest in non-local cuisines is raised by tourism to the places the cuisine is local, rather than being promoted by immigrants from the places the cuisine is local. So more demand pull than supply push. And, like the Vietnamese-Thai combo, if there aren’t enough immigrants from a particular cuisine area (yet), folks from culinarily-adjacent areas will learn to fake it well enough to satisfy the demand.
Totally. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had more Thai restaurants in the UK than Thai people. Influential people visit a place, bring back a trend and hey presto, we’re all eating green curry. A relatively modern thing given the increase in foreign tourism since the 80s I guess.
In my (admittedly somewhat provincial) experience of pan-Asian restaurants in my area, either none of the choices are very good, or the restaurant may specialize say, in Japanese or Chinese cuisine, but have mediocre Thai dishes on the menu. Or a Thai place that also serves mediocre pho.
And this is probably obvious to most, but I’ve had to learn from unfortunate experience, only get sushi from a sushi restaurant– never from a Thai or Chinese place that’s like “oh yeah, we have sushi too”.
The frustrating thing about Japanese restaurants is the difficulty of finding ones that are owned and operated by Japanese (-Americans). Here in the Detroit area, I’m aware of two good Japanese restaurants (Sharaku and Ajishin). There used to be others, but as the owners retired or died, those restaurants closed down or got bought by non-Japanese owners who lowered the quality.
Huh, Sharaku is just a few miles away from me-- I know the strip mall it’s in and have driven past the place a million times, but for whatever reason, it’s never been on my radar. Maybe because it’s an unassuming looking place in a strip mall (not that a strip mall restaurant can’t be outstanding). There’s even an Asian market in the same strip mall I’ve shopped in many times, that Sharaku probably also gets supplies from (if not also owns the market). I’ll have to try this place, thanks for the tip!
I voted for Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Lebanese (as the placeholder for Eastern Mediterranean), and Mexican. I’m surprised Vietnamese isn’t on more of the lists, although maybe it’s my skewed perception since the Corpus Christi area (especially in Rockport, where the family of Dallas Cowboys star Dat Nguyen runs an excellent Vietnamese restaurant) probably has a larger Vietnamese-American population per capita than a lot other medium sized cities. The joke here in Corpus is that we have a taqueria on every other corner. If that were true, by comparison we seemingly have a Vietnamese place on every fourth corner.
I’m probably not remembering it correctly, but I thought there was an Italian Iron Chef as well, at least at first. Then he retired and for a time there was only Japanese, Chinese, and French, with Italian eventually making a comeback.
Why is that frustrating? Here in Corpus Christi, we have one Japanese restaurant owned and operated Japanese-Americans. It is authentic. They haven’t tried to modify their food for American tastes. But the food is terrible, with the most prominent example being that their entire selection of sushi tastes the same, wasabi flavored, because of the insanely large amounts of wasabi they use. Which isn’t to say that I don’t like Japanese food. I quite enjoy it, and have eaten good Japanese food both in Japan and at Japanese restaurants (run by people who aren’t Japanese-Americans) here in the US, where the cook is likely Chinese, Vietnamese, or Mexican American but still does a great job.
IIRC Wal*Mart sells sushi. Just sayin’
Grocery store sushi is different yet. I don’t know about Wal-Mart sushi, but I’ve gotten grocery store sushi from our local Kroger on a few occasions. They have a sushi station where they make it fresh, the turnover is good, and it’s perfectly…fine. But there’s something about it that does not measure up to a really good sushi place, where the sushi is sublime.
The specific incident I’m referring to above is our favorite Thai place, where they had a sushi station years ago, and I tried it, and then it was really good. But they discontinued it until recently, where they got what they called a ‘pop-up sushi stand’. Since I had a good experience before, I tried the sushi again. The sushi rice was dried out and almost crunchy, and the fish was, not off exactly, but maybe hours away from being off. It did not taste right, and I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t get sick, but it was a nasty experience. Clearly they did not have the kind of turnover you want from the place you get sushi from.
Hell, there are definitely more sushi restaurants in Tel Aviv than there are Japanese people. But so what? Anybody can learn how to make any food. People like to romanticize it, talk about their culture and their roots, but really, It’s just a skill like any other. The Japanese themselves know this better than anyone.