I’m familiar enough with mexican, and to a lesser extent chinese, food to doubt that a lot of us would actually prefer it over the adapted cuisine commonly offered to us.
Take menudo, for example. Or posole.
And it’s pretty common for chinese people to eat fish eyeballs.
Or dinuguan, a filipino dish made of blood.
Would truly authentic ethnic restaraunts likely make it in mainstream America?
Peace,
mangeorge
It depends. I bet you could have Canadian…
When I’ve been taken to real Chinese restaurants, I’ve been the only non-Chinese there. It’s certainly not the food you find at the “Chinese” lunch counters. I think it would be a hard sell to “regular white” folks.
From the little I was able to get my hands on, I like real Balinese food would make it. But even there in Bali, they think (so my tour book says) that Westerners wouldn’t be interested in it. As a result, a tourist can get fabulous French or Italian or Mexican or Aussie Barbeque or Japanese, but it’s really hard to find Balinese food. My husband and I were lucky enough to be brought into the home of a couple who worked at our hotel and their food is amazing! Lots of satay-like things, ground seasoned meat on sticks and rice and noodle dishes and a gazillion sauces and powders and things to put on your food. They apparently consider food as it comes from the kitchen only half-prepared. The rest of the preparation is customized at the table, with the vast array of condiments available. Only babies, I was told, eat their food “plain”.
The only thing, culturally, that I found strange about Balinese cooking is the eating part - families don’t eat together. Mom and Aunties make the food and leave it in a few bowls in the kitchen, and whenever you’re hungry, you go get some. The exception, of course, is a Temple festival, when you make extra special holiday food and take it to Temple to be blessed and then back home for a feast. Then they do eat together, it seems.
They had an amazing desert thing called bogas. Freshly grated red coconut, date sugar and rice paste steamed in banana leaves. Oh I wish I could have that again!
The problem with “real” Chinese food is not that Westerners would find it superficially disgusting - much of it is perfectly mainstream in terms of content - but rather that it’s quite labor-intensive to prepare. It would therefore be unsuited to your general lunch takeout place, and so wouldn’t be that appreciated anyway.
What’s wrong with menudo? I have some in the cupboard right now. I should have it for breakfast, but I think I’m in the mood for pancakes today and I’m out of cilantro anyway. Anyway, menudo is very tasty.
I like seeing “authentic” dishes on a menu…it generally tells me that the place is serious about their food. But I generally won’t eat it. Menudo isn’t fit for the cats, much less as human food, for example. But you really can’t generalize that way about most cuisines. Normal, eat it every day, lower middle class French food bears very little resemblance to what you get served at Lutèce.
This issue is complicated by definition. Tex-Mex and even California-Mex are often criticized by not being authentic Mexican food even though both were parts of Mexico and are legitimate regional variations on what is authentic Mexican food. Likewise, much of what we consider to be Italian food including what we think of as pizza was invented in the U.S. The Olive Garden actually has as much claim to authentic Italian food as anywhere in Italy. I read recently that authentic ethnic cuisine usually goes back at a max of 50 years. Most supposedly authentic European disses are based on New World ingredients that gained steam since the transoceanic voyages are are often much more recent than that. There is usually no marker for what is ethnic nor regional so the definition becomes somewhat blurred. My home state of Louisiana has at least two unique world-class cuisines. However, most of it is mainstream and favorable to most. You can find odd and shocking things but that doesn’t mean it is what people eat very often at all.
Nothing is wrong with menudo. I like it a lot.
But many northern diners aren’t ready for tripe (or calf’s foot, in some recipes). Or hominy, for that matter. Posole is also made with hominy and pork. Sometimes the pork is a joint with a lot of fat and little lean. Takes a little getting used to.
Are there any good mexican restaraunts where you live? I bet you miss that about L.A. 
I should have read this before I replied to Johnny’s post. It’s an excellent example of my point about “not ready”. 
I’ve had some experience with french middle class home cooking. Generally, Julia Child was pretty close. Good stuff.
Menudo I understand–it’s tripe. I love it–grew up with the Polish version of tripe stew. But it’s easy to see why most folks might get squicked out by it. Posole, on the other, I don’t understand as an example in the OP. What’s to get used to with hominy? Grits anyone?
And to address a related point of the OP, I don’t think America is particularly special in this regard. Most countries I’ve been to, the ethnic cuisine has been calibrated to suit the local palate and local ingredients. I rather seem to think that the average American is actually somewhat more adventurous with their food than the average “ethnic.” And I’m not sure what you mean by whether any truly ethnic restaurants will make it in mainstream America–I think plenty already have. You can be plenty authentic without serving offal and odd ingredients if you want to.
Only if you mean “not ready” as a synonym for “wouldn’t eat that crap for love or money.” 
There are hundreds of different cuisines in the world. Is it required that we in this country eat something that others eat? If so, then I demand that every French chef start eating at Burger King. Just because other people eat it is no reason we should, or should want to. The reason the Chinese can make a dish out of pig’s bristles is because some rich bugger has nicked the pig. Over here, I’ll eat ribs and be happy.
Actually, I’m not critiquing the dishes. I’ll eat, and enjoy, most anything from spam through barbeque to mussels.
I hear people bemoaning the lack of authenticity of ethnic restaraunts. I wonder how many would indeed eat truly authentic dishes if offered.
“Authentic”, IMO, doesn’t neccessarily mean old or traditional. A quarter pounder with cheese is authentic. :dubious:
It is! Honest!
pulykamell, if you’re ever in San Pablo, California go to “La Fortuna” and order pozole. No nice familiar chunks of pork there. You get a large hunk of bone with a lot of fat on it and some meat. An aquired taste for sure. Good stuff.
Oh, don’t worry–there’s plenty of fatty pork in our pozole here (like menudo, served only on weekends, of course). I guess you can be right–I take fatty meat for granted, but that’s my midwestern and Eastern European roots talking. I guess most American consumers probably believe that leaner=better. For me, fat = flavor. But the pozole runs the gamut. Some have very fatty pieces of pork with barely any meat, others have fatty, but meaty pork (at any rate, I’ve never seen a pozole with lean pork).
WhyNot writes:
> From the little I was able to get my hands on, I like real Balinese food would
> make it. But even there in Bali, they think (so my tour book says) that
> Westerners wouldn’t be interested in it. As a result, a tourist can get fabulous
> French or Italian or Mexican or Aussie Barbeque or Japanese, but it’s really hard
> to find Balinese food. My husband and I were lucky enough to be brought into
> the home of a couple who worked at our hotel and their food is amazing! Lots
> of satay-like things, ground seasoned meat on sticks and rice and noodle
> dishes and a gazillion sauces and powders and things to put on your food. They
> apparently consider food as it comes from the kitchen only half-prepared. The
> rest of the preparation is customized at the table, with the vast array of
> condiments available. Only babies, I was told, eat their food “plain”.
I’ve eaten at Indonesian restaurants in the U.S. that served food that seemed to be quite close to what you describe as authentic Balinese food. I think that in general people exaggerate how difficult it is to get authentic ethnic food in the U.S. Maybe in some places it’s hard to find, but other places it’s not that difficult.
Good? Eh. Nothing spectacular, but there are a couple that are average by L.A. standards I guess. Before I moved south and came back there was a catering truck that was run by a Honduran woman that had pretty good burritos. I should run by to see if she’s still there.
There are a couple ‘okay’ Vietnamese places, but I miss Little Saigon (the Vietnamese community in Garden Grove). There’s actually a Thai place about a third of a mile from me in my little beach community. Not as good as the Thai take-out that I used to order stuff from, and it’s at least 50% more expensive. But I’ll take what I can get. Even if they don’t have beef satay.
I can live with the Mexican food they have here. For Asian or Indian I can always go to Vancouver. I asked a friend how I’d know which were the good Asian restaurants in Vancouver. He said, ‘Any of them.’
Within 15 minutes of my apartment, I can get menudo or goat stew or tacos made with pig cheek or tongue or tripas at multiple taquerias, or pho with tripe and tendon or jellyfish salad at Vietnamese restaurants. There is a Thai buffet frequently featuring such yummy dishes as fried fish heads, whole small fried miscellaneous fish, and pigs feet simmered in a sour sauce (and damn is that last one good). I recently learned of another Thai restaurant near me that specializes in authentic Thai cuisine, and one of their signature dishes is raw sausage with chilis, and I intend to visit it next week to try it.
(Four hours till Pascha, and typing all this up is making me hungry…)
All of these places are frequented by non-ethnic types. So the answer to your question is yes, at least in this part of Houston.
Can I ask what they serve at “Chinese” lunch counters?
(honestly curious-- in my neck of the woods they serve the same food in the office-park-takout places as the no-english-no-menu dim sum you have to enter through the kitchen.)
That’s a loaded question. From the title, I would have answered “yes” but reading the OP, and understanding how you meant “authentic,” I would say “maybe, maybe not.”
The thing is, just because a dish is “authentic” doesn’t mean everyone eats it. Take gravy. In the South (where I live currently, and where I grew up) gravy is generally offered with everything. It would be considered an “authentic” Southern food. I don’t eat the stuff. Can’t stand it. My family (that’s 2 brothers, 1 sister who all grew up in the South, my father who was exceedingly Southern and a very Northern mother) won’t eat it either. None of us eat chitterlings (chitlins for you non-Southerners) either. No one in my family ever really ate much “authentic Southern” food.
I would wager that not all Mexicans like Menudo or Posole. I would wager that there is a reason our local Mexican joint (run by real Mexican immigrants) offer Menudo off-menu, but don’t sell much of it. The owner mentioned once that he keeps Menudo available for his uncle and a couple of his uncle’s friends. Otherwise, he doesn’t know anyone who eats it.
I’ve had goat stew, many years ago. I’m not talking kid goat here, but nanny goat that’s gotten too old to milk. :eek:
I can get really good tacos de lengua around here. And fish tacos, which you can get into an arguement over as to whether or not they ever existed in Mexico.
I have yet to sample any Thai food. I need a dining partner who knows her way around the menu. 
I have had many versions of pho. Mmmm.
Conversely, just because a dish is “authentic” doesn’t mean Americans won’t gobble it up like candy. At the Thai buffet I mentioned earlier, the kanom krok is certainly authentic, and it’s one of the things that every damn person who comes to that buffet eats. They have a guy whose job is essentially to stand behind the buffet and continuously make a never-ending supply of the little things.