I remember reading years ago that Bruce Springsteen was pretty much unknown outside of the United States until fairly well into his career. When he finally started catching on in other countries they were able to release a bunch of his albums in short order because he had this back catalog of work that had been released in America over the years.
Another thing I’ve read is that talk shows are pretty much limited to their home countries (although the concept is international). People like David Letterman or Jay Leno or Oprah Winfrey can be major celebrities in their home country and virtually unknown anywhere else. Johnny Carson at the height of his career would vacation in Europe and be able to walk the streets unrecognized.
For that matter, is US-style Chinese food available or well-liked elsewhere? It is my understanding that Moo Goo Gai Pan, Kung Pao Chicken, Crab Rangoons, etc. aren’t eaten in China.
Yeah Country music is huge here. We even have our own local variant called Country & Irish.
You can buy Reese’s Faeces here but it isn’t especially popular. Hershey bars are common enough now too. You can buy Dr. Pepper here and maple syrup. Again, although widely available they’re not especially popular.
Sports are the main divide IMHO. If I turn on ESPN I haven’t a clue what anyone is talking about. It’s a whole different world of sport to what I’m used to.
The one that surprised me is that, apparently, pumpkin pie is pretty unknown outside of the US. Or at least in Europe (and probably Japan–certainly never saw it there.)
I’m not sure how true that is these days. It seems like all the people in Europe these days know Leno and Letterman. I first learned of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog via a Polish guy.
Chinese takeaway and restaurant food is very popular here - probably with a different (and probably also not necessarily authentically Chinese) menu - I only recognise the chicken dish from your short list.
I have never had US-style Chinese food, but I suspect what Australians call “RSL club food” is similar. It’s sold in clubs and in food courts in shopping malls. It’s laden with fat and MSG, and the dishes are as follows:
lemon chicken
beef in black bean sauce
Mongolian lamb
Sweet and sour pork
spring rolls
dim sims (these are bigger than real dim sum, and are FRIED)
As well as the clubs and shopping malls, this stuff survives in a certain type of Chinese restaurant. You are best off going to a country town if you want to find one, though a few hang on in the city. The shopfront will have garish decoration and a name like “PEKING PALACE”. A take-out and delivery menu (where they do most of their business) will be stuck to the window. It will have 345877543 dishes on it. Inside, there will be velvet regency red wallpaper, and 1960s furniture. The large scale Asian immigration of the last thirty years has put this type of restaurant on the endangered list. Now, we have some of the best Chinese and South East Asian food in the world, it’s cheap, fresh, and generally incredible. But if you want the old style "bugger cooking, let’s go down the ‘Chows’ " exprerience, it’s still there to be had if you know where to look.
And as disparaging as I sound, I quite like this stuff when I’m in the mood. It just occupies a different headspace to real Chinese food - which I prefer, but not all the time.
Not just the English-speaking world. I’d say more literature from America is translated to Hebrew than from any other nation, except perhaps Britain. All in all, I’d say at least half, if not two-thirds of all books imported to this country were originally written in English.
As for food, American “diner” food and most regional American cuisines are pretty much unheard of; however, Israel is littered with hundreds of U.S.-style “burger bars” and thousands of Starbucksesque coffeeshops. American culinary influence may be limited, but the parts that catch on REALLY catch on.
Country music is moderately popular in Germany, both in the original and as a German take on it that Americans might not recognize as such e.g. Der wilde, wilde Westen and No No Never
To add to my post above, you know you’ve hit the jackpot if you find a restaurant with an “Australian meals” section at the back of the menu. The staff will be ethnically Chinese, but probably third or fourth generation Australian with broad accents and no Chinese language at all. Some of them are even decendants from the gold rush days. And if you see this on the menu, go for it. They do a fucking brillant T-bone steak.
Oh, I meant to add - Chinese takeaway food in the UK doesn’t come in those cute little waxed card cartons like I keep seeing in the movies - at least, not until recently (and I think perhaps only then, because of the movies) - it typically comes in a foil container like one of these or, more recently, a plastic one like this
McDonalds is so popular in Japan that many Japanese are surprised when they go to the USA that McDonalds is there too. Many Japanese think it is a Japanese invention.
Well, most of the corn (or maize, as we Europeans prefer to call it) which is grown here is in fact grown as animal food, but there are other species of maize grown for human consumption, and they are popular. Personally, I love it, and I don’t know anybody who would shrug it off as “animal food.” Sure, there are people who don’t like it, but I guess this is due to personal taste, not the association you mention.
My first reaction when reading the thread title was sports as well - we know that there is American football and baseball, but the respective leagues here are small and receive little attention; it’s different for hockey and basketball, which do get attention here although not nearly as much as soccer, which we call football.
American literature definitely has an impact here, bot the recent bestsellers (Dan Brown) and classics (e.g. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck).
In terms of architecture, we admire American skyscrapers, but we don’t build them. Even in many large European cities, the tallest building around is likely to be as tall as an ordinary business tower in an American city of mediocre size (I remember reading a thread here some years ago about an American who had read news stories about an accident in Italy’s tallest building in Turin - he wondered why Italy’s tallest building was so short).
I agree. Nobody (in the UK at least) considers that they are going to an “American” restaurant when they go to McDonald’s, BK, KFC, whatever. It’s just going for a burger. If they want an “American-style” meal then there are plenty of more overtly American-themed diner-type restaurants.
Of course, some branches of McD’s and BK make a token effort with the decor, putting up screen prints of the Statue of Liberty or a Route 66 roadsign or something, but they’re not fooling anybody.
We have lots of Chinese restaurants in the UK, thanks to our former ownership of Hong Kong, but I’ve *never *seen a “Chinese fortune cookie”. I get the impression that these are given out routinely with Chinese meals in the US. Am I right in assuming that this is purely a Chinese-American thing and it is not routinely done anywhere else but the US?
