Next time you’re over there - ask for your coffee drink “skinny.”
- Peter Wiggen
Several dishes featuring skinless boneless chicken breasts. That’s probably the most popular part of the chicken here.
Baked potatoes with sour cream, cheese, and bacon bits.
Fried fish or chicken patties served on a hamburger bun, with fries.
The next time I went there, I ended up avoiding the Starbucks and getting just black coffee.
How can you go to London and not try the Starbucks?! :dubious:
- Peter Wiggen
I have been to, and I swear I am not making this up, Chang’s American Diner in Nuremberg, Germany. Something must have gotten lost in the translation, though; there was a slice of cucumber (not pickle) on my hamburger.
One dish not mentioned yet, chicken pot pie.
And there was one very interesting thing I learned in Germany. They (and I assume many other countries, too) have divisions and regional specialties just like we’re dividing the U.S. into. I mentioned to someone I was working with that I really liked the typical (to me) German food at some restaurant; things like roast pork shoulder and potato dumplings. He corrected me and said that was particularly Franconian, and other parts of Germany would be completely different. If you can’t put chili, shrimp gumbo and New England clam chowder together at an American restaurant, then you can’t do a restaurant for any one country and do it justice.
Just don’t ask me to explain the sister-city booth from Atlanta at the Christmas Market, with Pop-Tarts and Duncan Hines cake mix.
Ponster, an American restaurant in Paris? That must be a pretty tough sell, even at the best of times.
If the Food TV Network people are to be believed, the pot pie is a very old miner’s lunch in Wales, where they call it a pasty. It doesn’t rhyme with hasty, but it’s like pass tea.
So YOU’RE the one I can blame for our stupid custom of filling the glass with ice. I want a little ice to cool my drink down, not a huge mountain of ice to plant a flag on.
American food? Jello with fruit in it. Sure, it’s disgusting, but I think it’s pretty American.
Also, the sodas come in (in ascending order of size): Large, Jumbo, and “Medium” (Medium, of course, would be a “Medium” sized cup from a US fast food joint 
Also, let’s talk staff attire. I’m not sure what the fashions are in Europe, but let’s say the waitresses all wear slacks or knee-length skirts, white blouses, and big aprons with lots of pockets on them for keeping straws and a notepad and such in. Hair in a bun, with a pencil jammed through it for easy access. Cookstaff wears pants (hopefully), a stained white t-shirt or wifebeater, smokes a cigarette at all times, and wears a golf visor for some unclear reason. He must also be named “Al” and only speak to say “ORDER UP!” or “ALLRIGHTALLRIGHTALLREADY!” in response to the waitress shouting at him. Bonus points if the cook also shouts “ALL MONKEY SLUTS DANCE ON PARAGON’S LAP!”
This, of course, assumes you take the diner approach.
God beats the Baby Jesus every time someone orders one of those dry, tasteless things. I will never know why anyone prefers those to drumsticks.
Oddly, in my travels pancakes, sausage and maple syrup always struck people as strange. The mixture of sweet and savory is off-putting to some.
Of course American Silver Queen corn on the cob is a mystery to many people. A great treat here in Arabia.
This particular item is very frequently commented upon, but I cannot imagine why; Asian food incorporates fruit and honey with meat; African food uses apricots and raisins in otherwise savoury dishes; mediterranean food uses orange/lemon with meats, northern European food has sweet chutneys and relishes with meat and cheese… etc…
I think it’s one of those things like the “tomato is actually a fruit!” - something that only appears remarkable or exceptional when you don’t examine it in any detail.
I’ve just looked at the reipe for a pot pie. It’s not like any pasty that I’ve ever seen (which are common snacks all over the UK, not just in Wales, i.e. Cornish pasties, Lancashire pasties). The point of a pasty was that you could take it down a mine with you as your dinner, so they are folded pastry with the filling in the middle.
Pasties (note: not pasties) are a northern Michigan treat! They’re like empanadas, but with European roots (well, uh, yeah, okay). Pot pies, though, is made in a pot.
And miners who had speant the day digging for tin or coal or whatever, could eat the pasty by holding the think crust-end and eating around it, thus not needing a knife/fork to do the job.
… and there is a variety (or rather genre) of pasty called a tiggy-oggy(SP?) that has meat and potatoes in one half and fruit (usually apple) in the other - dinner and dessert in one package.
Oops; it’s tiddy oggy.
Oggy! Oggy! Oggy !
They’re an UPPER Michigan treat. Northern Michigan, to you non-Michiganders, refers to the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. Yes, “Northern Michigan” is south of the UP, and if you look at a map of the state as a whole, lies in the center of the state.
Back to Pasties, yes, a pasty is very different than a pot pie. Pot pies are meat and vegetables and gravy, almost like a thick stew, backed in a pie shell.
Pasties are steak and potatoes and maybe rutabegas all mixed together, baked free-form in a crust. You can pick 'em up with one hand and eat 'em, no plate required. No gravy, at least not inside. Gravy poured over the outside, however, is quite yummy.
The heathens put ketchup on pasties. But that’s not the correct way to eat them.
(now I want a pasty for lunch…)
I went to an American restaurant in India. They served a variety of veggie-burgers (this is India, remember), a genuine salad bar, and really good paneer “buffalo wings”.
TGIFridays bills itself abroad as “The American Restaurant”.
I think breakfast is really the key. For most meals, a large portion of Americans rarely eat “American food”. But for breakfast we always do. Breakfast (with the exception of grits and biscuits and gravy) cuts across geographic and class boundaries. It’s something that travelers miss desperately abroad. It also neatly sums up America, I think. How do you want your eggs? Hashbrowns or homefries? Toast or muffin? Bacon or sausage? Pancake or waffles? Are you going to smother everything in gravy, hotsauce, ketchup or syrup?
It also works in the drip coffee obsession.
I just remembered that I went to one of those on Connaught Circle in Delhi. All the waiters were dressed as cowboys. It was hilarious. Good pizza though. And I ate at TGI Fridays in Basant Behar, too. That was a peculiar experience - they take their flair seriously - but they had good beer.
There’s a controversy about it here, too (do you put syrup on the sausage, or not?). I have a theory that sweet-and-savory combinations may be a bit of an acquired taste, and a lot of people don’t like the ones they’re not used to.