Nobody said Korean yet?
Korean.
There’s an episode of “Law & Order - SVU” where one officer talks about a place called “Hello Dalai”, thinking it’s some kind of strip club, and Olivia’s (Mariska Hargitay) face lights up and says, “I’ve been there.” They all look at her oddly and she replies, “It’s a Tibetan restaurant.”
I can’t imagine that there are a lot of menu options in the extreme highlands. Ditto the South American altiplano, and I can’t imagine that Inuit cuisine is very appetizing to outsiders either.
A lady who used to go to my church also used to live in another building in the apartment complex where I currently reside, and for a while, she had some neighbors who were from Somalia, and she was not sorry to see them leave for quite a few reasons, one of them being the horrific cooking odors coming from their apartment. She never did quite identify some of them.
I have this theory that the British Empire was all about a search for better food. Conquest was secondary.
I went to a Filipino restaurant in suburban DC several years ago, and it was quite terrible. I wasn’t sure if it was Filipino cuisine in general that sucked, or just that one restaurant. Now I know not to bother trying any others.
Really? I’ve sampled little Korean food first-hand; but I received as a present a couple of years ago, a smallish Korean cookbook (including nothing dog-related !): going by which, Korean cuisine struck me as delectable – featuring many things which I greatly like, and none which I strongly dislike. This borne out by the few of such recipes which I’ve myself tried to make. Admittedly, kimchi looks like being an acquired taste.
I’m going to generalize a little and say Asian food–at least in the U.S.
Chinese restaurant food: heavy, greasy, chunks of meat with gristle still attached, gloppy sauce that oozes all over the meat and the soggy vegetables, which inevitably include broccoli and baby corn (shudder).
Thai food: See above, but with about a pound of hot peppers to further unbalance the flavor.
Japanese: Sweet when it should be savory, savory when it should be sweet. Raw fish.
Pho: Slippery noodles in insipid broth with chunks of overcooked meat and the ubiquitous soggy vegetables.
Korean: kim chee. No can do.
The only Asian food I find even remotely palatable is miso soup and sate chicken. Of course, I can’t count how many times people have said, “Well, then, you’ve never had* real* [insert country here] food!” And then I wonder why no one seems able to serve real [country name] food when they came to the U.S. from those very countries.
Ah well, that’s the story of my life, always in the minority.
I just don’t get how people are putting German at the bottom of their lists. Brats, Kraut, Stollen, schnitzel, potato pancakes, bier… the list goes on and on.
I’ve only found one I like in Brooklyn, but it’s really Pan-Asian Fusion cuisine with a classically trained Filipino head chef. And I’ve been to many. Too many. Too too many. As an extra bonus, if a Filipino restaurant has ‘average’ table service, it is head-and-shoulders above its competition.
And the crowning glory…rouladen. YUMMMM!
Speaking as a Dutch Calvinist: There’s a big difference between Dutch American cuisine that you’d often find at a church potluck (ham on buttered buns, orange drink, Jello salad, bland green bean casserole, plain potato chips), and actual Dutch cuisine (stroopwafels, Dutch licorice, oliebollen, erwtensoep, bitterballen, stamppot with sausage).
For me, my least favorite cuisine would be Indian, Japanese and Vietnamese.
In my experience it contained all things Yak with mostly sauteed veggies with rice and not all that bad.
Their abomination is dark tea with yak butter, like drinking hot dirty greasy sea water.
I guess you guys just got the wrong war refugees. I’m currently at a uni that sits smack dab in the middle of Paris’ Chinatown, which is more like Vietnamtown. There’s a working class pho joint like every five meters, and every time I went for some it was awesome. Great value to boot - something like 10 bucks get you enough broth to float a battleship in and enough meat & noodles to build it with.
Personally I can’t really do Indian cuisine, but I wouldn’t call it “the worst”. It certainly is very diverse and flavourful… but it’s guaranteed to give me the nuclear runs every damn time, no matter how mild the dish :o.
Given that people actually need to be able to eat, “fine” is about as low as it gets in cuisine.
Croatian and other Slavic foods seem largely to come down to, “Get pot, throw stuff in. If it ends up not being too funky a mixture, give it a name.” Which is basically the state of the art for medieval times, but the rest of the world has gone beyond that in the last 800 years.
So sure, it’s fine, but why would you ever want Croatian food when you could have Italian or Tunisian or Indian or whatever else?
I’m sure that Haggis and Hunter’s Stew are both, at the end of the day, perfectly edible. But they are at the lowest wrung of cuisine. Anything lower and you’re basically just looking at raw produce.
My family is German, but I’m not fond of the cuisine. It’s mainly because I don’t like red meat or beer, and I’m very partial to fish and green vegetables.
Stollen is fine, though it hurts my ears when Americans (especially food critics) pronounce it like the word “stolen.” It’s a German dish, with a German name, and it’s pronounced “SCHTUL-len.” It rhymes with “sullen” or “McMullen.”
I’m pretty sure you were adopted by a German family then and not genetically from there. You can probably only carry 6 mugs of beer at a time.
Because I actually like it? Believe it or not, I actually seek out Croatian and Serbian places here in Chicago. Grilled chevapi with ajvar, raw onions, and pita is one of my favorite meat dishes. Love the stuff. And lots of great seafood eats in Croatia. Add to that a tipple of slivovica, and I am in heaven.
I don’t know where your idea of “Get a pot, throw stuff in” comes in with Croatian food, or even Slavic food in general. There are some stews in these cuisines, but the bulk of the cuisine is certainly not stews (and the stews there are are delicious, like Hungarian goulash, or Polish Hunter’s Stew.)
Jewish food is Deli…and while I agree there are some scary things (gefilte fish? Gah) deli is also the flag flying over two of the greatest things ever invented: corned beef and pastrami. So no, Jewish is hardly the worst!
You are right, to the extent that there are way too many really terrible restaurants serving really horrible Asian food. But when it’s good, it’s sublime. Dim Sum!!! Yum! (And I agree to the extent that, as I understand it, Chinese as it is eaten by the people of China includes lots of completely revolting ingredients, that makes it pretty horrible in my book… except that when Chinese food is skillfully seasoned and cooked it’s superb, even if what has been so skillfully seasoned and cooked is some horrible guts or body parts or slimy creatures.)
So let me clarify and amend my OP: assume that in each case, the food has been as well prepared as it ever is in the given country. So if in the case of any particular dish or general cuisine their is no preference for, say, very fresh ingredients, then that is part of the assessment. But if that’s just a problem with some restaurants or the lower socio-economic rungs when they approach the recipes, you can’t hold it against the cuisine itself, because every country has loads of terrible cooks and poor people who can’t afford the best ingredients.
Which reminds me of a peeve of mine: most recipes are nearly meaningless if no attention is paid to the quality of the ingredients and the care of preparation, and that is rarely emphasized in written recipes. It’s particularly galling when recipes allow for terrible substitutions like “butter or margarine” - huh? Are you out of your mind? Margarine is a stain on humanity, butter is a gift from the gods. Substituting margarine for butter is going to have a radically negative effect on the finished dish!
I am a huge fan of ground beef, I’d say it’s probably my favorite meat overall. (though of course I adore spare ribs and prime rib and pastrami… it’s just those things are very singular, whereas ground beef has infinite variety, so if I had to choose just one…) But choose crappy ground beef for your recipe and the whole thing is garbage. Whereas top quality ground beef (super fresh, plenty of fat, perfect grind) can elevate a recipe to something really superb.
And preparation steps matter! Especially if recipes are supposed to be geared towards relatively inexperienced cooks (which I am not at all, but I think people who want to learn should get better help from recipes!) then specificity about what you really mean when you say “salute onions” **actually matters! ** Is it best to salute just until soft? Till Golden? Till browned at the edges?
Well, I just hijacked myself…
I’ve heard that haggis is very good. Never had a chance to try it, however.
kind of reminds me of the okayu I had in Japan. rice porridge; utterly tasteless on its own but OK once you added stuff to it.
anyone who puts down Polish/Slavic food hasn’t had a good kiełbasa krajana.
Japanese by far, followed by Scandinavian and Scottish. Every other culture has at least put together a couple of edible dishes, if not a cuisine.