This has been on my mind for a couple of days, possible arising with this thread. I grew up in a small, remote northern English town; the family was unadventurous, foodwise, and there were many, many “exotic” foods that I didn’t get to try until I went to college, a naïve northern teenager. Many of these foods were really not that exotic at all – although to 18 year old me they seemed to be. And that’s what this thread is about – the modestly exotic. I have quite a portfolio of these experiences, but I’ll start with just one.
I’m thinking back to student days, the nineteen seventies, and the time when a new burger place opened up not far from our hall of residence. It was a little bit more upmarket than the average joint, and one day I got up the courage to try a burger which was dressed with something I had never even heard of – but which sounded incredibly exotic – Thousand Island Dressing. Wow! What an experience - tangy and alluring and so full of unfamiliar flavors. I felt affronted that something so delicious had been kept secret from me for so long.
With time I got over it. It’s just a dressing, y’know?
So – good or bad – tell me about your first experience of a (modestly) exotic food. What have you got?
I think I was about 13 when Thai restaurants started opening up in our neighborhood. Eating Thai was “the cool thing to do”. A guy friend of mine who was part of The Cool Crowd ate their a lot and asked me to go one day. I was petrified that there wasn’t going to be a thing on the menu I would want. Silly me; it wasn’t that much different than Chinese (as far as some kind of meat in some kind of spicy sauce). I’ve been hooked ever since.
Treppenwitz, there weren’t any curry restaurants where you grew up?
When I was 20 or 21 I dated a girl of Chinese ethnicity whose father was a chef, and she was very knowledgeable of all types of Asian cuisine. She introduced me to sushi- not just the styles, but the etiquette of how to eat it, use the pickled ginger as a palate cleanser, etc. When I was a kid I thought the idea of eating raw fish was disgusting, but I discovered I LOVED sushi. Even stuff that scares off some people, like uni (sea urchin). To this day sushi (not that exotic now that you can pick it up to go at Kroger) is one of my favorite foods.
She also introduced me to a restaurant that served authentic dim sum, and I was all ready to try the chicken feet, but they were out that day. :mad:
You jest, surely? Into my mid-twenties, at least, the closest Indian restaurant was nearly 40 miles away in the Big City (Carlisle). In Workington, my home town, there was one Chinese takeaway which was staffed almost entirely by (white) locals and which made its money selling fish and chips. The only “foreign” food establishment I can think of was Tognarelli’s ice cream shop - I assume that family’s arrival was associated with one of the Italian diasporas - which was always pronounced with a hard G (Tog Na Relly’s) or shortened to Toggy’s.
Back in the early nineties, some college friends were visiting me and convinced me to try an Indian restaurant. That won’t sound all that exotic to an Englishman, but back then the South Asian population in Atlanta was much smaller, and Indian restaurants, while not unknown, weren’t common.
I was a spice wimp, and afraid that I’d end up searing off my tastebuds with a curry or a vindaloo. The lamb pasanda sounded safe, with plenty of naan on the side. I hesitantly took my first bite, and…
Oh. Oohh! Ohhhh!
Nowadays, I’ll happily gorge myself on as much Indian food as I can load onto my plate.
Since then, South Asian restaurants have become almost as common in my city as Mexican or Thai restaurants; now we even have subgenres – there are three Indian street food restaurants within 5 miles of my home. I predict that by the time I’m 75, Indian and Thai cuisine will be about as “exotic” as Italian or Mexican food.
Most of my formative years were spend in a small city in the Midwest, where Taco Bell was the most exotic cuisine available. That wasn’t a joke, there really wasn’t much beyond American fast food.
I moved to the Chicago area to go to university. One day I am walking near campus and I see a small eatery called Jim’s CharBroil Grill. Curious, I stroll inside. “Jim” was Gymnakos (or something like that) from Greece, and invites me “Come friend, come try gyros, you will like” So delicious! My mouth waters thinking about it.
I don’t know what counts exactly. I grew up in a big city (Houston) in a pretty cosmopolitan part (SW- Alief area in particular). I grew up eating Mexican/Tex Mex food, Chinese food, Vietnamese food, Americanized Italian food, vaguely Louisiana-esque seafood, barbecue, kolaches, etc… so I don’t really recall the first time I ate any of that stuff, as I was probably a toddler.
Outside of that, it took going to college or even being out of college to try some other stuff like Turkish, Indian, Thai and sushi.
My dad was from your neck of the woods (Maryport) and it was not, by all accounts, a hotbed of ethnic cuisine. He flew the coop pretty early and joined the forces. He was posted in the Malay peninsula as a young man and came back with a love of asian food and an on the rare occasions we did eat out as kids it was at the “eastern bamboo” in Darlington (where he settled on his return). So for me at least my earliest memories of exotic food are also my earliest memories of restaurant food full stop.
It remains in the same family hands, it must be for about 60 years now and is still going strong. My kids were introduced to it whilst still weaning and having eaten all over the world I can honestly say it remains my favourite chinese restaurant. If any of you are in the area I highly recommend you stop by and have the crispy chilli chicken wings with spring onion.
I was in my 20s when I first tried Thai food. I was hanging out at a friend’s place and another buddy arrived with some pad thai. He barely picked at it and I ate the rest. I’d never had anything like it, delicious.
I don’t know what counts exactly. I grew up in a big city (Houston) in a pretty cosmopolitan part (SW- Alief area in particular). I grew up eating Mexican/Tex Mex food, Chinese food, Vietnamese food, Americanized Italian food, vaguely Louisiana-esque seafood, barbecue, kolaches, etc… so I don’t really recall the first time I ate any of that stuff, as I was probably a toddler.
Outside of that, it took going to college or even being out of college to try some other stuff like Turkish, Indian, Thai and sushi, as they weren’t common in our area growing up, and my parents weren’t super adventurous, nor did any of us have a lot of spare cash.
Being raised in a small provincial rural community in the 1960’s I was not exposed to exotic foods. Dining out was rare, and generally “diner” food. So it wasn’t until adulthood that I had tasted real cheese (not velveeta), real fish (not frozen battered), olives, mushrooms, and any number of what might be considered “regular” ingredients.
As for foreign foods, I didn’t really get a taste for those until my mid 20’s. Granted, a lot of these types were not widely available in the 1970’s, that I recall.
I now consider myself a moderately adventurous eater, and living in the big city there are unending options, but push-come-to-shove in reality I’m still fairly conventional in my choices. Although that might be because my mate is not as inclined to respond positively to “Hey, let’s try that new Tibetan place that opened up!”
I grew up in a small town on Long Island, so the food I started with was basic American fare, plus seafood. Chinese food was Chung King Chow Mein. Pizza was Chef Boyardee in a box. Occasionally, we go to the City to try Chinese, but the only thing that appealed to me was spareribs; I was wary after eating Chung King.
I actually tried Chinese after I graduated from college and my girlfriend’s family took me to a decent Chinese restaurant in Albany. I realized that it didn’t have to be limp and overcooked vegetables in bland sauce.
I’ve since become a fan of many different cuisines. I had a policy to order something from the menu I had never tried before (if possible).
Probably moussaka, at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge, England, when I was 21.
I first had haggis around 20 years later, while I was living full time in Russia. IIRC, an acquaintance brought me some from the UK.
Lobster at what I though of at the time as a posh hotel, either in Parkersburg, West Virginia, or Joliet, Illinois; I don’t remember (I was 10 or 11 at the time).
I remember the first time I had creme brulee. I was 20 (just about to turn 21), doing a work abroad exchange between my junior and senior year of college. I found a job at a nice Michelin-starred restaruarant/hotel in Scotland working as a kitchen porter (basically, a kitchen wash-up person who also does some basic food prep and whatnot.) Anyhow, one night there were several leftover ramekins of creme brulee, so one of the chefs offered me one. I had not idea what in the hell it was. He looked a little surprised, but explained it to me as a caramel-covered custard. So I dug in and, holy shit, was I instantly a fan. I’m not a big sweets person, but I fell right in love with creme brulee right then and there. Every time they made it for dessert after that, he’d put an extra one aside for me.
That kitchen was also the first time I had encountered capers. We never used those in my family growing up (in the US), but over there it was common to include them in tartar sauce. So one lunch when they whipped up some fish & chips for the staff, the tartar sauce was a mayo, gherkin, and caper-based concoction which at first, tasted very strange to me, but eventually I grew to enjoy. (And there were other food firsts there, like grouse, Dublin Bay Prawns, various terrines, etc., but those two are the most basic of the bunch.)
I grew up in a smallish town in the South in the 1980s. What counted as “ethnic” food was Americanized Italian or Americanized Chinese food. And come to think of it, it was kind of a big deal that we actually had a Chinese restaurant in our town. If you drove a little farther there was a Mexican/Tex Mex place in a bigger town up the Interstate.
The first food I recall that seemed really exotic was in the fourth grade. The summer before our teacher had attended some workshop in Belize, and so our lessons that year included a lot about the Central American rainforests. As part of that, our teacher brought in a variety of fruits that grow in that region. Stuff like plantains, star fruit/carambola, and mango. Even mango, which isn’t that uncommon, felt exotic to me.
While the vast majority of the students at my school were white, and a handful were black, there was exactly one Indian kid (his parents owned a motel in town). In middle school his parents brought in a sampling of Indian dishes for the class to try, so that was my first experience with Indian food. I think there were probably something like samosas (I remember something stuffed with potatoes and onions). But besides that one small introduction to Indian food, I didn’t eat at an actual Indian restaurant until I was in college.
Being not too far from Charlotte, the area where we lived grew fairly rapidly during the time I lived there, and when I was in high school (mid to late 1990s) some Thai and Japanese restaurants started to open. I remember how it was a really big deal when the first Thai restaurant opened in our area. It got a lengthy write up in the local paper, with descriptions of Thai dishes, how to pronounce them, how to tell the waiter that you don’t want it too spicy…
I was first introduced to pho when I was in grad school circa 2003. Other than that I didn’t really eat any Vietnamese food until moved to California after I graduated. I didn’t even try Korean food at all until I moved to California.