Mid 1970’s while in high school, we had a school trip to Pierre SD (the state capital) and ended up at this quite exotic place “Pizza Hut”. I had never had non-frozen pizza, and I wasn’t about to try it, so I ordered spaghetti. Even that was very spicy to my farm-boy tastes.
It took me several tries to actually order something at a “Taco John’s” that wasn’t just nacho chips and cheese.
So the talk of sushi and Thai and curry - to me those would NOT be modestly exotic (and types of food I still try to avoid).
Sushi is the memorable one for me, in 2001. I remember the date because my daughter was three and LOVED sushi (still does) - and could handle chopsticks better than a knife and fork. Although I’ve been to some posh Japanese restaurants since, my favourite is still Yo Sushi, mainly because of the conveyer belt, because I am a child, They also do a lovely pickle salad (kaiso salad) and chocolate mochi for dessert.
Didn’t try Korean till a few years ago, and God it’s good.
Until I was in my twenties, my sole exposure to Asian food was a particularly bland and whitified Cantonese restaurant in a city with maybe 5 Chinese in the population. Then my cousin took me to a Korean place in Anchorage, where I got my first taste of kimchi. Haven’t looked back since.
I grew up in small town West Virginia, so college was my first experience with anything vaguely exotic. Fortunately, there was a large international student community at WVU, so there were lots of ethnic restaurants; Chinese, Lebanese, New Mexican (they got Hatch chilis by the carton and knew how to use them), Cajun/Creole, Filipino. I never looked back, and when I got a job that involved a good deal of travel I continued exploring new foods on the company’s dime.
And solost, you can have my share of the uni. That’s one of a very small set of foods that I never need to try again. Since it is one of the most expensive bites at a sushi restaurant, I’ll save the money and get some toro and natto instead.
This was my experience too. When I was 17 I started working at my cousin’s fancy catering/restaurant establishment. I was exposed to ALL KINDS of foods I’d never heard of or tasted. Many of them I had to learn to prepare! I didn’t really much of an expanded palate to be honest but I learned about stuff like asparagus, creme brulee, wasabi, lobster, etc. None of that really crossed my path prior to working there.
This was my dad’s experience. He grew up in a very white household in the 50s in a very white suburb. There’s a story that one time he was invited to a girl’s birthday party, and she had a crush on him, and she had pizza at her birthday party to impress him. He wasn’t impressed at all and was pretty turned off, declined having pizza and went home.
He and this girl both ended up raising their families in the same Other Suburb and I went to school with her kids. I’d heard the pizza story from him before but I’ve also heard it from her!
I think the first time I ate food that I would have considered “exotic” was sushi, some time in my mid teens. Folks warned me about wasabi, so I tried only a very tiny bit at first. “Hm, is this the sort of thing that takes a while to hit you, but then is super-hot a few minutes later?” No, they assured me, it was all immediate. So I started slathering it on thick.
Of course, “exotic” is relative. My freshman year of college, one of my professors bribed his classes with food to get good evaluations. We had our “final exam” at an Italian restaurant, where one of my classmates (who had lived his entire life on pizza, burgers, and cheesesteaks) decided to be adventurous, and try something he’d never had before. It was spaghetti and meatballs.
Rumaki, around 1970. I was still very young, and I suppose the bacon helped me get past the liver, which I still don’t care for. I ended up liking it a lot and haven’t had it since.
In the mid-70s I had the best-tasting hamburger of my life at a Wendy’s that had just opened. Took my parents there the next week and it wasn’t the same. I think it must have been some choice beef for that opening, along with spices and lots of MSG.
I tasted sesame oil for the first time in the mid-80s at a Korean takeout joint. “Transfixed” is exactly the right word, because as soon as I took that first bite, I just stood there chewing and staring at my food, trying to understand what my tongue was telling me.
Heh, that’s a great scene in Dances with Wolves when the Indian tastes refined sugar for the first time.
What’s funny is that sushi is typically a very subtle dish; there isn’t usually much in the way of intense flavors in a lot of sushi. Sometimes there can be, but a lot is more about the freshness of the fish or the interplay between the ingredients, not about beating you over the head with spices or heat.
Oh, I forgot what probably set me on my exotic eating path! As a little kid- probably from about 3 years old through about 8 or so, our next door neighbors were Filipino. The wife of the family (Winnie) and my mom hit it off, and Winnie told mom that she wanted to learn how to make classic American dishes. Mom agreed to teach her, but also wanted to learn how to make Filipino dishes. So they’d trade off in each other’s kitchens a time or two a week. So I grew up eating some Filipino dishes as a kid and never really thought anything about it. So much so, that I just assumed my mother knew how to cook egg rolls, without realizing until much later that I was actually eating lumpia, not Chinese-style egg rolls.
Sushi is the memorable one for me, in 2001. I remember the date because my daughter was three and LOVED sushi (still does) - and could handle chopsticks better than a knife and fork. Although I’ve been to some posh Japanese restaurants since, my favourite is still Yo Sushi, mainly because of the conveyer belt, because I am a child, They also do a lovely pickle salad (kaiso salad) and chocolate mochi for dessert.
Didn’t try Korean till a few years ago, and God it’s good.
I never had Kimchi until I was about 30 years old, perhaps 31. There are books upon books just about cooking with Kimchi. Kimchi fried rice is an amazing dish and everyone should have it.
I grew up in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb. When my pale white family dined out, mild gringo “Mexican” was the most exotic option, followed by smorgasbord. Exotic Asian at home was Chun King. But back then, Velveeta “cheese” was in a supermarket’s Gourmet section and McIlhenny tabasco was the hottest sauce to be found. Curry? What’s that?
I lived in the Congo when I was ten, and the guy who cleaned for us and cooked the big midday meal made a mean crepes suzettes. This was 1962. We also went over the Congo river to Brazzaville, in the former French Congo, and ate in a Vietnamese restaurant. I don’t remember what I had but my mother had a salad which was a terrible mistake, since it was washed in tap water and tap water was not something you let in your mouth.
Since then I’ve had plenty of exotic food, ostrich, emu, alligator, rattlesnake, and pig stomach. (Stomach of a pig stuffed with potatoes and pork. Mennonite thing. )
Loved them all.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so “exotic” food was always available to me. Except, I was an epic “picky” eater - cheese pizza, cheesebugers with no condiments, turkey and cheddar sandwiches with mayo and nothing else. That sort of thing. I started getting better in college, but the real watershed for me was when my parents paid for a trip to London for week as a graduation present. The flat I rented out was right next to an Indian restaurant, which was way too weird for me to try. Except… the “normal” food I was willing to try was friggin’ awful. Dry, overcooked, bland - pretty much every stereotype about British cooking. After three days, desperate, I decided to try that Indian place, because worst case, I throw away most of it like I’d done almost every other meal I’d had there. I ended up eating there almost every meal for the rest of the trip. It was just stuff like mild chicken tikka, and other aggressively westernized dishes, but it was like a revelation from God to me when I was in my early 20s.
My brother and I toured Greece with my parents and saw the octopus hanging from storefronts in Piraeus. The guide told us they were drying them to grill them. So we ordered grilled octo. Wonderful. I won’t eat it any more, but it was treat.