immigrant & ethnic food cultures, white ppl & appropriation, foodies

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/dining/masters-of-a-cuisine-by-calling-not-roots.html
http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/5367-is-it-fair-for-chefs-to-cook-other-cultures-foods

crossing several live wires here, expecting 1000 new answers by the end of the week

yelp

just gonna paste two otm things before I go to bed:

And so, many cooks quickly determine what seems to be the safest bet: toning down the spice, amping up the sweetness, frying a whole lot more.

A huge part of the reason I opened Baohaus is because everyone thought Momofuku pork buns were the original and it pissed me off. I’d been eating them since I was a kid, I knew they were from Taiwan and no one stuck up for us so I did. If you don’t defend the things that matter to you, no one will.

the nyt article is fairly interesting, the exchange between the two guys is unreadable. there's a whole bunch of shitty things here that are driven by foodie culture and ultimately that's a bigger problem than these chefs.

"Why do Asians like myself care so much about their food culture? It’s all we have to be proud of in this country!"

oh please. tell it to yo-yo ma. tell it to yoko ono. tell it to sonny bono! that guy is wickety wack.

Combining food into tasty things to eat is a human right. So is stealing ideas about what tastes good from other people, who may or may not belong to other cultures. But to complain that others do not combine those foods the way you do, aka the "only correct way", is similar to straights complaining that gay marriage will destroy the institution of marriage. It's bollocks.

yeah, that guy is a dope. people been stealing forever. not just white oppressors. everyone. chinese chefs steal. everyone steals. i don't think you have to respect anything when you cook. cook whatever the hell you want to cook. steal the best and make it better. in your own image. american palates are as dull as dirt - white trad palates - but catering to that has sold a whole lot of egg rolls! its a choice at some point. clock dollars selling mad egg rolls or follow your traditional muse and probably fail.

I recently ate french 'pizza'. It was, as you might expect, altered to reflect french food preferences, and did not resemble traditional Italian pizza very closely at all. NB: it did not contain either squid or squid ink as sometimes happens with japanese 'pizza', nor did it contain canadian bacon and pineapple, as is so popular a choice for american 'pizza'.

i'm not a big fan of greek pizza places. stick to souvlaki! you don't respect the pie!

just kidding. make whatever you want. but i ain't eating it.

if an american dude makes killer pad thai i'm all for it. i've been to some "traditional" "authentic" thai places run by immigrants who used time-honored grandma recipes...that sucked! or were just, you know, nothing to write to thailand about. a good cook is a good cook. hipster american dudes just opened a vietnamese food cart up in brattleboro and i am so there. i've heard good things.

there's a chinese restaurant down the road from me and i kinda hate their chinese food. or what i've gotten from them anyway. bland, not great...you know what's really good at this chinese restaurant? i mean like REALLY good? good enough that my foodie restaurant owner best friend gets it all the time there? their sushi! it's yummy! sweet potato sushi to die for!

I recently ate french 'pizza'. It was, as you might expect, altered to reflect french food preferences, and did not resemble traditional Italian pizza very closely at all.

Did it have a runny fried egg on it? That's a crucial French pizza innovation in my view.

i'm just gonna throw this out there and go to bed but if you're in america and you go around worrying about "food authenticity" you're out of your fucking mind. save some money and travel if you want to eat "authentic" food.

i gotta go to bed cuz now i'm hungry. want sushi...

mmm...east roll. want one.

(Shrimp, egg custard, avocado and fish roe)

i am careful about what i eat b/c i've had ulcers in the recent past and i get an upset stomach very easily. before that started happening, i was more than happy to try super-spicy and hot food (esp. curries) and would still be if such food didn't tie my digestive tract in knots. so if i like watered-down and mild variants of whatever ethnic treat, it's not just b/c i'm a wussy meatloaf-loving American philistine!

I subsist on a diet of ghost peppers and tiger penises

I don't need to speak another language fluently when I eat fluently like that

there are weird "market" factors here too: like there are very few "low end" French food places in the USA afaik (one exception: I've been to a French cafeteria in Columbus, OH). even French-style bakeries in the USA run you $5 a loaf or $3 a croissant, & they're set out as "fancy" places. even "steak frites" seems to mean something fancy! that's just what's expected. similarly, mexican & chinese *mostly* mean low-end dining (yeah yeah Frontera Grill etc but still). indian too.

though I dunno if we're talking "white appropriation" it's a little different b/c immigrant communities in the USA still tend to have "the real shit" (think of Buford Highway joints in the ATL) but they're not so accessible to the "whites" I think we're talking about here.

yeah, that guy is a dope. people been stealing forever. not just white oppressors. everyone. chinese chefs steal. everyone steals. i don't think you have to respect anything when you cook. cook whatever the hell you want to cook. steal the best and make it better. in your own image. american palates are as dull as dirt - white trad palates - but catering to that has sold a whole lot of egg rolls! its a choice at some point. clock dollars selling mad egg rolls or follow your traditional muse and probably fail.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 6, 2012 11:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah after sleeping on it I think it's ultimately about how white ppl are just better at marketing 'authentic versions' of these foods to other white ppl, which just sucks for obvious reasons ya mean

yeah i think if there is an issue, with all this, it's the gulf between someone saying "this is the real shit" & then inattentively not providing a real anything, more than it is a problem with things being reappropriated/refashioned, which can obviously be a cool thing & brought us the fusion cuisine we know and love, cf english mexican food

and just to be clear scott this isn't about just general ethnic food culture in america, but rather how ethnic food culture is marketed at the higher echelons, the concept of 'authenticity' and whatever higher plaudits and monetary benefits that brings in new york. I don't think the answer has to be to go overseas to get 'authentic ethnic food'

and yeah I know everybody is rolling their damn eyes as soon as 'authenticity' is dropped in this conversation but maybe there's a way to reframe the concept and figure out how it's working in the foodie world

i remember there was a lot of controversy when david thompson opened a thai restaurant in bangkok and said that he was bringing the real shit

i think there was even an nyt article about it

hah that reminds me of when I was in beijing and our program coordinator promised to bring us to the 'best roast beijing duck place' in the city and took us to a place in a 5 star hotel where the duck was ... completely similar to every other beijing roast duck place in the city. but I guess this place had gotten 5 stars in lonely planet or something and the waiters would refill your water glass without you asking. and there were individual napkins and actual silverware.

I guess the problem is that when people hear about the 'best [chinese, thai, indian, mexian] place in the city', the authenticity question is implicated? it would be nice that maybe if you were talking about that there was automatically an asterisk that said, in a footnote, the 'best [chinese, thai indian, mexican]-inspired place in the city' so everybody would understand, and wouldn't have to start talking about the little nice old vietnamese lady who makes your banh mi, when you are talking to other people about your banh mi

and there were individual napkins and actual silverware.

Shared napkins at the other places?! "Don't use that corner please."

Oh I meant the napkins you fold and put on your lap and stuff. most places in china don't actually give you any napkins or if they do they're paper thin and come from a box or are actually just toilet rolls

other than mentioning pork buns i can't help but notice the wack dude doesn't mention one of the most famous resellers and reinventors of grandma's peasant food. he also doesn't mention all the people lined up to pay 200+ a head for sushi master cuisine. new york is weird and new york food life is unlike anywhere else in the country but one thing foodies are good at is hyping "traditional" places run by immigrants. that's what i don't get about that guy's argument. for every snobby white hotshot fusion chef in a million dollar restaurant (and this is really the whole thing - the hotshots get big money backing and thus can pay for PR and prime real estate) there are a zillion more humble places to go to where the food is appreciated. even the new york times is pretty good at covering bling bling hotshot places AND the out of the way noodle shop/taco/etc place. they give a lot of ink to those small grandma shops! street food is as beloved as le bernardin in new york. that guy just has an inferiority complex or something.

you might even be able to singlehandedly blame david chang for hipster cuisine! people following their bliss and devoting their lives to the humble yet perfectly perfect cuban sandwich or whatever.

only marginally related but aerosmith has hummus on our rider and we toured with an Israeli dude last year and the first thing he does is take a bite backstage and go "this is not hummus." he then proceeded to annihilate the whole tub of it, all the while saying "this is just shit, you've never even had hummus." over the course of the tour the quest to find a hummus that would satisfy the Israeli keyboardist became a thing, he swears he only knows of one place in all NY that gets it right, but we did find two other places over the course of a spring's work. One was in Columbus, Ohio, and was adjudged absolutely authentic, perfect stuff. The other, a close second, was north of LA in the valley. Go figure.

articles are tl;dr but the worst thing is American hipsters who say "That's not real _________"

That tour story is good. Reminds me of my Lebanese roommate on year in college, whose chef/caterer mother used to send him back with gallons of the most garlicky hummus I had ever imagined could exist.

what are foods that "everyone" (i.e. "white people") agrees are better in their "white" versions than "real" versions?

i.e. at those "Brazilian" steakhouses they advertise in airline magazines do they serve sweetbreads?

articles are tl;dr

past a certain vintage "tl;dr" is a bad look unless it's being deployed for lols imo

If aerosmith happens to tour Cleveland anytime soon I can tell you that the absolute best hummus around is at Nate's on W. 25th (open for lunch only) followed by Tommy's on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. xxxp

gotta go get me some humble kitchen. YELP:

Yum! Humble Kitchen is a new food trailer that's serving Vietnamese sandwiches, soups and salads in the Harmony Lot in downtown Brattleboro. I just went there for lunch and got the Grilled Tofu Banh Mi sandwich, plus a pear/ginger pudding. It's just out there in the parking lot, so I took the food home to eat. The grilled tofu was just right--not too thick, but not overcooked. The shredded daikon and cucumber were fresh and tasty. The sauce was good. The sandwich comes with mayo, but it wasn't overdone. The roll was a good solid sandwich roll. The pear/ginger pudding was a british-style pudding, so more like a really solid, moist cupcake than a cup full of goo. Very tasty.

Assuming these guys succeed in this location, I will be visiting pretty regularly. I recommend that you check it out if you like Vietnamese food. If you're not a vegetarian, don't panic--they have chicken and pork options as well.

Reminds me, I've been meaning to make blackeyed pea hummus, maybe today. Authentic Mississippi blackeyed pea hummus.

i mean come on brattleboro. i think its cool. i love brattleboro.

my favorite story about stuff like this is how fish and chips is exactly the same thing as tempura, one brought to england by sephardic marranos, the other to japan by portuguese jesuits (who may have been conversos?). the whole earth likes a fish fry.

everything kind of moves around and 'globalization' is pretty ancient at this point.

The stars aligned to have me in Brattleboro at lunchtime on Friday, and I had exactly enough cash on hand for the last available pork banh mi of the day ($7 + tip). I can't speak to its authenticity as I've never had banh mi before, but I can say without hyperbole that it was the best damn sandwich I've ever had. It was a lot more food than a woman my age needs, but I ate the whole delicious thing and then skipped dinner.

Look forward to trying their pho, and wish them all success.

or tomatoes! thank you, conquistadores. 'marinara' = 'sailor sauce'

i LOVE when the stars align to have me in brattleboro. cuz it means i'm buying records.

ewww, sailor sauce...

A huge part of the reason I opened Baohaus is because everyone thought Momofuku pork buns were the original and it pissed me off. I’d been eating them since I was a kid, I knew they were from Taiwan and no one stuck up for us so I did. If you don’t defend the things that matter to you, no one will.

An important bit of context is that this is also a guy who started a $15 all-you-can-drink Four Loko deal at one of his restaurants, publishes recaps of Girls, and is generally known as more of a food-world personality than chef.

past a certain vintage "tl;dr" is a bad look unless it's being deployed for lols imo

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:17 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tl;dr

knew that was coming, lol'd anyway

maybe this weekend...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TFFmGIJ7rZE/T7wLkIwai1I/AAAAAAAACfw/I6y7rnzqVOk/s1600/IMAG0210.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EReGgwHPlFQ/T7wLVESBc-I/AAAAAAAACfg/1Te_MkaZe0c/s1600/IMAG0207.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t3fTYx9kWyE/T7wLcxuNAcI/AAAAAAAACfo/cD98AP6uF-s/s1600/IMAG0208.jpg

140 Characters in Search of A Short Attention Span

past the obvious annoyance of publishing your gchat exchange as an article, i don't think anyone in the second one says anything particularly wrong. or even particularly dogmatic: eddie doesn't say whiteppl shouldn't be allowed to make food or even market as they wish, just that it would be nice if the general discourse surrounding these things always framed it with "of course, this is at (x) levels of remove from the real thing, so to call it the best (y) food is kind of silly". it would be nice if.

before that started happening, i was more than happy to try super-spicy and hot food (esp. curries) and would still be if such food didn't tie my digestive tract in knots. so if i like watered-down and mild variants of whatever ethnic treat, it's not just b/c i'm a wussy meatloaf-loving American philistine!

i always kinda forget how chilis (the peppers, not the theme restaurants) didn't arrive in asia until 500 yrs ago or so. for some reason i think of those levels of heat in curries etc as being something that has just about always been a feature of foods in that part of the globe

How do food carts and their increasingly putrid preciousness figure in to all this

when people hate on food carts I'm like "cool, you stay out of the line, if they have good chow that is literally the only thing I give a shit about"

yeah i will admit to liking that food-personality dude's resentful voice in the second piece. he's obviously being hyperbolic all over the place, but he does cover the stuff said upthread about how first generation immigrant food shops are sometimes lackluster and often the classed-up, well-trained chef versions are better, he's just offering an analysis of why that's the case. his resentment does get in the way of the accuracy of his observations sometimes, but i don't think he's saying what some of the people in this thread think he's saying.

that was an xxp to thomp

"oh no I don't like the tattoos on the person serving me this delicious chow & the name of the cart is too cutesy, 4.5 worst new food cart!" fuckin whatever it's a sandwich

yeah, if you look at that food cart and think "putrid preciousness" and not "i could go for a banh mi" you probably have grown to accustomed to your lifestyle and should be exiled to texarcana or rapid city or stoke-on-trent or something

& yeah, i totally agree, i don't understand how a couple of posts hereare any kind of reply to what the guy actually says, rather than a cartoon of a related position someone else may have once held at some point in time

i've never encountered food cart hate. but there aren't a lot in boston, b/c of zoning/weather/licensing, and the ones in seattle/los angeles were pretty old school and benign. i'm under the perception that they exist and are managed and engineered more by hobbyists/starting chefs than wealthy restauranteur types.

also would read his girls recaps tbh

http://thepopchef.blogspot.co.uk/

feel like the GIRLS connection was what was missing from original post that really could take this to clusterfuck summary territory, maybe now if someone argues that he has some kind of illness misrepresented in the drm-iv we can break ilx

other than mentioning pork buns i can't help but notice the wack dude doesn't mention one of the most famous resellers and reinventors of grandma's peasant food. he also doesn't mention all the people lined up to pay 200+ a head for sushi master cuisine. new york is weird and new york food life is unlike anywhere else in the country but one thing foodies are good at is hyping "traditional" places run by immigrants. that's what i don't get about that guy's argument. for every snobby white hotshot fusion chef in a million dollar restaurant (and this is really the whole thing - the hotshots get big money backing and thus can pay for PR and prime real estate) there are a zillion more humble places to go to where the food is appreciated. even the new york times is pretty good at covering bling bling hotshot places AND the out of the way noodle shop/taco/etc place. they give a lot of ink to those small grandma shops! street food is as beloved as le bernardin in new york. that guy just has an inferiority complex or something.

well he's not really angry about the white hotshot fusion chef, he's angry about the white traditional Thai chef who's getting keys to the upper echelon of the world of fine dining that aren't being given to the Thai chefs

he is just mad at white people. i get it; it's made me say some really dumb stuff in my life, probably will continue to. there's something kind of exhilarating about reading it. possibly this is all bad for him and me and we should take care to moderate our tone, but i did enjoy reading it.

maybe i just don't get what the hip-hop chef wants. other than respect for immigrants. which is fine. i respect that. or maybe i just don't get the axe he's grinding. he sounds kinda jealous.

i think the food cart hate like most of the general antipathy towards extremes of foodies culture is due more to the breathless blogging and overhyping of that shit and not so much the thing in itself. like ppl talking how the new korean tacos with a twist down the street are the absolute soaring heights of human cultural achievement and pleasurable experiences

there are a lot of asian fine dining chefs, no?? i mean, yeah, some people might be better at marketing themselves or know the lay of the land better. there are definite advantages to being from here. and obviously benefits to being white/connected/school chums with investment brokers/etc. but asian chefs are also brought here from asia all the time to cook in fancy restaurants. or maybe i'm wrong.

when people hate on food carts I'm like "cool, you stay out of the line, if they have good chow that is literally the only thing I give a shit about"

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:44 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ OTM

Cleveland has really embraced food carts/trucks and we're a lot better off for it. Every Wednesday during the summer they block off part of a downtown side street at lunchtime, bring in a ton of food trucks, have live music, etc. It's awesome.

the empanada resentment wing of the black bloc is going to be turning over food carts during this summer's protests

yeah, it's sort of a weird thing if you live in a place (like madison) where it's just a given that you get lunch at a cart a lot of the time, some of them are yummy, some of them are crappy, but there's no particular cultural value (pos or neg) attached to being the kind of person who patronizes food carts or has opinions about which food carts are better than others.

susanna foo was the talk of the town when i moved to philly years ago. not white. very influential to a lot of people. people forget about these people. they've been here for decades. have more respect for pioneers! they said a chef from Mongolia would never make it in the land of the cheesesteak!

(not to mention a chef opening a restaurant in philly in the 80's that blended french and chinese)

yeah, i think that's one of the realities that that dude's bluster obscures, for sure. and i'm sure you're right that his anger is partly jealousy/wishing he had a higher profile/whatever. i don't know enough about the restaurant business to know if he's right about anything, to be honest, but i found his discussion of the dynamics of the immigrant-owned restaurant + the immigrant community compelling. mostly it is a relief to me when other people sound as resentful as i sometimes sound.

(not to mention a chef opening a restaurant in philly in the 80's that blended french and chinese)

did this person end up independently inventing vietnamese food because that would be kind of amazing

like, the thing he said about food being all chinese-americans have in this country; as you rightly point out, scott, that's not true! but i get how it could feel true! i have heard myself get weirdly culturally nationalistic when indian food gets brought up in conversation and been like, what is this about???

yeah - I think his resentment also stems from being the child of immigrants, ie someone who ought to be better at navigating the whirls and whorls of the restaurant business than his FOB forbears, but is still losing out to the famous white pastry chef who happened to marry into a Mexican family

i get the resentment. and totally understand the immigrant resentment. and feeling left out in a country that just keeps taking your shit and making it seem like a novelty. and, mexico, i am deeply sorry.

there is no real answer to cultural imperialism. just make your food and be true to yourself. that's all you can do. and kill white people.

eat white people

we are talking about a country that made this. and supposedly ate it. some crazy motherfuckers. watch your back.

https://fbcdn_sphotos_c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/s720x720/547553_3701821697805_1511526505_n.jpg

is that a weight watchers recipe card in the sense that those lists of public enemies are CIA playing cards

there's broccoli!

mods pls nsfw this thread

is that pasta? cabbage? lemon rind?

grilled onions, presumably

no, apparently sauerkraut

this one is better:

http://www.greenstardesign.com/blog/barf_dog.jpg

3 slices bacon
½ cup chopped onion
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup
¼ cup milk
3 cups sliced cooked potatoes
1 ½ cups cooked cut green beans
1 pound frankfurters

Heat oven to 350°. Crisply fry bacon slices, crumble and set aside. Drain off excess bacon fat and brown onions in remaining drippings. Stir in soup, milk, potatoes and green beans. Pour into a 1 ½ quart casserole. Cut frankfurters in half, and stand up around the edge of the baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes, top with bacon and serve.

Serves:4
Preparation time: 50 minutes
Approximate calories per serving: 520

I hear white people are trying to sing the blues too. When Muddy Waters was asked whether they could, he supposedly said, "Sure why not, I have a dog that can bark the blues."

if your recipe looks simultaneously like excrement AND genitalia then...

plus the broccoli isn't overcooked enough for that era!

Mayonnaise and cream of mushroom soup are implicated in so much of this shit, thry're like the Bat-signal of shitty American taste trends.

final step: push Frankfurter Volcano into trash, eat marigolds

xxxp

xp
ahem JELLO MOLDS

with marshmallows in case you're feeling especially gelatin-deficient

next dinner party:

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_jyIYP1-t1W0/S9Bq_uIeXnI/AAAAAAAAJZ8/i5or1a2JaSk/vintage-recipe-cards_thumb%5B3%5D.jpg

is there an opportunity to revitalize cream-of-whatsit soup & frankfurt casseroles for cosmopolitan yelpers? maybe a charmingly kitschy bistro called "haute dish" or something?

p sure they're balloon sculptures scott

btw i know tater tots have been reclaimed already, there is a place here that does tater tot poutine

there are those kinda faux diner places that have apple brown betty and tuna casserole "with a modern twist". but nothing as extreme as frankfurter spectacular.

maybe a charmingly kitschy bistro called "haute dish" or something?

there is a restaurant here with that actual name

think of how long people were torturing the humble mashed potato. those potatoes didn't know what hit them.

all the new american places have those kinda throwback/futuristic dishes. i love a fancy mac & cheese. there is some great cheese out there!

there's also a place called "cafeteria" that i am fairly sure serves everything in plastic trays with the multiple compartments. never been there. it's always busy.

a table of itinerant foodies going crazy over a cilantro-infused pineapple jello mold, taking DSLR snaps of the house-made stovetop stuffing crust on their turkey casserole

fronting ground zero

http://www.haute-dish.com/

i would take a gift card; their beer list isn't bad.

haha wow, that actually exists.

would eat

inevitable last frontier will be the place called Le Dumpster. foodie diving behind supermarkets will be the ultimate in locavore sustainability. still think the new yorker article on the "fad" of "foraging" signals endtimes. you can get FOOD right out of the GROUND! who knew?

that belongs on the future foodie trends thread though.

Shit White People Eat

this dude's food is pretty good, even if the atmosphere is a bit much and the decor borders on/crosses the line to bad tase: http://newasiancuisine.com/5179-zak-pelaccio.html

maybe it's cause I grew up on ground beef casseroles bound w/cream of mushroom soup & mayonnaise, but beyond the LOLs those frankfurter dishes don't strike me as more outlandish and/or indigestible than some of the stuff I read about in high-end restaurant reviews

there is nothing left to do but invent entirely new foods, foods incomprehensible to human perception, foods whose very flavors come at the cost of sanity

At The Mushrooms of Madness

haha

even then some foodie would one-up you - "ah the manna from heaven I had in the middle east was better"

there is nothing left to do but invent entirely new foods, foods incomprehensible to human perception, foods whose very flavors come at the cost of sanity

ilx has done this before: dr. strongo's neuvo cuisine.

an appetizer that turns into a dessert as you eat

does the appropriation of eastern european foods work differently than that of Latin American or Asian foods?

besides generally being less yummy

maybe it's cause I grew up on ground beef casseroles bound w/cream of mushroom soup & mayonnaise

Had this at an elementary school potluck last night, it was amazing and I went back for seconds.

there were tater tots in it too, obviously.

hahaha my mom made that tater tots casserole 1000x

does the appropriation of eastern european foods work differently than that of Latin American or Asian foods?

Data point: the hipster Russian dumpling shop here went out of business. Pelmeni were the only menu item and the in-house music was provided by LPs played on a fetishistically displayed wood-cabinet record player. I miss it, actually.

hahaha my mom made that tater tots casserole 1000x

Just trying to say that this kind of food is not somehow far away in time or space; people around this great nation are eating tater tot casserole as we speak. They sell it in the grocery store prepared-food case here right next to the eel sushi and roasted beet salad.

I don't have a horse in the 'authenticity' race, but I do think pan-Asian places are frequently pretty bad. I think they cast too wide a net, as in "we're going to cook you region-specific food, from a region comprised of more than half of the earth's population and containing every conceivable biome and ingredient and also there will be probably be ginger"

this is fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epoIPgQrAyQ

the future is now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh9CdDzfU5g

Note: I love food carts to death, I live about 50 feet from a great lot of them.

I also live in a city also infused with folks convinced they can out-clever and out sub-niche each other, and food carts is a battlefield they have chosen. to paraphrase a local alt-weekly, if they spent as much energy into having regular or even stable opening hours as they did coming up with a gimmick and punny name, not nearly as many of them would fail.

Thus my putrid preciousness comment.

this thread worked out surprisingly well. would eat at haute dish.

in the linked conversation/rant, i thought eddie was OTM with this:

At a certain point, food isn’t an ethnic thing, it’s a class thing.

imo americans cloak their class aspirations in ethnic identity and not just w/food choices

well, we also cloak our class aspirations in class aspirations

there's no class in america, remember

there's no class in america / whoa-oh / everybody live with the elephant bar

from the haute dish page:

Haute Dish is the first local restaurant for the Millennial Generation and it's as important as any we've got

oh hi i want to murder you

http://www.wwd.com/eye/food/tao-downtown-opens-in-the-meatpacking-district-7211530?module=Eye-hero

gross

yeesh

we really just need that picture at the top of the page to draw our conclusions

Scamardella stumbled upon the dish at a restaurant in Hong Kong. After begging the kitchen staff for the recipe, he finally broke them down by bribing them with a round of beers. Although this method wasn’t the norm, the chef was able to procure a trove of recipes, as well as some skilled help. During his travels, Scamardella recruited a handful of chefs from China, Singapore and Japan to move to New York and cook for Tao.

“They are all living in a house in Staten Island now. We brought everybody back,” Scamardella said, chuckling, before underscoring that Tao, which has a Midtown location in New York and one in Las Vegas, “has always been a restaurant first.”
O_O

"...and you know how Jesse was working for Todd there towards the end? That's how we roll with the Staten Island house, except we got a lot of guard dogs too."

Grrrrrrrrrross.

http://bitchmagazine.org/article/craving-the-other

Really good piece

When I go to contemporary Asian restaurants, like Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered 20.21 in Minneapolis and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York City, it seems the entrées are always in the $16–$35 range and the only identifiable person of color in the kitchen is the dishwasher. The menus usually include little blurbs about how the chefs used to backpack in the steaming jungles of the Far East (undoubtedly stuffing all the herbs and spices they could fit into said backpacks along the way, for research purposes), and were so inspired by the smiling faces of the very generous natives—of which there are plenty of tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls, by the way—and the hospitality, oh, the hospitality, that they decided the best way to really crystallize that life-changing experience was to go back home and sterilize the cuisine they experienced by putting some microcilantro on that $20 curry to really make it worthy of the everyday American sophisticate. American chefs like to talk fancy talk about “elevating” or “refining” third-world cuisines, a rhetoric that brings to mind the mission civilisatrice that Europe took on to justify violent takeovers of those same cuisines’ countries of origin. In their publicity materials, Spice Market uses explicitly objectifying language to describe the culture they’re appropriating: “A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?

Also vibed much with descriptions of growing up an immigrant

I wanted the straightforward, prefabricated snacks that I saw on television: Bagel Bites, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets. When my grandmother babysat me, she would make tiny concessions, preparing rice bowls with chopped turkey cold cuts for me while everyone else got caramelized pork. I would make my own Bagel Bites by toasting a normal-size bagel and topping it with Chinese sausage and a dash of Sriracha. My favorite snack was a weird kind of fusion: a slice of nutrient-void Wonder Bread sprinkled with a few dashes of Maggi sauce, an ultraplain proto–banh mi that I came up with while rummaging through my grandmother’s pantry. In our food-centric family, I was the barbarian who demanded twisted simulacra of my grandmother’s masterpieces, perverted so far beyond the pungent, saucy originals that they looked like the national cuisine of a country that didn’t exist.

...

All of this makes the experiences of the immigrant’s Americanized children particularly head scratching. We’re appreciated for our usefulness in giving our foodie friends a window into the off-menu life of our cuisines, but the interest usually stops there. When I tell white Americans about the Maggi-and-margarine sandwiches and cold-cut rice bowls that I used to eat, they tend to wrinkle their noses and wonder aloud why I would reject my grandmother’s incredible, authentic Vietnamese food for such bastardizations. What I don’t tell them is, “It’s because I wanted to be like you.”

Brought back memories of my packed school lunches

We'd go to Pathmark and load up on cold cuts

My dad would make these really thick cold cut sandwiches. About an inch thick of honey ham or w/e and lettuce and white bread and both slices slathered in mayo. The lettuce would be wrinkly and soggy and the bread mushy because the mayo would have permeated everything

Those sandwiches were not made with a love or understanding of American cuisine

Also remember coming home every day and my dad making two hot dogs, boiled, heavy on the ketchup, ate while watching GI Joe and X-men and all the other after-school cartoons

wolfgang puck invented food (foodie mansplaining)

also, my dad just did this to me re my thanksgiving dish.

i always blame boomers for everything annoying, but i'm gonna call this a primarily boomer problem?

if you wanted to go to an asian restaurant in minneapolis why would you go to wolfgang puck's?!

Notice the adjective 'contemporary'

oh wait i only read the first post! sorry.
i'll read the whole thing before i have anything else to say.

If I want to go to an Asian restaurant that's michelin rated and run by Asian dudes I think my options are pretty much limited to sushi places in NYC

'doctor, my arm hurts when i do this…'

Asian food is generally not associated with haute cuisine here in the States

People want it to be cheap and dingy and in the Chinatown or other ethnic community ghetto

j. what are your top 5 asian themed restaurants that are zagat or michelin rated and where you wouldn't mind dropping 50 bucks per person on

also fwiw at my school we have different cafeteria options for the different campuses because there are more jibarito eaters over here, more tamale customers over there, etc.

to contrast, lately i have found myself annoyed at the presence of the perception of a latino monoculture in political discourse, etc.

michelin's ratings are mostly due to french people only liking french and japanese things

Yeah the perception of a monoculture among communities of color is a big problem

I'm perpetually worried that East Asian perspectives dominate the Asian American discourse

the whole idea of spending $50 per person on a meal is dumb to me, asian or no

the number of non-japanese east asian restaurants in london with 'haute cuisine'* type reps that aren't asian fusion is.....pretty small

* another stupid term but it vaguely correlates to something like the expense spared in procuring and cooking the food, as well as all sorts of other nonsense that is needed to get multiple michelin stars

I only ever went to the brunch at 20.21 but how the fuck was it an asian restaurant?

Probably because it marketed itself as Asian Fusion? Look it says it right there on the Yelp page http://www.yelp.com/biz/20-21-minneapolis

ah, looks like their dinner menu was pan-asian fusion, but still... I'm not sure you can say a fusion cuisine and a native one are comparable

sry, x-post

Well if you bothered to read the article you would see she's not making that point, nitwit

I'm agreeing! I think the people who try to pretend most chef fusion shit is anything other than the upscale version of applebees having "asian"-flavored wings or whatever are seriously deluded.

It can taste nice, to me Panda Express is to Wolfgang Puck's fusion as Golden Corral is to an expensive steakhouse with ala carte baked potatoes

“A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?

is it not possible the ingredients might be better? i mean, no guarantee, plenty of cheating everywhere, but it's often true if you're paying more for food more time has been spent on sourcing the ingredients. there are certain factors here that aren't just opinions, but other faintly snobby ideas like provenance or the happiness of the animal.

i mean it's awkward language above, sure, but arguably that par is just claiming high-end restaurant methods to be superior to street vendor ones? same high-end restaurants also do their takes on burgers or whatever else.

it's interesting that the process works the other way around with "authentic" - there are all sorts of weird associations when people talk about authentic asian food, or authentic indian food.

"is it not possible the ingredients might be better?"

I always interpreted this as meaning "it's not the neck, or the foot or tail of the animal so it's cool for whites ppl" vs. "we kill bespoke swine for your bunz"

You're mostly paying for the fact that the chef was CIA trained or w/e and that the restaurant is located in a part of town that has a bunch of other hip restaurants in it and it was reviewed by Peter Wells

You're paying $10 for french fries with truffle oil regardless of where the fries are 'sourced'

Also a $50/head meal to me involves booze and Service, neither of which I would think of when mentioning a Puck restaurant or Spice Market

I always interpreted this as meaning "it's not the neck, or the foot or tail of the animal so it's cool for whites ppl" vs. "we kill bespoke swine for your bunz"

maybe 20 years ago.

xpost - true about fries, not true about meat.

btw the 20.21 brunch had this on the buffet line, truly the height of asian fusion
http://www.food.com/recipe/asian-ramen-coleslaw-180352

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

Nakh, I'm thinking about the Sichuan chew-with-a-view place in the Shard and Bar Shu etc as haute. As more Chinese money moves into London, more fancy Chinese regional cuisine. London's Vietnamese community are at the point in their establishment here, where they'll start opening fancier restaurants than, say, Viet Grill. In another 10 years, London will probably have about five fancyish Somali places and a couple of dozen Persian.

Agreed UGH at rich wannabe-chef bros who bring a bunch of recipes back and don't involve the people who came up with the cuisine in their business.

xpost to LG, provenance of ingredients is important, as is animal welfare. It's not snobby to want to minimise people's impact on environment or to work towards better animal welfare.

anyway like, there is no way anyone, not even foodies, would claim these places are authentic. authenticity is fetishized hugely by foodies with prob just as many awkward racial issues as the idea of the high-end ethnic restaurant staffed by white superchefs. seems that'd be an interesting angle to come at this from too.

puck & co should be burned at the stake if they really have some sort of tourist narrative printed in their menus, imo

like literally our ideas about authenticity in things seem to have some weird obsession with the idea that the unsanitised is holy - even when we're actually eating something, putting it into our bodies - dirty equals real.

by our i guess i mean white people

You're paying $10 for french fries with truffle oil regardless of where the fries are 'sourced'
totally
it is a waste of money on top of everything, that's extra gross on top of gross. i don't even like going to restaurants that are that expensive. no matter how tasty the food is, it is always totally overpriced and guess what -- that brand name potato tastes like a potato.

i still kinda think the appropriating celebrity chef is a boomer man thing.

She never claims that those restaurants are claiming to be authentic! She's just pointing out that they are using Asian cuisines to lend themselves a little different-than-our-neighbors gloss - and that most people would be fine with paying higher prices for this 'refined' or 'reimagined' asian cuisine but would turn up their noses at paying similar prices at an actual Asian restaurant

Do you mean a restaurant with an Asian chef, or a diff definition of actual Asian restaurant? In London I think there are quite a lot of high-end Asian restaurants with Asian chefs.

I feel like the idea of a high-end restaurant has sort of boxes to tick that are nothing to do with food anyway, esp the higher up you go. Like probably even the price when you get to the really formal places.

Did any of you read Eddie Huang's memoir? Interested in what you guys think of it if so.

Anyway for all my repressed ire I actually think Andy Ricker is a cool dude, this was a good interview

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2013/10/pok_pok_ny_andy_ricker.php

You took an online reviewer to task for expecting free rice. Tell me about that.
This speaks to a much bigger problem: People view Asian food as a cheap commodity food. It should be plentiful and cheap and you should get free shit with it. And that's in our mindset because people who have sold Asian food in our country are just trying to survive. But we all live in the same economic reality. You're keeping your food cost below 30 percent, so if you're charging $7 for a giant plate of food, something has to give: labor, rent, or food. Most places aren't going to be buying natural meats, organic vegetables, top-grade seafood, or even top-grade rice. We don't make a big deal about it, but we use all-natural meat and high-quality ingredients, and we pay a fair living wage to employees. High-quality jasmine rice from Thailand costs more than $1 a pound, and you have to be careful in how you prepare it. We don't charge that much money for our food, so I don't feel bad about charging $2 or $3 for rice. And to top it off, in Asia, you pay for rice. Free rice is an American invention.

Talk to me about authenticity. Does it matter?
We don't use authentic, and we don't use traditional; those words are not in the literature. In my new cookbook, there's an essay on the absurdity of authenticity. Most Thai restaurants call themselves traditional, authentic Thai--to me, that means what you get in an American Thai restaurant. I like that food. Everyone likes that food. It's fucking delicious. But if you call yourself traditional or authentic, you're putting yourself in a position to piss people off.

Do you mean a restaurant with an Asian chef, or a diff definition of actual Asian restaurant? In London I think there are quite a lot of high-end Asian restaurants with Asian chefs.

I feel like the idea of a high-end restaurant has sort of boxes to tick that are nothing to do with food anyway, esp the higher up you go. Like probably even the price when you get to the really formal places.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Monday, November 25, 2013 10:52 AM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark

Thinking more of restaurants where the clientele are primarily Asian. There are a bunch of places out in Flushing like this where you probably couldn't get away for less than $30 a head and the food is great

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

― hatcat marnell (suzy), Monday, November 25, 2013 7:45 AM (8 minutes ago)

http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Everything-You-Know-Is-Wrong-250x364.jpg

the best vietnamese in london is haute cuisine by quality just not decorated or presented thusly etc

I feel like ,in London, restaurants where the clientele are primarily Asian tend to be given coverage by critics, a dedicated few anyway, but I can't be certain good spots aren't being ignored. The real food-obsessed people seem p open-minded but I dunno if that's a UK-centric view. I dunno, I just feel from my experience people who are into food hunt down the best stuff they can.

But maybe that's a diff type of person to the one who goes to Wolfgang Puck restaurants, I suspect there's huge ignorance when you get that high end anyway, same as with the fashion choices of the rich or whatever else.

Why is she wrong? The Vietnamese and Hmong populations in Minnesota were among the first in the west, right?

Xpost

suzy i agree and hope you are right and we get more high end places from other cuisines than french japanese italian etc

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).
― hatcat marnell (suzy), Monday, November 25, 2013 7:45 AM (8 minutes ago)

Need to point out the historical reasons for this being so

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Migration_and_Refugee_Assistance_Act

I feel a guilty thrill from enjoying articles and television spots hosted by middle-aged white men criticizing the bland, expensive haute cuisine of other middle-aged white chef men served in tourist destinations and overpriced downtown urban locales

xpost to LG, provenance of ingredients is important, as is animal welfare. It's not snobby to want to minimise people's impact on environment or to work towards better animal welfare.

btw I agree with you completely on this Suzy, but I guess it could be argued it's not something everyone can afford to care about either, and hence in effect tends to be a concern for the more well-off.

Also Vietnamese food often has a heavy French influence, so what does authenticity even mean in a case like that.

great britain had curry before it had fish & chips, makes u think

Gee I wonder why it has such a heavy French influence

nice french people bringing exotic french cooking techniques and spices

I could do without the splaining

hunan is probably the best echt-chinese or as close to it as possible place in london (though it is hunanese reimagined via taiwan i think), described by loudmouth pleb giles coren as the best chinese place in the world which typifies the sort of ludicrous climate anyone in the london restaurant world operates in

i am curious about the peculiar food of ppl's childhoods like dyao's double mayo honey ham sandwiches.

Even when I was eating them I realized they were really bad sandwiches. It takes a lot of mayo to make iceberg lettuce wilt, which is what we used because it was the cheapest

The school lunches were much better. For $1.50 (or .40 if you qualified for the reduced price rate like I did) you could get a chicken patty sandwich, a bag of chocolate milk, tater tots or fries if you were really lucky. Or you could go to the hoagie line and get a sweet tuna salad hoagie. But I never had forty cents

Glucose powder straight from the packet or in a sandwich

deems what irish food should people appropriate

Deems have you ever thought about opening a Chinese-Irish fusion restaurant. Let's do it. But in all descriptions it's imperative that the 'Chinese' come in front of the 'Irish' part. What part of Dublin would be best do you think

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

Why I'll be sure to pass that RIGHT along to a lot of folks right here in OC, about ten minutes up the 405.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saigon#Orange_County

I mean I don't work in a library that has this here or anything

http://seaa.lib.uci.edu/

when I was in ireland I went to a mexican restaurant with a picture of africa in the front that had potato nachos

xxxxxxp
so it wasn't even a peculiar child's palate thing? you wouldn't be at all tempted by an authentic home-made one now?

Also not irrelevant (and the book she wrote is a great one)

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/29/food/fo-viet29

Hell no. I mean I liked cold cut sandwiches as a kid and I still do now. A really good italian hoagie is incredible

But no I would not be tempted by a double meat both sides mayo iceberg lettuce wonderbread sandwich. No way

Peanut butter and bacon sandwich (bread toasted, always) was a thing in my family. Also fried bologne sandwiches with mayo.

xposts Have told the story of '70s arrival of Vietnamese and Hmong communities in MN a number of times, which takes about the same effort to check as it does to pull up a tres amusant JPG to deploy in telling me I must be wrong. ~sigh~ A quick Google just showed me there are at last Hmong restaurants in the Twin Cities - the lateness of which makes sense because the Hmong have found integration a bit more difficult to manage than the Vietnamese did.

In London, I'm a short walk from Chilli Cool so I don't think I've eaten much in other Chinese restaurants since I started going there.

My Proustian childhood sandwich is either deli bologna with French's mustard on heavily buttered egg twist/cholla bread (an especially bitey sandwich) or Pillsbury crescent rolls stuffed with a hot dog and melted Kraft slices, then baked. My mom bought our bread from bakeries; Wonder and its ilk were banned. Would still eat both, or switch the bologna for ham. My dad ate peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, which has to be the most repulsive combo in the world.

The Vietnamese population (I'm not talking Laotians or Cambodians, but strictly Vietnamese) is pretty insubstantial in MPS compared to the rest of the country*.

*Concentrations of Vietnamese-born population of the USA:
http://i.imgur.com/1ArxEK7.png

Of the 231,000 Vietnamese population in the USA in 1980, less than 3% lived in the state of MN, with over 50% living in CA. (Apparently the USA census states there were 0 Vietnamese people living in the USA prior to 1970.)

Why anyone would think that the Minneapolis was privy to better Vietnamese food 20 years prior to anywhere else in America or Europe (like Pho Banh Cuon 14 in Paris which will be 100 years old next year) is beyond me.

fancy azn places to eat in ny that aren't freaky appropriation-fests:

danji, red farm, mission chinese (tho yeah i know about the temp shutdown by the health dept, ick).

appropriation-ish azn fusion that's still tasty:

fatty crab.

other suggestions?

I've been meaning to check out red farm for a while

(oh add salt&fat to the first list)

I've heard Yunnan Garden is okay but requires a more 'sensitive' and 'delicate' palate

(first list should be fancy + fusiony, actually.)

There's a new place by the owners of Nom Wah that just opened

http://fungtu.com/

Might go tonight

the fusion-y stuff in jc is mainly pan-asian yich owned mainly by one family i think. its not westernized-fusion as such, but just like 'a little meh sushi, some meh chinese, some meh thai, all from the same storefront'.

White people will eat anything. What pigs

Just kidding white people. I love you all and your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

inedible sweet glazes with sliced up bell peppers and mango

we put cream cheese in a wonton wrapper and fried it guys.

no complaints here

There's a new place by the owners of Nom Wah that just opened

http://fungtu.com/

Might go tonight

― 乒乓, Monday, November 25, 2013 12:02 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Robert Sietsema ‏@robertsietsema 2h From Fung Tu: Sichuan pork sauce with "dumpling knots" (really spaetzle), Chinese-German fusion pic.twitter.com/iNX9rvQGkb

Theres decent chinese places, as such things are judged locally anyway, along parnell st, i bleev i gmapped it for you before tbh.

Irish foods i would recommend for appropriation, idk, idk. Generics like stew you cant claim, one pot bacon and cabbage prob fair fare, the trad fryup obv but the brits have that.

Pot still whiskey and carrageen it is i guess.

there's a couple of fancy korean places, Jungsik in Tribeca and Gaonnuri on the 39th floor of building on Broadway

Ned, I used to say I'd never go back to Orange County, but now I'd like to visit the old neighborhoods (Stanton, Westminster, Garden Grove) and see what's changed since 1975.

Irish colleague from my days in NYC said Dublin Chinese food of the '80s used Ould Sod-level amounts of cabbage, carrot and potato in the food (and that it was gross).

I ate a lot of Irish Chinese food from the late 80s on and never encountered potato. Homely quantities of onion/carrots in every dish, sure.

I ate Chinese in the 80s, in Dublin, and it was p much yr standard UK/Ireland dishes, sweet and sour, duck cantonese, beef black bean sauce etc.

I ate chinese food in dublin last month and it was not that thing u all said

Question for the asian people:

Does a restaurant with intra-asian (eastern?) appropriation raise any wary concerns where you might feel otherwise disinterested if it was a western chef?

I know Mission Chinese was mentioned upthread, which is the product of a Korean chef who was worked in fusion-y sushi bars and mediocre Italian restaurants before he became hyped a few years ago once he "pimped-out" (tm Vice Magazine) Chinese Food.

xp
Up to 2000-ish there were only a couple of not-100%-Westernised Chinese restaurants (Good World/Millenium/Imperial iirc); pretty sure the landscape has changed dramatically since then, though I haven't been to any of the Parnell St. places.

there's a couple of fancy korean places, Jungsik in Tribeca and Gaonnuri on the 39th floor of building on Broadway

― mizzell, Monday, November 25, 2013 12:14 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

Gaonnuri is amazing and fucking ace. You think you're paying big bucks for the view but no it's the food

Danny Bowien (Mission Chinese) is an interesting case, since he was adopted by white parents in Oklahoma so I assume he didn't grow up learning much about Korean food.

my running annoyance is that there are a ton of pan-asian restaurants with little to no korean dishes run by korean families

I want korean food, authenticity level be damned!

Yeah Danny Bowien is an example of a guy who does it right

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/dining/danny-bowiens-mission-cantina-opens-soon.html?_r=0

Ned, I used to say I'd never go back to Orange County, but now I'd like to visit the old neighborhoods (Stanton, Westminster, Garden Grove) and see what's changed since 1975.

Stanton...is Stanton. The other two spots, that's something else.

we put cream cheese in a wonton wrapper and fried it guys

Yes, yes we did. You're welcome.

Love,
The Midwest

dont want to read this thread but is the 'asian restaurant with ACTUAL asian people eating there' thing racist or not?

i feel like well-meaning white racists i know say this all the time as a way of describing good 'ethnic' food places

Not nec racist but you should go to a place because the food is good not because asian people eat there

There are plenty of terrible places where chinese people eat at

For example, chinese buffets

I do encourage all white ppl to try and discover more places actual Asians (tm) eat at

The food there is often very good

last time i was in nyc i got the whole sichuan so real even immigrants eat it thing idk, put me off a bit, dont want yr cultural tourism jr associates &c

New York has some pretty dope Sichuan

But you probably wouldn't want to eat it with one of those guys

My friend has done some favors for a Chinese coworker and has been taken out to lunch, thinking they'll go somewhere interesting and it's been a Chinese buffet a couple times. hehe

Although on one excursion they went by some industrial building where these young dudes were trying to out together a tofu factory. The actual businessman with know-how wasn't able to stick around and the whole situation turned into some comedic tragedy. I really need to find the right thread to detail that one....

my uni has a lot of asian students & so a lot of asian restaurants & many of these asian restaurants serve p much entirely asian clientele. with long lines. & it's not like these are out of the way or expensive or serve particularly weird food. the food's fantastic. & asian students recommend these places to me & other non-asians. just don't get it.

tonight I'll go appropriate some huaraches at a place where there will be no gringos & again, this is not an out of the way place, and huaraches aren't weird: fried dough with meat and cheese.

none of these places are fancy & I do hear white people say that they're "dirty", which I guess says it all

For example, chinese buffets

But the value per pound is so delicious.

My friend has done some favors for a Chinese coworker and has been taken out to lunch, thinking they'll go somewhere interesting and it's been a Chinese buffet a couple times. hehe

This is such a classic Chinese person move. My parents have done it and have had it done to them. It's so bad

Like we'll have friends over and cook them a really nice big meal. So the next time we go visit them and by courtesy they're supposed to treat us. What happens is we get taken out to the Chinese buffet

Thus when they come over next we'll take them out to our local Chinese buffet. Except it'll be called something like International Hibachi Teriyaki Grill but it's always run by Chinese people. Like 99% of sushi restaurants outside of NYC and LA

It actually ends up being good for us because one of our friends eats a LOT. She never stops eating. So when we go to the chinese buffet we're actually saving so much time and hassle of individually wrapping DUMPLINGS! and meat buns and mixing up the ground pork mixture and all that

L4ng is a super-nice dude with the most random connections. He apparently went to high school (well, the equivalent) with a guy who ended up being China's minister of agriculture around 2008ish and helped coordinate a visit to our company. Mostly he hoards computers and boxes in his office, though.

If you get taken out by him to the CHinese buffet it means you're not in his inner circle. He's just going through the motions

fetzoned

Hah, same friend that went there got invited to his house a couple times. I am not sure there is an inner circle per se

the bathroom

Did they just make out a little or did the friend stay the night

Picturing my friend k3ith and this 50 year old man making out is making me lol

If the dude is 50 then his connections most definitely aren't random. He's from the era when only Chinese of the landed gentry could make it out of the country. Probably went to a very prestigious Chinese high school

If he had stuck it out in China during the lean times he would probably be very rich. He would be part of the same group of people that are now scraping the country to the bone

Yeah, I got that impression! I may be a bad gauge of age, but def at least mid-40s. I should ask him about it sometime.

"Are you part of the group of people scraping China to the bone?"

http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/169984-1.htm

I like this & support it

$8 for one though that's crazy

I took a vid of my 煎饼 guy yesterday http://instagram.com/p/k1Ii6iv0B7/

I want a 煎饼 guy! I will have to keep my eyes peeled. Gonna pass on any hot dog option.

For lunch I'm gonna go to a halal restaurant where there's a guy pulling noodles in the window (S. just informed me that these are Xinjiang noodles. Off to read what that is all about). Chinese + Muslim appropriation all in one dish!

Hah that's not really appropriation - those noodle shops are opened usually by muslims from Xinjiang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_cuisine

Yeah well a western WASP getting stupid excited about noodles and mutton is kinda suspect ;)

^_^

no one eats mutton in my area! it's crazy

omg jianbing are soooooooo good, one of the top three things i ate in china easily. I should look around for where I can get 'em in NYC, there must be tons.

Haven't seen any in MHT Chinatown and I live there

Nor any in Flushing

Update: that lamb soup with Xinjiang noodles was excellent; will appropriate again soon.

90% of the time "pulling noodles in window" + mutton is going to be advertised as lanzhou lamian even if they're only sometimes run by people from gansu. and usually by people from qinghai in my experience. maybe dongxiang people from xinjiang. maybe even hui muslims. you can get pilau and a few sorta central asian dishes sometimes at those places but it's not exactly xinjiang cuisine. and definitely uighur lagman is a different noodle situation than what you get in these places.

so I was headed around the corner to my soup place for breakfast/lunch (I wake up so late that it has morphed into a single late-morning meal) and LO AND BEHOLD there's a couple making jianbing right there on my corner.

it was totally fine and cost fairly close to nothing, but is not in the competition for my soup affections. I didn't go to my soup place yesterday so I'll have to squeeze it in today for a snack because I miss it when I don't visit!

There is great Uighur place here in Melbourne, fantastic handmade noodles but the start is the roast mutton which comes in uncharacteristically (for chinese food at least) large lumps and is deliciously spiced with lots of cumin.

Now its a challenge do I seek out 煎饼 for lunch or go and have uighur noodles?

http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/169984-1.htm

lol this article

http://i.imgur.com/AMompPx.jpg

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Port-San-Antonio-bans-food-truck-because-of-5288089.php

This was just a bad idea all around

After my grandfather had a few strokes and lost most of his speech, one of the only things he could still say, in a wheezy lifetime-smoker's growl, was "Huh. Jesus Christ."

I did a pretty good imitation of him when that image loaded.

"Yoder, who is not Asian"

y'don't say

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/07/the_kimchi_revolution_how_korean_american_chefs_are_changing_food_culture/

that was terrible

You may know him as the Iron Chef and master of Japanese cuisine, but chef Masaharu Morimoto has a new restaurant in NYC that blends Japanese with … (wait for it) … Mexican cuisine!

And yes, it's as delicious as it sounds.

Asian x Mexican seems to be getting more popular these days http://www.missioncantinany.com/

We had a favorite sushi joint in MEXICO that had fabulous fresh baja seafood served raw with really good sushi rice and chili/cilantro sauces and man I was super opposed to fusion sushi but that shit WORKED.

You have to remember that, in the States, we have an entirely different problem. As in, "I wanna go toxftugcd's for lunch." And there is always the khaki-panted square from the burbs who thinks toxftugcd's (or "authentic" anything) is code for gang / drug dealer front operation. In the drugged up eighties and nineties, it could well have been.

Being Italian, I used to recommend joints that real dagos eat at and white breads ask if they're going to see a real gangster. Bbbbut that's part of the experience, no?!?

Not really mad at YUM! Brands at all for trying this out but lol:

When I first heard that Yum! Brands, the parent company behind Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, was opening a bánh mì shop in Dallas, my reaction was muted. By that point, I wasn't even upset at the cultural appropriation-- I was already wearied from all of the pho sandwiches and pho burgers and pho not-phos. No, I figured if the shop ends up being kind of authentic and maybe turns some people onto Vietnamese food, then why not?

Banh Shop couldn't really be that bad, right?

And then Yum! did literally the worst thing they could realistically do: They stuck a communist star in their logo. Is Yum Brands just begging for busloads of elders from Little Saigon to loudly protest outside their new store for weeks?

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2014/09/banh_shop_communist_star.php

The website itself is also a treat

http://banhshop.com/

http://i.imgur.com/mWJhumX.png

I mean don't get me wrong I'd try one of these out any day but lol @ americanizing a product meaning getting rid of the vegetables and adding more fat and sugar

never had this but damn i have had many terrible attempts at banh mi appropriation. hard as a rock baguette that gives you a jaw ache trying to chew, sickly sweet sauce slathered on, chunky raw vegetables sliding out everywhere because you can't even chew the damn thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/world/asia/bad-thai-food-enter-a-robot-taster.html?_r=1

Not quite the right thread for this but

I need this machine (+ calibrated for Chinese food)

I would say it's really stupid to open up a Vietnamese chain in an area with a large Vietnamese population and a shit-ton of good, authentic joints... OTOH, Chipotle/etc..

I don't think the Vietnamese population is the target demographic for Banh Shop

none of those sandwiches sound like banh mi

From that NYT article on the robot testing Thai food. But it sounds like a dog tester would be helpful also:

Ingredients like fresh tamarind, Thai limes and galangal, an aromatic root similar to ginger, are not readily available overseas, and the substitution of inferior ingredients frequently yields a dish that a Bangkok gourmand might describe in the Thai vernacular as “food even a dog would not swallow.”

I don't think the Vietnamese population is the target demographic for Banh Shop

The really good banh mi shop across from one of my stores shut down to become Vietnamese-Italian fusion. IDGI

Yeah

There's probably a pretty decently sized non-Vietnamese / non-adventurous-white-foodie population who don't venture into the Vietnamese owned restaurants but who would probably go to Banh Shop, right?

I dunno, they might have to brand it with THEY'RE SANDWICHES underneath or something. I strongly suspect that the kind of person who wouldn't frequent a Vietnamese-owned shop doesn't have a clue what a banh mi is.

Looking at the address they're just off the SMU campus so there are enough rich kids who want to be adventurous but not too adventurous should make it all but impossible to completely fail.

There's a popular manhattan sandwich shop with a few locations called Num Pang that is supposed to be Cambodian sandwiches and I think it's pretty clearly not and not supposed to be "authentic Cambodian" but more of that nu-food-truck style food, anyway it's pretty good and I eat there sometimes. Maybe this chain is just a bigger version of that sort of thing.

Or maybe, like Chipotles, Banh Shops will be in locations more convenient for white-collar workers to dine at? When I lived in Chicago area, yes I'd love to go to an authentic taqueria for lunch but closest one was 30 mins away whereas there were 3 Chipotles within 15 mins or less.

Possible. I eat at Tortilleria Nixtamal on the weekends whenever possible, but for lunch near work Chipotle is the only remotely "Mexican" thing, and I don't even think of it as Mexican, I just go there sometimes because it's reasonably fresh and tasty.

Looking at the address they're just off the SMU campus so there are enough rich kids who want to be adventurous but not too adventurous should make it all but impossible to completely fail.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Monday, September 29, 2014 5:26 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

Locating ethnic restaurants within walking distance of college campuses works great ime

Food can be inauthentic and still be delicious.

Well, yeah

Like 5 years ago NA came on a thread to point that out, also when no one was saying otherwise. Go ahead and enjoy your inauthentic food, dude!

Looking at the address they're just off the SMU campus so there are enough rich kids who want to be adventurous but not too adventurous should make it all but impossible to completely fail.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Monday, September 29, 2014 5:26 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

Locating ethnic restaurants within walking distance of college campuses works great ime

it should but man that is NOT the case up here in NH

thread gettin daingerous

num pang is bomb. their corn is particularly awesome.

i would eat the hell out of that banh shop food -- minus the aioli, because mayo is the devil's condiment and all that.

they make good/inauthentic banh mis at the mendocino farms mini-chain in los angeles, including an awesome lemongrass steak one. bring it on, i say.

Btw I guess I never posted the link to my anti-street harassment project and our official documents, so here you go finally!

http://brooklynmovementcenter.org/anti-street-harassment/

We are currently comprised of cisgendered women who consistently face street harassment. Our intention is to address the ways in which men harass women, queer, trans, and/or gender non-conforming people in our neighborhood’s public spaces. We understand that street harassment is a type of gendered and sexualized violence and that our work is one part of a larger movement to dismantle patriarchy’s effects on our lives. We seek to work in solidarity with individuals and organizations whose approach to violence works for and not against our values, our mission and our vision for the community we are working to transform.

Lol sorry wrong thread.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/10/15/354654440/in-the-world-of-chefs-asian-american-women-are-turning-up-the-heat

Get 'em

http://bittersoutherner.com/how-hot-chicken-really-happened#.Va2xpIvxRFK

this piece, about hot chicken in nashville, was prob way too long, and had the odd needless personal tangent, but it is p interesting how the story of a dish is also the story of segregation.

also made this white person want some hot chicken.

Rachel L. Martin, Ph.D. missed out on some key white ppl facts

One interesting footnote (which I guess is almost a “foodnote”) is that fair few people probably have heard of hot chicken but didn’t know why or what they were hearing about. On the album “Electr-O-Pura,” Yo La Tengo has not one, but two, songs with Hot Chicken in the title. Joe York’s got the classic, original second-track-on-the-cd, Hot Chicken as the soundtrack to his film. Now that I’ve had the dish I can say with some degree of groundedness that the song actually reflects the dish, at least to me. I’m not a music writer so forgive my foray into that realm but . . . the song really does have an affinity for the chicken . . . starts with a steady, catchy hook, builds gradually to something approaching but never quite overstepping into all out cacophony. Throughout the beat keeps going, and the music keeps rising and the song gets under your skin in a way that sticks. Think chicken-holism. It all makes sense—the band records in Nashville and they eat a lot of Prince’s hot chicken. Think hot chicken, eat hot chicken, listen to hot chicken.

http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/08/fox-all-white-bbq-pitmaster-list.html

https://www.instagram.com/p/_FNtikNP0U/

http://igcdn-photos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xft1/t51.2885-15/e35/12353344_1535210403437068_2045414289_n.jpg

God that's awful oh the humanity etc

Im guessing youre not britishes, just sayin? Chinese chip shop curry is a p specific type of british artificial curry sauce that you get either at a Chinese takeout with rice or chips, or from a chip shop with chips that doesn't really have another name.

^Also available in many non-Chinese takeaways as gravy for chips. Weirdly, this tastes a lot like katsu sauce.

'chinese'=sweet

incidentally i love it and it's one of the few things i make sure to eat when im visiting home

saw really good public television show about Asian American cuisine last night

http://ww2.kqed.org/about/2015/11/16/interview-with-grace-lee-off-the-menu-asian-america/

xxp i'm not british! i lived in london for a while but somehow never had it.

http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_29347835/cal-state-professor-teaches-students-decolonize-your-diet

cultural appropriation that's the opposite of the original gist of the thread!

yah i was going to preface that with "probably wrong thread"
just think the dynamics of ethnic food culture etc in the west is p interesting

west usa

west usa

time for a break.

no it's interesting! you are right! you shouldn't be so self-deprecatory

Excellent (paywalled) FT piece on the decline of the traditional British curry house here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2165379e-b4b2-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.html#slide0

Some of the key points:

People expect prices to be more of less fixed - there hasn't been significant inflation over the last ten years
Spice prices have gone up in India and Pakistan, cutting margins
De-listing of cooking as "skilled work" for migration makes it hard to recruit staff
Social stigma applied to kids continuing family business, rather than going to university, etc
Cooks / waiters migrating in bulk to being Uber drivers instead
No tradition of muscular chains to compete with Pizza Express, Nando's etc,

Key link to the thread:

The leading pizza and hamburger chains in the UK were started by British entrepreneurs, rather than ethnic Italians or Americans. But almost everyone working in the curry industry believes that native nous remains a magic ingredient. “This is an art and you need to be Indian to understand it properly: how to grind and mix the spices, how to leave the dosa mixture to ferment for just the right time,” says Frederick at Saravanaa Bhavan. “Indian food needs specific skills,” says Lord Bilimoria at Cobra. “You can guarantee there has to be a South Asian chef. You cannot just recruit anyone and follow a recipe checklist.”

“There is a hypothesis that curry houses have a requirement that, unlike pizza, burgers or noodles, you probably need to be Indian to understand the cuisine,” says Shamil Thakrar. “That means the sort of entrepreneurs who have attempted them are from the ethnic group of Indians. And while there have been some Indian entrepreneurs, the mainstream investors have not tackled it.".

However, one of the main reasons they're failing is that non-Asian ppl are waking up to what Asian ppl have been telling them for years - that the food is mostly terrible. The majority of curry houses in the UK are Sylheti joints turning out anglicised staples that can be cooked easily and far more 'authentically' at home. They're being squeezed by Wetherspoons on volume and by M&S ready meals on quality. There's a big Bangladeshi community where i live now. All the restaurants are awful and catering to a local white taste that is probably getting more sophisticated.

This has opened up the space in the market for specialist, high-quality places doing things that are both closer to Asian tastes and harder to replicate at home (Tayyabs is permanently packed, for example) but it'll be interesting to see how that turns out wrt who's setting the places up. Dishoom is run by an Anglo-Asian family but the face of the latest on-trend item, the Sri Lankan hopper, is called Emily Dobbs:

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/what-is-a-hopper-the-lightest-way-to-eat-curry-in-london-a2958511.html

Ideally, you'd get to the situation you have in Dubai where there almost everywhere seems to be offering excellent, specialised regional cuisine but there's a huge gap and a vast chunk of the existing network (which employs over 100k people) will fall away.

http://luckypeach.com/inside-taos-vibe-dining-empire-2/

http://i.imgur.com/DJrSUpF.png

what is wrong w/ pig offal

― just sayin, Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:51 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it is awful

― Player is killed, but they are resurrected, and the 45 Revolver glow gold (dyao), Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:53 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've come around on pig offal

pig ears, pig feet. . . but I don't think I've had pig innards. What is officially offal?

cheeks. bones (boiled down for broth). But have yet to encounter tongue, heart, liver, intestines, pancreas, other innards???

of the pig I mean

Had some of this the other day (Korean pigs blood sausage): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundae_(Korean_food) - it was as you would expect, although I wasn't sure at the time if the noodles poking out weren't tendons or veins or something even more off-putting. Served in a soup with liver, I don't know of which animal, it tasted like liver.

xp there's quite a few dishes that i always see at sichuan restaurants - fire-exploded kidney flowers, husband & wife lung, some sort of deep-fried intestine

the whole idea of "cultural appropriation" (as a negative value) as applied to stuff like food (or music or whatever) is the dumbest concept to come out the academic left (and to spread far and wide) in decades. it's a stupid dead end, and that end is total self-abnegation. i have zero patience with this stuff, and if social-justice movements want to tie their flag to the "cultural appropriation" pole, so much the worse for them.

^^ spoken like w true white person

just saw SV's post upthread about curry houses. i was reading it waiting to jump and make this point, until you made it:

However, one of the main reasons they're failing is that non-Asian ppl are waking up to what Asian ppl have been telling them for years - that the food is mostly terrible.

growing up in ireland, the british curry tradition isn't really in my veins. (our drunken appropriated food was always chinese, ireland has a p advanced or retrograde chinese fast food scene, which i'll come to). the trad curry house is horrible imo, not even nice in a drunken way like a kebab or something is. anytime i ate indian food in ireland it was always a bit more varied or had a smaller menu, i mean generally anyway, apart from that place in temple bar which people used to go to buy a "vegetable platter" and earn the right to then buy 48 bottles of cobra.

the face of the latest on-trend item, the Sri Lankan hopper, is called Emily Dobbs

who is this? imo the face(s) of the hopper trend in london are the sethis: http://www.thestaffcanteen.com/news/sethis-launch-hoppers-soho

away from curry and back to chinese food, i was back in ireland for a funeral recently and i had some beers with my two brothers, and we ended up going to the ancient chinese takeaway where i grew up. we got a "spice bag", which is this huge phenomenon in ireland. i'd seen people talking about it and it's on social media a lot. it's basically like salt and pepper everything, in the way you might have previously had "salt and pepper squid" or "salt and pepper prawns" - so it's like thick cut irish chips drenched in the salt and pepper coating (msg and chilli i guess), bits of chicken or meat, and chillis.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/spice-bag-been-named-irelands-6680781

it seems like a kind of combo of chinese food and the fish and chip shop, which is obv the other big post-pub thing.

for years in ireland, and presumably still, the "3-in-1" was the dominant late night chinese dish. fried rice, chips and curry sauce all in one carton. sometimes a 4-in-1 or 5-in-1 might have other deep fried stuff in there floating about. i think the spice bag has won out partly cos people can eat it while walking, the 3-in-1 always required a scurry home and maybe the microwave, or sitting on a wall somewhere.

sorry if this post was distressing for some.

while i'm here, i should add that i've been going to wong-kei in london a bit lately, at lunch, like an old cafe in chinatown. it's p well known and the rudeness there is legendary but the more i consider it, the more i think it adds to the place. they have a bunch of secret rules ie:

1. sit anywhere. sit beside someone else if it's busy. sit anywhere. ANYWHERE. the first time i went i didn't know where to sit and floated towards the host and he just screamed "SIT ANYWHERE" in a cockney/chinese accent and glared at me. now i enjoy this happening to others.
2. only pay by cash. i often fantasise about attempting to pay with a cheque one day cos they get so angry when anyone fails to produce cash instantly.
3. a menu is a luxury. they'll give you one if you ask but you're supposed to know the menu and know exactly what you want.
4. maybe you aren't allowed to order what you want. i heard one of the waiters bark "you won't like it" at someone once. i liked this as it reminded me of working in and shopping at record stores.

having said all that, once you follow the rules everything goes smoothly, and it's £5 for a bowl of noodles or a plate of duck over rice or whatever - with free tea. the seating also is p cool - sometimes you get talking to people, i had a long lunch chatting to a woman in her 80s from singapore who was visiting friends for christmas. p rare to actually meet someone from such a diff background and generation and converse.

The Indian places I've been to in small-town Ireland have tended to be slightly above average but more focused on sit-down meals than slinging takeaway cartons, which probably helps. I've eaten at Indian restaurants everywhere from Gdansk to Yerevan and, for the most part, even if the spices are hard to come by, the technique is there. With takeaway joints, or places that do a lot of their business as takeaway joints and gear the menu accordingly, you are mostly limited to generic curry with a dash of something added at the end or deep fried bhajis.

Emily Dobbs ran a street stall and then opened a restaurant:

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/what-is-a-hopper-the-lightest-way-to-eat-curry-in-london-a2958511.html

The Sethis came along slightly later but seem to have taken over the buzz. Of course, they aren't Sri Lankan either...

yeah they are kinda entrepreneurs i guess, they run that bao place too which seems impossible to ever get into, and i guess they aren't taiwanese either!

i feel like brick lane is as you describe takeaway joints. i haven't eaten there in years but it felt like the competition there was too much for all the restaurants and the standard of ingredient was as low as possible.

Never heard of spice bags, he's taking the piss
Taco fries otoh

you need to accept you live in dublin and integrate yourself into the culture.

Inappropriate

is taco fries abrakebabra? i never got those there. i used to get the bread roll filled with chips. terrifying.

Original and best is, now everyone else has .....well yknow

abrakepropriated

^^ spoken like w true white person

― 龜, Saturday, March 5, 2016 9:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

atf

^^ spoken like w true white person

Every culture on earth has stolen good ideas from other cultures and adapted them for their own uses. The world has never been any other way. Moreover, unlike stealing people to enslave them, or stealing land from those who live on it to dispossess them, or stealing power in order to rule over your neighbors, stealing ideas does no one any noticeable harm. And of all the ideas humans like to steal, pouncing on new ways to eat delicious food seems about the most universal and harmless of all.

I'm 'white' btw.

what does 'white' mean in this context?

i'm a russian-lithuanian jew by heritage.* does this mean i'm appropriating scotch-irish culture when i listen to old-time music? is it OK if i listen with my girlfriend who is from a scotch-irish appalachian family?

how about food? is my attempt to cook naan any more 'appropriative' than my attempt to make linguini?

i know i kind of butted in on an interesting discussion of chinese food! sorry about that. but the whole idea--broached in some of the articles posted by OP--that you shouldn't cook the foods of 'other' cultures is laughably absurd. in make it's so absurd that it's kind of helpful in pointing out the reductio ad absurdum quality of most arguments about 'cultural appropriation.'

*jews have not always been considered 'white' btw, and still aren't in some quarters.

xpost

i agree w/ aimless, of course.

also it's kind of nagl how some folks make a habit of making gross generalizations about 'white ppl' of a kind that would get them pilloried if they were made about any other group of people (like one of my coworkers, who has an uncanny ability to take any topic and turn it in a "white ppl are like..." direction).

note that i'm not claiming 'reverse racism' or some bullshit like that, it's just insultingly dumb and cheapens discourse.

(my coworker is chinese-american but never misses an opportunity to speak on behalf of african-americans, which he can do because he once spent a summer doing community organizing in the 'inner city')

Lol

Is popcorn.gif safe to eat itt

what does 'white' mean in this context?

i'm a russian-lithuanian jew by heritage.* does this mean i'm appropriating scotch-irish culture when i listen to old-time music? is it OK if i listen with my girlfriend who is from a scotch-irish appalachian family?

how about food? is my attempt to cook naan any more 'appropriative' than my attempt to make linguini?

i know i kind of butted in on an interesting discussion of chinese food! sorry about that. but the whole idea--broached in some of the articles posted by OP--that you shouldn't cook the foods of 'other' cultures is laughably absurd. in make it's so absurd that it's kind of helpful in pointing out the reductio ad absurdum quality of most arguments about 'cultural appropriation.'

*jews have not always been considered 'white' btw, and still aren't in some quarters.

Youre white

Thanks

Do me next

I'm irish

love 2eat w wites

i ate a thing from a culture that wasn't mine... it was delicious... i think i'd do it again 😈

oh sorry, did i take it too far????? deal with it

sleepinggabb

Do me next

I'm irish

― Ecomigrant gnomics (darraghmac), Sunday, March 6, 2016 12:24 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a bit of an escalation from "kiss me, I'm Irish"

"I decree: This Indian food, once properly Americanised, tastes delightful!"

-The White Eater

bout to go to flushing an appropriate some malaysian food into my mouth and also i think some of yall are (deliberately?) missing the thrust of this thread which in my reading is more about fetishization of immigrant food cultures as a mark of sophistication or worldliness, of which i am definitely guilty but i just cant leave that rendang alone

appropriate some of that for all of us, sounds good.

dayo, I dunno if you're joking, but it's not a good joke to police how a Jew self-identifies their race

And yeah, you Am/Aim/sleep guys haven't read the thread. It's more about authenticity narratives and foh/boh/prestige disparity than eating or cooking food from other cultures.

sorry! i was thinking of that thing at oberlin

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/12/23/oberlin_students_think_americanized_asian_food_is_cultural_appropriation.html

man, just posting that link made me hungry.

Do me next

I'm irish

― Ecomigrant gnomics (darraghmac), Sunday, March 6, 2016 12:24 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a bit of an escalation from "kiss me, I'm Irish"

― petulant dick master (silby), Sunday, 6 March 2016 21:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Post Celtic tiger mores are a little faster and looser than may have been previously the case

my korean-american coworker is returning to LA for a bit and said 'you know what i'm going to eat? some of that american chinese food'. tbf korean chinese food is pretty awful.

we rarely eat any form of noodle

https://bitchmedia.org/article/craving-the-other-0

While searching the internet for interesting freeze-dried food that I could take on my wilderness treks, I just discovered there is such a thing as freeze-dried kimchee. I may just culturally appropriate a few packages for my own unconsciously racist pleasure.

i eat what i can which tbh is not much these days

^ is that based more on financial or physiological factors, crüt?

there's a family-run, hole in the wall mexican place in my neighbourhood that opened a few years back, it was the only mexican joint in the area and the food is really good; but the décor is pretty basic and it's in a strip-mall. they stock the local latino free paper and the clientele is quite diverse, which is notable as there's not a ton of latino people where i live. about a year later about a block away some white people opened a mexican restaurant, it's much nicer inside, rustic wooden furniture, pleasant light fixtures etc. and received good press. it has a mural of like cantinflas or something with a sombrero on on the side wall. now im not going to firebomb the place or protest outside it or in any way get up in arms about it and i have eaten at white mexican places a ton of times, but as a person of latino heritage i think this particular resto with its proximity to the only other Mexican resto in the area and its mural is kind of shitty and im never going to eat there. the idea that cultural appropriation is just nothing and that people from ethnic minority backgrounds should just stfu based on the fact that some people take policing appropriation to an egregious extreme - "this person with no Genovese heritage made pasta w/ pesto: burn him" - seems silly.

physiological, ethical, and financial

my condolences. may the physiological and financial aspects heal soon. the ethical ones are probably better left alone.

It is probably worth mentioning here that in the USA the first big wave of immigrants from China came to the west coast during the gold rush in California and they not only became miners or laborers, but often were hired as camp cooks for mining operations or opened eating establishments in mining camps. While most of what was offered was common 'American' food like bacon & beans, pies, and pancakes, these immigrant cooks also invented Americanized Chinese food, most notably Chow Mein and Egg Foo Yung. I'm not sure who was appropriating whom, but these dishes are still staples in Chinese-American restaurants.

there's a family-run, hole in the wall mexican place in my neighbourhood that opened a few years back, it was the only mexican joint in the area and the food is really good; but the décor is pretty basic and it's in a strip-mall. they stock the local latino free paper and the clientele is quite diverse, which is notable as there's not a ton of latino people where i live. about a year later about a block away some white people opened a mexican restaurant, it's much nicer inside, rustic wooden furniture, pleasant light fixtures etc. and received good press. it has a mural of like cantinflas or something with a sombrero on on the side wall. now im not going to firebomb the place or protest outside it or in any way get up in arms about it and i have eaten at white mexican places a ton of times, but as a person of latino heritage i think this particular resto with its proximity to the only other Mexican resto in the area and its mural is kind of shitty and im never going to eat there. the idea that cultural appropriation is just nothing and that people from ethnic minority backgrounds should just stfu based on the fact that some people take policing appropriation to an egregious extreme - "this person with no Genovese heritage made pasta w/ pesto: burn him" - seems silly.

to the extent there's a problem here, it's that there is not economic equality between people of different ethnicities. the latino family that opened up their restaurant don't have access to the same cash that the other family does. (of course, there are plenty of examples of latinos opening up chic, slick restaurants.) the problem is not "appropriation" of food cultures or whatever. it's the underlying economic inequality. if there is a problem at all, which i'm not sure there is in your scenario.

there's no "problem", no one has been harmed, the hole in the wall enlarged its premises after the other place opened.

im not calling for a moratorium on people with x heritage making food from y culture. im just saying that i don't feel that my side-eye and distaste for the other resto is completely invalid, and based on something that doesn't exist/is irrelevant.

i don't think the actual appropriation is the problem as much as the sense by some people that the appropriation is giving legitimacy to a particular cuisine or "classing it up", idk. the most famous thai chef in the U.S. is probably Andy Ricker and the most famous Mexican chef in the U.S. is Rick Bayless. not saying they're undeserving of fame, they're excellent chefs afaik, but certainly their level of fame above other chefs operating in Thai and Mexican can be partially attributed to something other than food.

there's some specific niche for expensive places that serve "mexican" food where young white people go on dates. there's always at least one, with a group of dudes wearing whatever the current version of a striped shirt is, and his date wearing what looks like a prom dress

always at least one restaurant local to me, that is. i think it might have rotated to a different venue in recent years.

young white dudes wearing striped shirts should just stay home and eat mac & cheese or whatever

or just starve and die

egg wites

to the extent there's a problem here, it's that there is not economic equality between people of different ethnicities. the latino family that opened up their restaurant don't have access to the same cash that the other family does. (of course, there are plenty of examples of latinos opening up chic, slick restaurants.) the problem is not "appropriation" of food cultures or whatever. it's the underlying economic inequality. if there is a problem at all, which i'm not sure there is in your scenario.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Monday, March 7, 2016 4:31 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a little reductive, "oh this is merely an economic inequality issue!!"

jim i feel u btw

i don't think the actual appropriation is the problem as much as the sense by some people that the appropriation is giving legitimacy to a particular cuisine or "classing it up", idk. the most famous thai chef in the U.S. is probably Andy Ricker and the most famous Mexican chef in the U.S. is Rick Bayless. not saying they're undeserving of fame, they're excellent chefs afaik, but certainly their level of fame above other chefs operating in Thai and Mexican can be partially attributed to something other than food.

― nomar, Monday, March 7, 2016 4:43 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good post

a little reductive, "oh this is merely an economic inequality issue!!"

― marcos, Monday, March 7, 2016 5:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah i think a certain type of liberal - tends to be old and of the kum-ba-yah, we're all one race variety- tends to try to shortcut race by just saying everything is an economic or class issue instead of trying to address the racial factor as well

if you think this is just about making white ppl feeling 'guilty' when they go to an 'ethnic' restaurant or w/e that's a pretty blatant misreading and u can suck an egg. that means u, aimless

im on the record as saying that i don't really care when white ppl eat chinese food or make it at home or w/e they want to do. that's fine! go ahead.

but it does piss me off when white ppl try to monetize it. thats why i posted that excerpt from TAO upthread. i don't think it's cool one of the highest grossing restaurants in NYC is doing it off chinese-influenced food done by a white owner.

especially given the abject conditions a lot of recent chinese immigrants live in - the chinese buffet circuit up and down the east coast, etc.

young white dudes wearing striped shirts should just stay home and eat mac & cheese or whatever

or just starve and die

― brotato chip (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, March 7, 2016 5:07 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm cool with both of these positions and support them fyi

people who have money, when they go on dates, they typically go to "nice" places, irrespective of the cuisine or who owns the restaurant. this is not just true of "white ppl"

yeah i think a certain type of liberal - tends to be old and of the kum-ba-yah, we're all one race variety- tends to try to shortcut race by just saying everything is an economic or class issue instead of trying to address the racial factor as well

that's not what i'm saying at all. i'm saying that it doesn't matter what kind of food you eat or whether "white ppl" make mexican food or ghananian food or whatever. if there are "problems" w/ any of the scenarios you guys are describing (and i'm not convinced there are, honestly), then they have to do with dynamics other than "appropriation."

you guys write as if there aren't any mexican or african-american middle-class and rich people who go to nice restaurants

Kinda relieved to get permission to at least suck an egg tbh

as long as it was prepared in a traditionally irish way

Nah we absolutely encourage the bastardisation of our culture it makes it easier to drag other cultures down to our level

http://images1.miaminewtimes.com/imager/ogrimacy-on-a-shamrock-shake-cup-circa-19/u/original/6597696/shamrockshake.jpg

OK, some of em we drag up to our level, granted

you guys write as if there aren't any mexican or african-american middle-class and rich people who go to nice restaurants

Youre acting as if there are """nice""" restaurants that are not european or sushi, or, if "ethnic", not owned and operated by white ppl

where do you live?????

everywhere i've lived there have been /plenty/ of "nice" restaurants owned by african-americans, mexican-americans, thai-americans, etc. etc.

i suspect you either live in bumblefuck idaho (which i hear has great scenery btw) or you are projecting your reductive understanding of political economy onto the more complex world we live in.

yeah idgi

not owned and operated by white ppl

I don't think this fits the description of a single restaurant in SF tbh

"nice" or otherwise

tbf it's also possible that 龜 is from iceland

or siberia

shamrock shakes are really good

oreo shakes are better tho

Post pictures of far-flung Irish pubs here

lol don't you live in a college town amatuerist? i suppose nice for you tops out at 'not-an-olive garden'

i've lived in a lot of places

you're transparently a troll or an idiot, so, keep going if it gives you satisfaction

lol i'm surprised they let you back in after your ban

wtf

Οὖτις, don't interrupt him!

you were banned? when did that happen?

Uh wait do you ppl not know who symbol is

I barely know who anybody is

:-}

anyway i think this link is relevant to share, from a black chef working in fine dining:

http://luckypeach.com/on-being-black-in-the-kitchen-edouardo-jordan/

half of us are spartacus and the other half are keyser soze

do you ppl not know who symbol is

When you mouse over the name of mr. 'symbol', ilx offers "click here for more information about this user". So I clicked and damn me if it told me squat about who he is.

your display name has never been more fitting

Uh wait do you ppl not know who symbol is

The Aimless-Amateurist tagteam is delivering, as expected by their monikers

not surprised that y'all don't pay any attention to usernames since u are both clearly in love with the sound of your own voices

lol xp

Who are they? And that shouldn’t be the case. They should fucking walk in just as hungry and eager as any other cook, no matter who they are. Woman, white man, purple man, fat man.

I lol'd

symbol

in my experience there's "nice" as in seated/wait staff/cloth napkin/wine list

.. and then there's "nice" as in all the essentials, plus guests expected to be in nice attire, everything is significantly more expensive, no children visible, reservations pretty much necessary, soup/salad always ala carte, the front of house has a maître d' instead of a "host," possible valet service out front, etc.

there are plenty of the former owned/operated by immigrants around my area, not so many of the latter. we don't have many of the latter at all, though.

Hate the poison itt I mean it's a food thread for a start

Uh wait do you ppl not know who symbol is

― Ecomigrant gnomics (darraghmac), Monday, March 7, 2016 4:12 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol otm

Can't we all just not get along, but yknow, nicer

I'm regretting the "you ppl" but I think I may have escaped that one

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/91/e2/d8/91e2d87e127ebf22055e5a81b8c39278.jpg

dayo have you ever read chopsticks & marrow? the dude has steered me to some good places in the past but there's sometimes a veneer of othering or essentialization to his quick summations of food traditions etc. it's not quite to the level of "i went to this place and we were the only white people in there" but maybe it's the next level?

if you think this is just about making white ppl feeling 'guilty' when they go to an 'ethnic' restaurant or w/e that's a pretty blatant misreading and u can suck an egg. that means u, aimless

wtf? I don't think I've used the word restaurant in this thread, let alone the words ethnic or guilty.

Ey symbol I know a p good Chinese place in Dublin fyi & btw just sayin

I'm still trying to figure out why places w/thai menus are really into adding a sushi bar lately. I guess maybe it's a good profit center? I could use some sort of thai cuisine inspired sushi roll but that never happens

Yr white. Invent one, make millions.

nobody makes millions in the restaurant game unless they run one of those really expensive places or has franchises all over

I was kind of thinking about whether some places capitalize on a pan-european thing for menu formation and the only real point would be every type of restaurant offering some kind of pizza

i think the money quote from the edouardo jordan piece is at the end which shakes conveniently omitted:

Name a black chef who’s won an award besides Marcus Samuelsson. It’s a celebrity show, culinary politics. I did a little research and I’m going through everything that I can possibly find, and there are maybe one or two minority chefs recognized by the James Beard Foundation a year, if that. It’s pretty fucking sad. I want to have a say in this. I want to stir it up. But I don’t know: Is that their problem or my problem? Or our problem?

wtf? I don't think I've used the word restaurant in this thread, let alone the words ethnic or guilty.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, March 7, 2016 7:47 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

aimless, i say this to you as warmly and sincerely as i possibly can: please enjoy your freeze-dried kimchi.

Ey symbol I know a p good Chinese place in Dublin fyi & btw just sayin

― Ecomigrant gnomics (darraghmac), Monday, March 7, 2016 7:48 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

when i come to visit i'm counting on you to bringing me to some chinese-owned restaurants ay

I'm still trying to figure out why places w/thai menus are really into adding a sushi bar lately. I guess maybe it's a good profit center? I could use some sort of thai cuisine inspired sushi roll but that never happens

― μpright mammal (mh), Monday, March 7, 2016 7:51 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah most 'pan-asian' joints not in cities will advertise that they do everything - pho, thai, sushi, chinese, whatever the white people there want. it's a different phenomenon than actual organic fusion restaurants, like indian chinese or jamaican chinese restaurants etc. etc.

i think it's probably worth a hard look into the phenomenon of pan-asian restaurants and their impact but that's a discussion i'd want to have with other asian americans, not white ppl.

dayo have you ever read chopsticks & marrow? the dude has steered me to some good places in the past but there's sometimes a veneer of othering or essentialization to his quick summations of food traditions etc. it's not quite to the level of "i went to this place and we were the only white people in there" but maybe it's the next level?

― adam, Monday, March 7, 2016 7:47 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i've come across it a few times but the guy comes off as too much like max falkowitz. tbh i don't mind that much as long as it drives traffic towards the restaurants he reviews. but reading through his reviews is a chore and a slog. it also generally bugs me when non-chinese people have Very Strong Opinions about where the best, say, xiao long bao or pulled noodles or w/e are in the city.

i much prefer a site like eating in translation http://www.eatingintranslation.com/ - descriptive without making too many assumptions or superlative comparisons.

despite its unfortunate name, eataku (lol) also is like that

eating in translation is fantastic. i appreciate the dude's obsession with bygone signage.

idk eataku.

max falkowitz is a clown

i actually dig ligaya mishan even tho her reviews bring the fuckin eye of nytimes reader mordor down upon every place she writes abt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_starred_restaurants#United_States

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/dining/la-chine-review.html

pete wells, hear hear:

The egg was one of the first things I ate at La Chine, which opened in November inside the Waldorf Astoria, specializing in Chinese food made with finesse and an eye for beauty. This could get interesting, I thought. In fact, the rest of the meal and the two that followed did get interesting, in ways that those of us who love the cuisines of China wish would happen more often in New York.

Downtown Manhattan, Flushing in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn are rich in Chinese restaurants. Their cooking can range from filling to thrilling, but it rarely aspires to climb the slopes of creativity. Ingredients are generally good but not stellar, limited as they are by the prices these restaurants can charge. Unlike many cities in Asia, New York has not historically had a broad base of people willing to spend a lot on Chinese food.

...

But at the risk of undermining my populist credentials, I’d suggest New York could use more Chinese restaurants that are as expensive as our most ambitious French and Italian places. Those restaurants could use more ingredients worth splurging on, and restaurateurs determined to lure talented chefs from China.

not a perfect review but given the platform and the thrust of the message, i give it a pass

i actually dig ligaya mishan even tho her reviews bring the fuckin eye of nytimes reader mordor down upon every place she writes abt

― adam, Monday, March 7, 2016 8:32 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah ligaya mishan is great too. apparently she has a MFA in poetry which explains how, uh, purple-y some of the writing gets

not owned and operated by white ppl

I don't think this fits the description of a single restaurant in SF tbh

― Οὖτις, Monday, March 7, 2016 6:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is interesting to me because i visited SF last summer and i just looked up some of the restaurants i remember us going to and all of them are minority-owned. and this isn't even including the ones we visited in chinatown

i guess my feeling is that white ppl owned "ethnic" restaurants are 1) not as good as authentic ones owned by a member of that culture and 2) probably more a symptom of wealth inequality between whites and non-whites as anything else. it's textbook capitalism -- the rich profiting from the work and ideas of the less well-off

probably because your partner has good taste because she's not [redacted]

at the risk of exploding a clusterfuck in my face, i'll share some thoughts engendered by the quoted bits, not as criticism of the quoted material, but as further observations in tangential directions.

white ppl owned "ethnic" restaurants are 1) not as good as authentic ones owned by a member of that culture

Authenticity, especially in the realm of food, is a thorny category, because people who are accepted as belonging to the same culture and who share the same ethnicity may drastically change what they eat and how they prepare it over the course of a few generations. If the Chinese begin drinking wine made from grapes with some regularity, as they seem to be experimenting with these days, will wine become authentic Chinese food in 50 years?

probably because your partner has good taste

Achieving what is deemed good taste in something is a very interesting state. It would seem to be purely socially defined. Would it even be possible to have "good taste" in the absence of shared and accepted canonical reference points? What about people to whom those reference points are not available; are they condemned always to have "bad" taste? What would that mean for their lives?

And the closer you examine what "good taste" consists of, the more permutations, refinements and gradations there are, until you reach a rarified pinnacle occupied only by a rarified few, who still have been known to quarrel over the final few exquisite distinctions.

aimless, i say this to you as warmly and sincerely as i possibly can: please enjoy your freeze-dried kimchi.

thank you dayo. that is very gracious of you. I certainly hope to.

Redacted has a v specific ilx meaning imo and I lolled

A friend has a great idea for an Irish Potato Famine theme restaurant. The starters will be all based on wizened potatos, but then you get on a little boat which brings you across a moat to a US style burger joint, to symbolise the emigration and new life that resulted from the famine.
-- DV (dirtyvica...), July 18th, 2005 7:51 PM

most ethnic restaurants, including posh ones, that I've gone to, have been owned by people from the country the cuisine comes from.

i guess i don't expect much besides vulgarity from bloated megachefs - the entire luxury industry is unsubtle and off-putting, i don't think many people are impressed by it, or interested in it. like wolfgang puck or someone - think his london restaurant is at the mandarin oriental hotel, but prob best not to widen this discussion to luxury health spas.

as for people like ricker or bowen, seems there's inauthenticity there front and centre, it's part of the appeal. but to me the idea of a traditional Chinese or Indian restaurant run by white people is p strange and unlikely - I guess America may be different, are there really normal mid-priced ethnic restaurants opened and run by white people?

how does fuschia dunlop figure into all this, i like her :/

have you been for Mexican food in London lately garda

also lots of vaguely hip vaguely middle eastern stuff that looks pretty white the past couple years, also I kind of want to make a claim that the vogue for barbecue is kinda iffy on this level. But more iffy on so many others, so.

american-style barbecue is panracial

i think fuschia dunlop is fine! she's done the work, gone to actual cooking school in china and she writes respectfully about the food and what she learned. at least from what i've read. also she's a http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/8600450PU_zps0btgyi0e.jpg

but to me the idea of a traditional Chinese or Indian restaurant run by white people is p strange and unlikely - I guess America may be different, are there really normal mid-priced ethnic restaurants opened and run by white people?

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Tuesday, March 8, 2016 3:48 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

i wouldn't say its the majority but there are definitely a few examples in nyc.

there's http://kingscoimperial.com/, run by this person: https://www.instagram.com/tracyjanenz/

there's the aforementioned andy ricker and his thai restaurant pok pok

just heard of a new thai restaurant opening in the east village run by these guys

http://i.imgur.com/6LSWJnm.jpg

Best Irish breakfast in Dublin is in a French cafe run by Chinese people it's a glorious thing

and of course tao, which is like an infection spreading across america at this point, is run by this guy

http://i.imgur.com/tQ5mayN.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/swMaQmH.jpg

I don't get the tennis ball ref?

most ethnic restaurants, including posh ones, that I've gone to, have been owned by people from the country the cuisine comes from.

me too, and i'm american ¯\(°_o)/¯

tbh, i think big city dwellers who habitually eat at "nice places" have a rather rarefied sphere of concerns

http://i.imgur.com/z7zx875.jpg

tbh, i think big city dwellers who habitually eat at "nice places" have a rather rarefied sphere of concerns

― leet gentlemen's club (contenderizer), Tuesday, March 8, 2016 8:21 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

big cities happen to be where a lot of immigrants congregate.

lol @ bluegrass soy sauce

hey soybeans are a top commodity in kentucky though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJa1_u-VLE

omg I am dumb

american-style barbecue is panracial

― adam, Tuesday, March 8, 2016 7:46 AM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark

if you fall on the 'idc when white ppl open ethnic restaurants' side then i would hope that when u come to nyc u check out tyson ho's bbq spot arrogant swine

http://i.imgur.com/JXTZa76.jpg

welp i've been reading his serious eats posts about it for twenty minutes now

龜,

What are your thoughts on Maggi sauce/seasoning?

ARB

arrogant swine is good and that dude is chill af

ARB,

dont' have much experience with Maggi! from googling it seems to have gotten to where it is because of colonialism. but if the people of those countries enjoy it that's great. thanks,

龜

constantly reminded by coworkers how american/british approximations of "indian food" really aren't indian food -- it's as if the savory, disproportionately meaty parts of the cuisine made the cut and a lot of the day-to-day food isn't represented

which is too bad, because indian snacks tend to be pretty good and i love snacks. thankfully my coworker brought back snacks yesterday.

has anyone seen that michael pollan series "cooked"?

There is an unbelievable number of Chinese restaurants in Bangladash. I'd estimate they make up about 75% of all restaurants in Dhaka and virtually all of the non-chain places. No real pretence at authenticity and I'm pretty sure almost no Chinese chefs but it's interesting to see how it has been bastardised by a non-Western culture.

It's tough to nail down what people should mean when they refer to 'Indian food' as it is so heavily regionalised but I have always thought that Anglo-Asian hybrid cuisine is a legit strand in itself, though probably distinct from 'Indian food in Britain'.

how's the bangladeshi take on chinese food?

but I have always thought that Anglo-Asian hybrid cuisine is a legit strand in itself, though probably distinct from 'Indian food in Britain'.

i went here and enjoyed it!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/dining/hungry-city-mr-curry-saltie-williamsburg-brooklyn.html

otm about "indian food" not being a monolithic thing, i should have qualified. there was a fun conversation when another colleague whose contract was ending went out to lunch with a group and half of them were unimpressed because they went to her favorite indian restaurant that has more northern-style cooking, which they considered kind of bland

my friend of course looked at me and said "i bet you'd really like it"

burned!

has anyone been to danny bowien's taco joint, speaking of fusion and tangled food politics

adam - lauhound is also good in that it's heavy on pics and light on commmentary http://www.lauhound.com/

young white dudes wearing striped shirts should just stay home and eat mac & cheese or whatever

or just starve and die

― brotato chip (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 7 March 2016 22:07 Bookmark

what kind of stripes

Xps lots of cumin and coriander, emphasis on noodles over rice, often very sweet, fewer fresh vegetables, lots of fried / sizzling dishes, too much pineapple...

That restaurant looks interesting dayo!

Xp, my father went to one of the most highly rated Goan restaurants in London a couple of years ago, which is apparently pretty authentic, and ended up having to ask for piles of fresh chillis on the side mid-way through the meal as it was too bland to enjoy.

"it's as if the savory, disproportionately meaty parts of the cuisine made the cut and a lot of the day-to-day food isn't represented"

this is true of a lot of cookbooks too: you buy a thai or italian or indian cookbook, and what you're learning is more the "festive" foods than day to day foods.

that's not so much true of french cookbooks in english because there are so many of them now, but it's true of most french restaurants in the usa at least.

adam - lauhound is also good in that it's heavy on pics and light on commmentary http://www.lauhound.com/

this is good!

mh -- i've been to mission cantina (but not mission chinese) and his approach is so OTT postmodern that he sidesteps a lot of the authenticity/appropriation debate. this is in stark contrast to the kings county imperial joint that has stoked so much rage in this thread--those dudes just blunder into those debates head on and completely clueless, less "rapture" and more graceland.

the most offensive posts itt are the ones demonizing tripe.

crispy fried intestines, you'll always be the fries intestines of my heart.

fried is also a word, autocorrect, which you recognized once in that sentence. Get it together

British Indian cuisine is venerable now at 250+ yrs old, and I'm sure both it and the composite cuisines its based on have undergone a few mutations over that time

I always thought the meaty/kebabish character of trad curry houses here was to some extent due to the immigrants who were making it - more north Indian/Bengali/Punjabi and often Muslim

britain has had curry longer than fish & chips iirc

Friends of that background always tell me their families eat mostly dal and rice/vegetarian diet at home, and that the food served in Indian/stealth-Bangladeshi restaurants is "wedding reception food".

this thread does a really good job of making me hungry as hell

btw by "nice" restaurants i didn't mean michelin-starred, > $40/plate places (which i very rarely go to). just vaguely "nice," interior-designed, professional-looking-menu-type places. which, i admit, can run the gamut. but in chicago and madison, for examples, there are tons of such places owned by latinos, asians, etc. etc. etc.

i know nothing about the upper echelon of dining, because i'm not a hardcore foodie and i have no money to eat at such places.

props to Portugal re fish&chips & curry

in the UK I think most/all of the Michelin star Indian & Chinese restaurants are run and owned by British Indian/Chinese ppl

Actual appropriation so

asian cuisine has always been a big blind spot for michelin - i don't think started awarding stars in hong kong until within the past couple of years, to say nothing of the mainland

interesting. though i can't imagine that there were many of the sort of restaurants that michelin reviews in the PRC before the late 1990s.

one of the SF Bay Area michelin restaurants is Asian fusion, run by a chef from .... The French Laundry. I haven't been to either, though I went to the one in Los Gatos with my parents because my dad was given a gift certificate there as a retirement present.

Achieving what is deemed good taste in something is a very interesting state. It would seem to be purely socially defined.

one of my bff's just got back from visiting Portland and she said all the Asian food there ranged from tolerable to awful

and this is kinda relevant to the issue:
http://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/The-Bay-Area-s-Burmese-food-boom-6251404.php

And yet, the great majority of Portlanders can eat at such restaurants and not have the slightest inkling that they are exhibiting wretchedly bad taste by enjoying the food there. It is a puzzlement.

probably because so many of them are white ppl who only know white ppl food? apparently the donuts there were amazing though

Fwiw on Friday I'll be in SF and I'm going to a decidedly "nice" Thai restaurant run by a Thai woman which looks amazing.

which one?

Kin Khao

i'm off to get some lao food y'all

lol that's a hotel restaurant!

lol that's a hotel restaurant!

it is literally in a hotel.

I can live with that.

i've never been there ... not making fun of you for eating at a hotel restaurant ... it's just funny in context of authenticity/appropriation narratives, as I associate eating at the hotel restaurant with "things unadventurous white tourists do"

i get that but there are definitely instances of good restaurants happening to be in hotels

no doubt! it's just a stereotype.

ate at a hotel Chinese restaurant in Brno once and urgently regretted it. one of those in retrospect very bad ideas.

re:sarahell Your bff has probably eaten at more Portland area Asian food restaurants than I have, since on average I eat a restaurant meal about twice a year.

fwiw, Portland never had much of a "Chinatown" compared to many other west coast cities, so our Chinese restaurant scene has always been impoverished. But we did get a pretty large influx of southeast Asian immigrants in the 70s and early 80s, and we now have quite a few Vietnamese restaurants owned and operated by Vietnamese. We also have a good-sized representation of south Asians who mostly came to work in the high tech industry, which has instigated the appearance of some Indian restaurants.

But, if, as a Portlander, I am condemned to be served blandified and mongrelized Asian food adapted to white ppl's ignorant palates whenever I pay for a meal in a local Asian restaurant, even if the owners of the restaurant are Asian immigrants who know how to make food that better conforms to the original culture's idea of what tastes good, then wouldn't it make more sense to pity me for paying good money to eat slop, than to say I am to blame for ruining the food? How am I going to learn, if I am never exposed to the "real" thing, and how am I going to be exposed, if the owners choose to serve me slop? It's a vicious cycle.

Lol you're not doing anything wrong. IDC what you like. In fact you should tip 25-50% as long as you're eating at an asian-owned restaurant

FYI Portland never had much of a 'chinatown' because chinese immigrants were driven out http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Pacific%20Northwest%20History/Lessons/Lesson%2015/15.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_riot_of_1886

From another Wikipedia article:

Chinese Massacre Cove is an area along the Snake River in Wallowa County, Oregon, United States. It is located in the Wallowa–Whitman National Forest and the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, upriver from the Snake's confluence with the Imnaha River. In May of 1887, it was the location of the Hells Canyon Massacre, where thirty-four Chinese gold miners were ambushed and murdered.[

I think there are a lot of signifiers of familiarity or comfort that are taken for granted that some people don't wrap their heads around when it comes to seeking out restaurants. I was going through some Yelp reviews (the savages!) of local places and there are a number of comments about specific customs or signifiers in the dining experience I don't really care about that people seem to take as given quantities and find fault with restaurants that deviate from their norms.

On the other hand, a local favorite Vietnamese place recently reopened after a fire and I haven't even tried to visit because it's completely packed to the point they've had to close several days after running out of food. And it's been weeks. But every article about the place has a handful of "why do people go here, dish X is not as good as it is at these other three restaurants" comments which are probably true, but completely ignores the fact that this place is either a neighborhood destination or pretty much comfort food for many people because of their long standing.

To change the subject from Oregon's horrible treatment of minorities, the major reason I rarely eat at restaurants isn't so much a lack of funds as a lack of interest. I am usually able to prepare and eat better food at home, so I do.

I have not mastered Asian cuisine, though I wish I could magically acquire the ability - without putting in the necessary labor or having to buy all the proper utensils and specialty ingredients. The few dishes I make that vaguely resemble Asian food are deeply inauthentic and don't pretend to be anything but an assemblage of tasty ingredients put on a plate. Their only real virtue is that the ingredients are fresh and taste good together.

there are hotel restaurants and hotel restaurants. there’s the restaurant at the holiday inn in jamestown, new york that serves their hamburgers at room temperature. then there’s the boutique hotel that hires a world-class chef to develop a "concept."

i skipped the lao for lunch because it was out of my way and got hot pot. although i always feel bad eating at hot pot places because they give me 500% more food than i can possibly eat. so i end up feeling full while there’s still a huge stack of stuff on my plate that hasn’t even gone in the pot. but what i did eat was yummy.

number of comments about specific customs or signifiers in the dining experience I don't really care about that people seem to take as given quantities and find fault with restaurants that deviate from their norms.

there’s a subset of Yelp reviews by people who seem to expect an insance level of obeisance from waitstaff that just boggles my mind. those reviews are usually pretty easy to spot (they often have a /lot/ of paragraph breaks, words in ALL CAPS, etc.) and skip over.

another takeaway from yelp: groupon can be really bad for your business

"i had 18 groupons for ten free sandwiches each and the owner said i could only use one at a time! what nerve!"

places get a bunch of traffic of people not used to the cuisine or prefer an americanized version, groupon users get either overworked waiters or dishes that aren't what they're used to, reviews plummet

i wouldn't say its the majority but there are definitely a few examples in nyc.

there's http://kingscoimperial.com/, run by this person:

lol bless me father for i have sinned, but i was in ny last week and my friend was staying right by here (i have been a lot lately and mainly try to stay in manhattan cos it has more tourist value and more AUTHENTICITY) and i was going to a theatre show in bushwick so we went here. i guess i was hoping for some sort of twist or variance, like that's sort of how i'd praise pok pok or something, not that it's "refining" or shit like that, but that maybe there's a mix of things going on that i can't get in a more authentic place.

anyway i feel as if language like "watered down" is really bandied around when it comes to music, food (where at least it's more accurate), and other things, but i can honestly say this place was really very bland. i mean i dunno, i went to a western-type chinese place in my home town run by chinese liverpudlians from age 6 to anytime i visit my parents, and kings county couldn't even get that kind of thing right. like i think we got a salt and chilli pork chops, basically like fried meat, but there was no onion, or no chilli.

my friend got some type of twice cooked pork but it was shit. i can see the appeal of somewhere like this if the food was good, i have like three or four really good chinese restaurants near me now, i don't know why but in east london there seems to be a bit of a breakout of non-westernised chinese food. but they're mostly like bare bones places, with no conversation, no music, fittings and furnishings that are like they come from an office, a stink of oil etc.

i don't care about this shit and i prob eat at my fave one once a week, but it does kinda give perspective to the whole "nice" place thing. i mean, i was at one of the three on friday and it was prob the worst atmos and most dire room i've ever been in, despite being clean and quick service and fantastic food, and good value.

but i can see how if somebody opened a fancy restaurant with a maitre d and service and nice lights and music that the food wouldn't have to be authentic for loads of white people to go and try it. i mean i wouldn't say i feel welcome when i go to a smaller place. i'm not paying that premium that means the staff are trained to high-five me.

Ay if you want a twist or variance check out mission chinese (but only order the 'classic' dishes)

Also i havent brought up authenticity even once in this revive its a shell game dont fall for it

http://www.theonion.com/article/affluent-white-man-enjoys-causes-the-blues-1511 relevant 2 thread imo

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/dining/chinese-food-modern-american.html

good article

One was working as an accredited C.P.A. Another had just completed the requirements for a pre-med degree at the University of Chicago. Yet another, a junior employee at Morgan Stanley, walked down 75 flights in the World Trade Center’s South Tower and back into the family food business on Sept. 11, 2001.

These New Yorkers — Thomas Chen, Jonathan Wu and Wilson Tang — are among a few dozen Chinese-Americans who have recently surfaced as influential chefs, determined to begin a new culinary conversation with the food of their ancestors. Independently, they arrived at the same goal: to invent a kind of Chinese-American food that is modern, creative and delicious instead of sweet, sticky and bland.

But they took similar routes to get there. Despite their advanced academic degrees, these chefs started over as culinary students — usually against their families’ wishes.

“No Chinese parent sends their child off to college hoping they’ll work in a kitchen,” said Mr. Chen, 31, whose parents owned a restaurant in Mount Vernon, N.Y., while he was growing up. “That’s what you go to college to escape from.”

They worked their way up in high-end global kitchens like Noma, Guy Savoy, Eleven Madison Park and Jean-Georges. And then, having defied their parents, they defied their culinary training as well. They left the luxurious places where they had mastered foie gras and morels to open storefront restaurants where they can mess around with pork belly and pomelo, steamed eggs and sawtooth herb.

In addition to exploring a vast pantry of new ingredients (osmanthus, pandan, celtuce and wood ginger), they are facing a daunting new arsenal of Chinese cooking techniques, entirely different from the skills they’ve been schooled in.

“It’s not just recipes that are different,” Mr. Chen said. “It’s basics like how to hold a knife, how to trim an onion, how to boil vegetables.”

The phenomenon is certainly not confined to New York City, although several of its exemplary restaurants are clustered in Lower Manhattan: Mr. Wu’s Fung Tu, Mr. Chen’s Tuome, and Yunnan BBQ from Doron Wong, 39, and Erika Chou, 31.

It is also not new. Pioneers like Susanna Foo and Ming Tsai long ago opened ambitious, creative Chinese restaurants that paved the way. More recently Anita Lo, of Annisa in the West Village, has been the spirit guide for many young chefs; her stubborn conviction that Chinese food can flow seamlessly into Western fine dining smoothed the path for this next generation.

They include Justin Yu and Karen Man at Oxheart in Houston, Shirley Chung at Twenty Eight in Irvine, Calif., Brandon Jew of the eagerly awaited Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco, and Sheridan Su of Fat Choy in Las Vegas. In New York, Mission Chinese Food and RedFarm both have a similar spirit and exciting food.

There is also a junior class of specialists, like Hannah and Marian Cheng of Mimi Cheng’s DUMPLINGS! in the East Village, where the DUMPLINGS! are made from sustainable meat and served with farm-to-table vegetable sides from their Taiwanese mother’s recipes; the Boba Guys, who use organic milk and house-made syrup in their bubble tea; and Debbie Mullin of Wei Kitchen in Seattle, who makes small-batch shallot and chile oils.

Mr. Su is a refugee from fine-dining kitchens on the Las Vegas Strip who started a solo career making bao in a corner of a strip-mall hair salon. His newest venture, Flock & Fowl, is devoted to the classic southern Chinese dish called Hainanese chicken rice, but with upgraded ingredients and innovations like congee topped with fried (free-range) chicken, a poached (organic) egg and (house-made) pickles.

Most of these chefs have never been to China and have no Chinese culinary training, so they are learning as they go, synthesizing the values of the kitchens they know (organic, seasonal, soigné) with Chinese elements they do not. “No one would give me even the lowest kitchen job in Beijing,” said Cara Stadler, 28, who grew up in Massachusetts and moved to China with substantial experience in the kitchens of the chefs Guy Savoy and Gordon Ramsay. Instead, she started the city’s first underground supper club. “Going to the markets every day forced me to really learn about Chinese produce,” she said.

Ms. Stadler is now the chef and owner of Tao Yuan in Brunswick, Me., where the shellfish are plentiful and exquisite. Next week, for the Lunar New Year, she will be making plump scallop won tons — and then drying the bivalves’ side muscles to simmer into a homemade XO sauce, a fiery, funky, hugely popular condiment from Hong Kong.

Chinese ingredients by themselves are a vast field of study — dried mushrooms, cured meats, salted fish and bean pastes are only the beginning. Most of these chefs grew up without them: Instead, they ate a combination of American snacks, global fast food and the kind of meals a Chinese mother living in Dayton, Ohio, or Avon, Conn., might produce on a Tuesday night in the 1980s: beef stir-fried with romaine lettuce (in the absence of gai lan or bok choy) or fried rice studded with pepperoni instead of sweet lap cheong.

“Every Chinese family I knew had Dinty Moore beef stew in the pantry,” said Mr. Tang, 37, whose family owned real estate and Chinese bakeries in New York City, including the classic Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which he now runs. “You throw that in the wok with some soy sauce and chile bean paste, fresh rice from the rice cooker, it’s not bad.”

That kind of crude fusion doesn’t satisfy them anymore. From cookbooks and childhood memories, and through trial and error, they are feeling their way into one of the world’s most complex, ancient and demanding culinary traditions. So they are making their own five-spice powder, hand-cutting noodles and home-brewing basics like pickled mustard greens, chile bean paste and fermented black beans.

And they are hoping to find “essentiality” — the important modern value idea of making fine, fresh ingredients taste like themselves.

“Honestly, I thought that was a Japanese thing,” said Mr. Wu, of Fung Tu, who spent years working in the kitchen at Per Se. “I didn’t realize that Chinese food had that, only because I’d never had that kind of Chinese food.”

Mr. Wong, the chef at Yunnan BBQ, who grew up near Boston and trained in Hong Kong, where his family emigrated from, said: “Most Americans, including me at some point, have just never had Chinese food. When I went there and saw things like cornmeal wrapped in a banana leaf, or wood-roasted chicken wings, I thought, ‘Am I really that ignorant about my own food?’”

The answer was probably yes. Chinese-American food — mostly Cantonese banquet dishes adjusted for long-outgrown American tastes — is so ingrained here that even Chinese-Americans have come to believe that it is closely related to “real” Chinese food, when in truth it is a very, very distant cousin.

But that is starting to change as different cuisines and cooks arrive here from China, as more Americans travel to China, and as haute cuisine there bounces back from a long dormancy. Traditional (and modern) Chinese restaurants are thriving as the growing middle class and the new availability of ingredients from around the world have generated new demand.

Kian Lam Kho, 62, a software engineer turned chef who grew up in Singapore and lives in Harlem, is one of the few people equally at home in the American and Chinese culinary worlds. He returns to Asia frequently, snapping up old and new Chinese-language culinary textbooks as they come back into print. (Restaurants, culinary schools and cookbooks have been common in China since the Song dynasty, about 1000 A.D.) He used these texts to research his magisterial new book, “Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees,” which details not only the recipes and regions but also the underlying concepts that have been the building blocks of Chinese cooking — and of much East Asian cooking — for thousands of years.

He said the book was partly designed to teach English-speaking people of Chinese heritage like these chefs, who may have lost the language of China but not their loyalty to its food.

“Unless they understand the original dishes, what they cook will never have a real relationship with Chinese food,” he said. When they braise the classic red-cooked pork in the oven instead of in a wok, he said, or if they sear the meat first, the way they are taught in Western cooking schools, it changes the flavor, the mouthfeel and how everything works together.

Using clam chowder as a reference point, he said, “Anyone can take clams, potatoes, salt pork and milk, and make some kind of dish.” But if the pork fat is not rendered, if the potatoes are left whole, if the cooking is too fast, it will not be chowder.

This new effort to synthesize Chinese and American cuisines takes more study and skill than squirting a few drizzles of soy and hoisin onto Western dishes like grilled steak or mashed potatoes. Those thoughtless mash-ups are why these Chinese-American chefs now shudder at the term “Asian fusion” and go to great lengths to define what they are doing differently. (They are definitely not tinkering with sushi or dabbling in pad Thai.)

The term “Chinese-American food” has even worse connotations: heavy, sticky, deep-fried.

“We definitely need to figure out what to call it,” said Mr. Tang, who is a partner in Fung Tu.

Modern American-Chinese? Chef-driven Chinese-American? “Elevated or upscale sounds too snooty, especially when we’re basically serving ribs and noodles and chicken wings,” he said.

Another challenge, Mr. Tang said, is to decide whether the cooks supporting them in the kitchen should be graduates of restaurants like Hakkasan, who would have the Chinese skills, or like Gramercy Tavern, who have the fine-dining finesse.

“What we need is ABCs” — American-born Chinese — “who speak Chinese but also speak farm-to-table,” he said. “ And so far, there aren’t too many of us.”

to invent a kind of Chinese-American food that is modern, creative and delicious instead of sweet, sticky and bland.

the food at my ideal restaurant would probably satisfy all six of these criteria tbph

Blandly delicious?

oh hell yeah

Blandly delicious?

Some Korean desserts fit this

congee fits that description imo

if you're in NYC make sure to go to the food market in Queens

http://www.wsj.com/articles/building-a-food-festival-hold-the-fusion-1457472327

fuck a smorgasburg lol

I just feel like things can taste really amazing without being aggressively flavored and I'm into those things

Blandly delicious?
Some Korean desserts fit this

― badg, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 8:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it depends on your reference point. i find most american food too salty or too sweet.

i'm not a fan of sweets/desserts, but i quite enjoy korean desserts specifically because they are less sweet than, say, japanese desserts, though a few japanese desserts are less sweet

putting a night market in queens just seems inhumane

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/12/korea-paris-baguette-chain-expands-french-bakery

that's interesting. i've been to paris baguette plenty of times. it's fine. but a korean *chain* setting up shop in paris and selling baguette to parisians sounds weird. i would assume they're localizing their foods to satiate local palates

the koreans won some type of world baking contest recently as well, didn't they? i've had a lot of korean desserts; they're very good at baking. i prefer korean (birthday) cakes to american ones

yo i tried to go to that queens night market last year. we drove around corona for an hour trying to park before giving up and getting bhutanese food in woodside.

take the train i guess is my contribution here

Independently, they arrived at the same goal: to invent a kind of Chinese-American food that is modern, creative and delicious instead of sweet, sticky and bland.

this binary is one of the modern journalist, use it for food, music, clothes, art, whatever. not taking away from these chefs but fuck this kind of language tbh. might as well just say "food that is good, good and good instead of bad, bad and bad"

putting a night market in queens just seems inhumane

The park is a good space

How long have u been in nyc again? 5 minutes?

:)

i don't live in NYC lol

didn't realize it was in flushing meadows tho thats cool, was just worried there were no trains to wherever it was gonna be held

flushing meadows is a nice walk from the flushing train stop, you can also take the chinatown vans

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/22/467113401/lo-mein-loophole-how-u-s-immigration-law-fueled-a-chinese-restaurant-boom

the reasons why i feel so strongly about white ppl opening chinese restaurants are also historical - i wish this piece would have named the Chinese Exclusion Act by name tho

Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America in the early 20th century — and had been since the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S. Many non-Chinese workers felt threatened by these laborers, who often worked for lower wages.

Amid mounting social tensions, the U.S. passed immigration laws that explicitly barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming U.S. citizens, and made it extremely difficult for even legal residents to re-enter the U.S. after a visit home to China.

But, as MIT legal historian Heather Lee tells it, there was an important exception to these laws: Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.

"The number of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubles from 1910 to 1920, and doubles again from 1920 to 1930," says Lee, referring to research done by economist Susan Carter. In New York City alone, Lee found that the number of Chinese eateries quadrupled between 1910 and 1920.

that's interesting. i've been to paris baguette plenty of times. it's fine. but a korean *chain* setting up shop in paris and selling baguette to parisians sounds weird. i would assume they're localizing their foods to satiate local palates

the koreans won some type of world baking contest recently as well, didn't they? i've had a lot of korean desserts; they're very good at baking. i prefer korean (birthday) cakes to american ones

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 6:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

paris baguette is great lol there's one across the street from my office

authenticity of cronut appropriation questioned!
https://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Paris-Baguette-Croissant-Donut-Cronut-imitation

I've been to Paris Baguette in Manhattan. wasn't bad for New York bread! mostly I liked the desserts which were not very French but more Korean.

I haven't been to the one in Paris. there are plenty of chain-y boulangeries in Paris, lots of Brioche Dorées etc, lots of frozen vienoisseries, it's fine, wonder if they have the korean desserts there.

"Quant aux gâteaux à la patate douce et aux petits pains aux haricots rouges, ils ne figurent pas encore au menu."

so evidently no, they don't sell the Korean desserts here. blah.

there is a Paris Baguette in Berkeley. I had no idea what it was and why most of the people I'd see eating there were East Asian students, and now I get it.

"Quant aux gâteaux à la patate douce et aux petits pains aux haricots rouges, ils ne figurent pas encore au menu."

so evidently no, they don't sell the Korean desserts here. blah.

― droit au butt (Euler), Thursday, March 10, 2016 8:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah, there you go. if you've not eaten them before, though, i really recommend the red bean ones -- they're actually not normal red beans, but azuki beans. i quite like patbingsoo

http://www.thegreenespace.org/events/thegreenespace/2016/mar/24/wnyc-sporkful-live/

seems relevant.

Where's the line between culinary cross-pollination and cultural appropriation? What's the difference between taking inspiration from someone else's food and ripping it off?

Join Dan Pashman, host of WNYC's The Sporkful, at this live podcast taping with actress Rosie Perez, artist Ashok Kondabolu (aka Dapwell), and cookbook authors Chitra Agrawal and Nicole Taylor.

Is a burrito filled with sushi (like San Francisco's "Sushirrito") a beautiful symbol of the American melting pot or an offensive bastardization of two proud cuisines? When is it appropriate for chefs to cook food from a culture they weren't born into? How do our assumptions about people affect our assumptions of their food? And how do their assumptions about our food affect how we feel about ourselves?

The Sporkful will tackle these questions and more in this kick-off to their podcast series, "Other People's Food."

literally everything at paris baguette apart from the coffee bun is garbage

did you have to taste more than half the store to come to that conclusion

he had to taste everything

actually i was briefly addicted to the KOPAN also but that was a difficult moment in my life and i regret it

http://paris.cdn.malgnsoft.com/paris/event/2015/kopan/page.jpg

xpost i have eaten a regrettably large amount of the things they sell at paris baguette, yes. i am easily moved to action by novelty

i mean i don't eat there willingly, but i go to hmart every week and i sometimes pick up a snack. it's good for what it is. the caffe bene round the corner isn't any better (tom n toms is the one that is pretty much garbage), but there's a sul&beans in the same building, which is also originally from korea, and damn if that's not the best patbingsoo i've ever tasted

verdict on paris baguette vs. 85 degrees?
http://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/9g5Tq_t4H8atJu8wxn7EYw/o.jpg

been to both actually. 85 degrees hands down. but i believe 85 degrees is taiwanese

i have certainly never seen one in korea

is 'sul&beans' what sulbing trade as outside korea? -- yeah, on their facebook page that stuff looks the same. yeah, that's one korean chain i will hear no ill word said about.

tom n toms i am kind of fond of because they have some 24 hour locations i've found it convenient to sober up / sleep it off in. otoh someone just bought me a massive case of their coffee concentrate, coffee tea bags, etc, and it's a disconcerting fortnight's worth of coffee to contemplate.

paris baguette has the cool orange juice juicer for fresh OJ, and asian flavored lattes oh yeah

i had a good coffee from 85 degrees in changsha

tom n toms has the same rep here as in korea. you go there either to study, after partying or to doze off for a bit

ktown in la is its own little world, which is what i love about the place

anything good to read about transnational spread of ingredients and recipes / techniques in the precapitalist / colonialist world?

not intended as stealth search for evidence to rehabilitate practices of white ppl of yore and today, curious how this worked before food went full commodity

it didn't

easy read thx

another problem solved

next

interesting snippets in wikipedia article on transnational spread of DUMPLINGS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_(dumpling)

great thread y'all

btw - while it is fun and easy to generalize about mega-white portland, and the chinese and japanese food there is mostly awful, the quality and range of thai food is insane for an american city. there does not appear to be any demographic reason that this should be the case, but it is. nyc and the bay area do not even come close, esp in a per capita sense. and no i am not just talking about andy ricker / pok pok.

also voodoo donuts are strictly for tourists and local high school kids

re kings co imperial https://www.facebook.com/leung.stellayt/posts/10107535852218561

her description of the food kind of sums up how i felt. i'm not against high priced chinese food per se but there stuff is very...average...

there's also just a mismatch in principles about that place. if you want to focus on 'freshness' and 'locally sourced ingredients' like they do, sichuan and homestyle foods should not be what you do - you should focus on cantonese cuisine, which places much more of an emphasis on that.

in fact given that so much of the style they're looking for has its roots in /preserving/ food, fermentation etc it's totally weird to advertise that you use freshly sourced berkshire pork or w/e

yeah i didnt love kings co. i did have a fantastic meal at red farm though

it is really bland - even the rice isn't particularly good, which you'd imagine would be a basic.

imo that kind of indicts the reason why people want local/fresh ingredients -- it's more of a political or social move than it is for tastiness

my clueless friend booked a table at "black tree bk" in williamsburg the other weekend and we went and they

a) wouldn't seat us until everyone showed up despite the reservation
b) said "have you dined with us before?" which is just fuck you man

then the waitress was like, "everything on our menu comes from within 300 miles blah blah blah." my friend orders a campari and soda and she goes "oh, we don't have campari. it's not from within 300 miles." so we left and went to frost restaurant and had a fantastic meal with lots of campari.

italian-american food being an immigrant cuisine where people don't expect everything to be dirt cheap and also assume that the food is "fresh" and "well-sourced." idk if that's an assimilation-over-time thing or indicative of something more insidious

sorry that was stupid faux naif

italian-american food is contentious in that, I definitely know ppl who scoff at paying a lot for what they perceive as basics. on the other hand, there are other italian-american places that are perceived as fancy but no have real distinguishing features, cuisine-wise, that differentiate them from a kind of generic image of pan-italian americanized food

yeah paying $30 for pasta? but then again ppl are all about freshly made pasta with freshly made tomato sauce, olive oil that's been jarred this year, regional olives, idk

idk places like bamonte's (or john's in the east village or don peppe in ozone park) are not cheap in the way that chinese or mexican restaurants are expected to be and they generally don't tout artisanal this or locavore that. it's not like going to marea or some shit but we probably spent $50/person at frost that night.

p much disappointed by italian restos 99% of the time tbh

i've had the squid ink or w/e pasta in red wine at marea and it was good!

marea does look pretty good

jim--i don't doubt you but there's a particular brand of italian-american cuisine that you can find in places like brooklyn or the suburbs of new orleans that is largely sicilian/southern italian but incorporates other italian regional cuisines as well as mainstream american perceptions of what italian cuisine should be and ends up this weirdo reflexive hybrid that some days is my favorite food in the entire universe.

i have also eaten "italian subs" from a place on greenwich ave twice this week already

sietsema back at it again http://ny.eater.com/2016/3/15/11234846/hunan-bistro-spicy-restaurant-review

yeah paying $30 for pasta? but then again ppl are all about freshly made pasta with freshly made tomato sauce, olive oil that's been jarred this year, regional olives, idk

i had dinner at faro and it was italian redone as a deeply corny bklyn eatery but also v v good. actually only one v but still. their big thing was the grain used to make the pasta is made from organic, locally-sourced wheat. i dont think adam is really arguing against this but there are def other italian places based around similar concepts/marketing. yeah idk

faro is the corniest but yeah delicious

"Back in China the dish is fed to children to increase brain power; at Hunan Bistro, it’s merely the best thing on the menu" reads a little like "the inscrutable natives use this in their voodoo rituals... but to me it's just good eats"

i just gave up on reading it because its was stupid and i am now actually just starving. what i really want is korean though

Eating at an Italian chippy which for those uninitiated is about as Irish as food gets.

has to be much more irish than whatever ills are tagged with your country's name in my land this day of st. patrick celebration

Oh and mine

is it true that some of the american customs have been adopted? I weep

Green beer for all

tipping my green budweiser hat at darragh

america won't stop til ireland's rivers are green

It's not a big deal guys. I'm not shook.