Restaurants and National Cuisine

why have food in pill form when you can have food in foam form.

Ethnic cuisines are based around having access to only certain regional ingredients and a cultural tradition - in modern industrialed society there is access to practically every ingredient and a dearth of tradition, so mabye in the far future all ethnic cuisines will be rendered irrelevant (but since I don't see the long term survival of industrialized society, so it wont happen)

does this make me a twat of some description? writing it down makes it seems like a v. pretentious/pedantic thing to do...

in nz when you order a curry (indian, usually) they ask you how hot you want it - which is a bastardisation cause each dish should be geared one way or the other or in between on the hot scale anyway (eg vindaloo vs korma vs masala vs tandori) and then if you say 'hot' they say, 'kiwi hot or indian hot?'. and you're never sure which is hotter cause sometimes when people make curries they fuck them up and make them too hot (this often happens when the man of the house chooses to cook for the wife of the house and reminisce about his days as rootin' tootin' antipodian expat in london). so nz-hot is not what an indian waiter may think nz-hot is and nobody can agree on what it is cause not everyone has had the experience of having an intestine-dissolving curry made by a nz ex-expat.(i've had the very same made by an annoying anthropology professor who IS english. we call him 'jack russell', on account of his constant nipping and smallness, or 'old woman', on account of his moaning and bitching and strange voice - it's sexist i know, but he is too so it kinda fits) i usually end up with a dish that's too sweet and too mild; it's a fuckin lottery. the cultural thematicisation that mcdonald's employs isn't do anything to help stop people identify dishes with countries.

Has there ever been a newspaper of quality called The Herald?

Please note that I am not denegrating the Herald generally.

That's fine NICK DASTOOR, STAFF NUMBER 45361.

On Irish restaurants: When I was in San Francisco, there were several places advertising traditional Irish food: colcannon, boxty, some sort of stewy thing, some sort of fried thing ... it fades from the mind. Surely our American ideas of discrete foreign cultures are 100% accurate, though, no?