The Off Topic Topic

[Sheilbh]

My best friend is Taiwanese and whenever I want to get him riled up I just say something about "chinese food". He is simultaneously confused why Chinese food in America is reduced to a few shit dishes and why there is a concept of "chinese food" when there is so much variation in China (we don't usually talk about "european food").

Totally agree and the same goes for Indian food which often, popularly, covers from the top of Pakistan down to Sri Lanka where there's obviously huge regional differences. Again in the last sort of 20-30 years in the UK people have started to become aware of the differences and started to seek out the different types of food and recognise what's distinctive. Which if, like me, you just like trying lots of different food is great.

But there is definitely a menu of a traditional UK curry house or Chinese that is probably unique to the UK

One theory is that there is an immigration model from China that helps families get set up in the US by moving to places without a chinese restaurant and setting one up there. So we end up in a town in rural alabama and will often find a chinese restaurant run by an immigrant family. From what he tells me, some family in China gets the ability to move to the US but doesn't really have contacts here, and immigration groups will identify that bumblefuck, alabama doesn't have a chinese restaurant and help them with what they need to do to get it going. Of course the family isn't a group of gourmands, and the customer base in bumblefuck, alabama probably doesn't want sophisticated food anyway. So you get a zillion restaurants with cheap and crappy chinese food and that is how americans encounter the cuisine.

I assume that would be vaguely applicable to europe as well.

Yeah - there's a really good film on Netflix called (I think) "In Search of General Tso" which is about the immigrant Chinese restaurants in the US - which were organised exactly as you say.

And in the UK Chinese food has been transformed in the last 20 years which reflects changes in immigration. The traditional "Chinese" here was Cantonese because most immigrants came from Hong Kong and it was heavily tailored to local tastes. Now there's a large mainland Chinese and Taiwanese population there's far more regional restaurants. Plus at the high end there are lots of expensive restaurants exploring the different regional traditions. Near me is a very famous Xinjiang restaurant in London which is excellent - but then I recently read a review by an expert in Chinese food (she spent years in China studying in different regions) and she described it as "Han" Xinjiang food because it basically serves the type of "Xinjiang food" you get in, say, Beijing or Shanghai not really Xinjiang food

It's not just Europe and the US though - I know there's Indo-Chinese food which are Chinese restaurants in India that have very distinctive dishes tailored to Indian tastes. I imagine there's something similar with Indian restaurants in China (just like in Europe and the US).

It's why I think authenticity is sort of bogus and pointless to look for in food - it's all good as long as it's tasty and we acknowledge our sources

And, as someone who likes trying lots of things, it's a good time to be eating out

[Sheilbh]

In Spain a disproportionate number of Chinese immigrants hail from the province of Zhejiang, which has influenced what Spaniards think (and expect) as "Chinese food" massively. The dishes I could find in your throwaway cheap Chinese restaurant in both New York and Barcelona were nearly nothing alike, which was rather funny (I wish somebody imported General Tso's Chicken, which IIRC isn't even Chinese to begin with).

Fuchsia Dunlop's written at length about General Tso's chickent - it does have a real origin but there is a Taiwanese chef who claims to have invented the modern American version. He said it's from a Hunanese dish (which is where he was from) but he moved to Taiwan because he was working for Nationalist leaders. He later had a high end restaurant in Taipei that was very successful and expanded in the late 60s to one in New York (near the UN HQ) where it was incredibly popular with Americans (including Kissinger) and then almost overnight every Chinese restaurant in New York did it and then it expanded all over America. But at each step from Hunan it was changing to meet local tastes.

There's a bit of me that would love to travel round Europe trying the most "typical" local dishes in different Chinese restaurants because I'm sure the food would be entirely different from the UK to Spain to France to Ukraine.

[Tamas]

For how "ancient" national foods are, you can look at Hungary: remove tomatoes potatoes and especially paprika and you have no national dish left.

On a side note, I agree with those who say gulyás or as you people know it goulash can't be a real traditional food because there is no way your average Hungarian peasant would have used beef to chop it into some soup. It was likely a 2oth century Viennese restaurant innovation, or so I have read.

[The Larch]

There's a bit of me that would love to travel round Europe trying the most "typical" local dishes in different Chinese restaurants because I'm sure the food would be entirely different from the UK to Spain to France to Ukraine.

IIRC in many former Soviet bloc countries many of their "Chinese" restaurants are actually run by Vietnamese, for instance. They'd travel there as part of socialist friendship programs and scolarships and end up settling there.

[The Larch]

This reminds me of one of my favourite Twitter accounts: Italians Mad at Food:
https://twitter.com/ItalianComments

That one is amazing.  If you want to see a more sophisticated version, there's a Youtube channel used by some official Italian food promotion campaign that from time to time makes a few chefs watch Youtube videos featuring how to make a certain traditional Italian recipe, and they don't mince words in their criticism. 

[celedhring]

People being snarky about food is timeless entertainment. 

[The Larch]

People being snarky about food is timeless entertainment. 

One of the funny things about these Italian videos I mentioned is that, in the group of real chefs watching how Youtube cooks do their versions of the recipes they almost always include an old lady with a face that implies that she's been doing the traditional version of the recipe in her restaurant for decades and is able to do it blindfolded and with a hand tied behind her back, almost always ending up with an expression of grandmotherly dissapointment at how the Youtube cooks do the recipe. 

[celedhring]

People being snarky about food is timeless entertainment. 

One of the funny things about these Italian videos I mentioned is that, in the group of real chefs watching how Youtube cooks do their versions of the recipes they almost always include an old lady with a face that implies that she's been doing the traditional version of the recipe in her restaurant for decades and is able to do it blindfolded and with a hand tied behind her back, almost always ending up with an expression of grandmotherly dissapointment at how the Youtube cooks do the recipe. 

That lady has achieved stock character status already In the Catalan version of "My restaurant rocks!" they always have one like that, ALWAYS.

[Sheilbh]

This reminds me of one of my favourite Twitter accounts: Italians Mad at Food:
https://twitter.com/ItalianComments

That one is amazing.  If you want to see a more sophisticated version, there's a Youtube channel used by some official Italian food promotion campaign that from time to time makes a few chefs watch Youtube videos featuring how to make a certain traditional Italian recipe, and they don't mince words in their criticism. 

Will look it up. We also have Gino d'Acampo (an Italian chef) on Breakfast TV whose reactions are fairly iconic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc

There was also a lovely counterpoint on this where I think young Chinese-Americans and their parents or grandparents tried various options on, I think, the Panda Express menu. It was hilarious - all of the young people were like "this is disgusting/disgraceful/insulting to our heritage " and all the elderly people were saying "this is quite nice - reminds me of a dish in China. Very tasty"

[The Larch]

This reminds me of one of my favourite Twitter accounts: Italians Mad at Food:
https://twitter.com/ItalianComments

That one is amazing.  If you want to see a more sophisticated version, there's a Youtube channel used by some official Italian food promotion campaign that from time to time makes a few chefs watch Youtube videos featuring how to make a certain traditional Italian recipe, and they don't mince words in their criticism. 

Will look it up. We also have Gino d'Acampo (an Italian chef) on Breakfast TV whose reactions are fairly iconic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc

There was also a lovely counterpoint on this where I think young Chinese-Americans and their parents or grandparents tried various options on, I think, the Panda Express menu. It was hilarious - all of the young people were like "this is disgusting/disgraceful/insulting to our heritage " and all the elderly people were saying "this is quite nice - reminds me of a dish in China. Very tasty"

Yeah, I know him because of his rant about Bolognese sauce. In the "Italians mad at food" twitter account they use that one as their template for reactions.  https://twitter.com/ItalianComments/status/1317920806920478720

[Oexmelin]

For how "ancient" national foods are, you can look at Hungary: remove tomatoes potatoes and especially paprika and you have no national dish left.

On a side note, I agree with those who say gulyás or as you people know it goulash can't be a real traditional food because there is no way your average Hungarian peasant would have used beef to chop it into some soup. It was likely a 2oth century Viennese restaurant innovation, or so I have read.

A Hungarian student of mine actually did a long research paper on paprika and its association with Hungarian national sentiment. It's is predictably tied with the rise of agroindustrial business in late 19th c. and early 20th.

[Josquius]

On southern US food I've lately discovered bisto do a type of gravy called southern style, all decorated with American flags, which is actually really really good. Can't put my finger on why.

[Malthus]

pizza, steak, and hamburgers beat offal and boiled chicken, sorry

Italian fury incoming

I love offal but it's something I associate with European/non-British food. British people are generally far too squeamish about this stuff, especially the English - it's fairly regional. I'm very weird for liking it so much

American pizza is a whole separate thing from Italian. I like it more as well

And them there is Chicago style pizza ... boy was I ever disappointed by that! I'd heard it was not to be missed. I tried it, it was more like a stew than a pizza. Not a big fan here.

[Josquius]

I miss Swedish style pizza. Never remarked upon but oddly different to American and Italian. Good though.

[Malthus]

I miss Swedish style pizza. Never remarked upon but oddly different to American and Italian. Good though.

Pizza with Surstromming instead of anchovies? 😉