I’m in China and I can get the same damn Big Mac I could in the US. (I prefer not to though.)
Not only does Chinese food vary across regions of China, but it generally adapts itself to the cuisine of whatever other country the Chinese immigrants find themselves in.
I’m far from America but can (could) get many of the ‘food’ items Americans find at their local McDos.
I’m far from China but can get most of the Chinese food items you can get there, in a mile radius from my house.
Exiting my garden’s gate I have to walk less than 50 yards to be seated at a Chinese restaurant. If I was on my way to McDo’s, I’d walk by another one and then couldn’t even get a double quarter pounder with cheese because they don’t have it.
Are we comparing the globally most commonly eaten and available food to a junk food corporation?
I would be very surprised if you could get Uyghur, Mongolian, Cantonese, Szechuan, Shandong, etc. all within a mile radius of your home. I’m in China itself and I probably couldn’t.
I claimed:
I’m far from China but can get most of the Chinese food items you can get there, in a mile radius from my house.
I can even get China food. Bet you can’t.
Yes, there is great variety in Chinese Food.
Much over a fourth of the food consumed by humans on this planet is prepared as Chinese food.
I doubt that its variety compares favorably to that of the other three quarters though.
My examples were probably not well chosen being, as you say, tourist traps in some sense. I’m saying I could go down to Chinatown, or Little Italy, or another place with a cluster of restaurants from a particular ethnicity, and find plenty of places that are both mediocre, and yet also popular with people of the same background as the cuisine served.
It’s really not hard, because Americans may be notorious for adoring their shitty chain restaurants, but there is no white-anglo-american monopoly on bad taste.
On the flipside, I’m seeing more and more Chinese restaurants located outside Chinatown, and a non-Chinatown location is no longer shorthand for a place that serves sweet-and-sour chicken balls and greasy fried rice. Some of these places are damn good, even though they tend to cater to a largely non-Chinese clientele.
After a week of eating in local restaurants and cafes in Florence, I enjoyed the luxury of eating in a local McDonalds. It was such a relief to go somewhere where I knew exactly what everything was, what quality to expect, how much it would likely cost and how quickly I could get served. It was a crappy burger and limp fries, but it really hit the spot
A common phenomenon at every cart-service place I’ve been, and I think it happens because most non-Chinese really don’t like (or don’t think they’ll like) the chicken feet, the tripe, etc… The people pushing the cart have plenty of experience being told “no thanks” by non-Chinese who see what’s in the steamers. If you like those things, you’ll probably have to chase down that cart and insist.
I have a similar issue around spicy foods, particularly Sichuan. A lot of the dishes don’t work nearly as well if the spicing (not just heat) is dialed back to what my taste is assumed to be. The classic recipes are as they are for a reason, but many servers and cooks assume that non-Chinese just don’t like Sichuan peppercorn, for example. Mapo tofu is glorious if made well, with loads of chili heat and Sichuan peppercorn. It’s boring and bland if those elements are reduced to token amounts (or entirely absent, as the peppercorn sometimes is).
I’ve had so-so meals and great meals at the same place – the only difference being that in the one case assumptions were left unchallenged, in the other we were adamant about liking the food made the “traditional” way.
外國人， 老外，and 鬼佬 are the most common ones, with the third one, the Cantonese gweilo, being the least complimentary. It means roughly, ghost thing. The one used in the video, 老外 or lao wai, is most common in China, and is sort of passive aggressive respectful, ‘old outsider,’ old being a kind of honorific. Foreigner is a perfectly good translation of it.
If someone decided to “help” me by refusing to serve me tripe, I’d be really pissed.
In this case, it’s a restaurant serving food from a particular region of China, though. Not generic (oxymoronic) “Chinese” food (that likely does not even originate in China).
But even worse, restaurants from ethnically-themed areas may heavily rely on tourists who aren’t from that region for their business. (Because a “Chinatown” or “Little Italy” more often than not may be more a historic remnant no longer catering to those communities, kept alive by tourism.) All I’m saying is, if I see a restaurant that’s full of people from the region where the cuisine hails from, it’s usually a much safer bet than a similar restaurant with no people from that region. Sometimes interesting fusion cuisine happens, but more often than not, in the latter case, it’s just a matter of the restaurant filing off the edges, removing recipes and ingredients, to make something generically acceptable to uneducated palates.
I’m in Montreal, a city with two “Chinatowns” (they’re actually more pan-Asian districts), one of them only about a decade old and still growing. Both still serve the older Chinese-Canadian community and recent Chinese (and other) immigrants as well as tourists or non-Asian locals. Both have some good restaurants and some not so good ones, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that you cannot tell the good from the bad by eyeballing the clientele. You really just can’t.
And then you see a northern-style dumpling place outside Chinatown… would you avoid it because there are few or no Asian clients? In some cases that would make you a fool.
Your description is more apt for our Little Italy, but the more salient point I think is that Italian-Canadians tend not to be foodies to the same degree as Italians from Italy tend to be, though there are exceptions of course. We have a handful of very good Italian restaurants that would pass muster in Italy. We also have some pretty mediocre places that many Italian-Canadians happily frequent and recommend.
This reminds me of William Deming, statistical process control, and aiming for the center of targets to better ensure that results fall within some acceptable band.
