Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

What's your local cuisine?

04:41 / 12.11.02

I was just watching an episode of the British cooking show, Ready Steady Cook, and one of the cooks (he isn't a chef) made what he referred to as a Thai dish. Everyone went OOOOOOOOOH!! a lot and said "how EXOTIC!". It was rubbish. He even added CREAM at the end instead of the perfectly excellent and appropriate coconut cream he had at his disposal. Cretin. Anyway, this got me thinking. I live in Australia and I think that Thai is one of the most common cuisines around here. Within about 2 minutes walk from my front door are 3 Thai restaurants, it's hardly exotic. Indian is still a bit exotic. I've been to Britain and been blown away by the Indian food on offer. Nothing like the Indian food we get around Adelaide, I'd say it's probably a lot less authentic but it's brilliant. I love it - especially with chips (for chrissakes). Chips and curry sauce. Wow!! The king of all junk food IMHO. Nobody here has ever heard of such a concept.

So that's my answer, Thai. In Adelaide, South Australia, in my personal experiance, Thai is the most popular, and possibly also most common, cuisine about.

What is it where you are?

The Return Of Rothkoid

04:44 / 12.11.02

I'm in Sydney, and it's largely the same - only since I was away in the UK, sushi has started to creep up. It's certainly a lot more ubiquitous than it was before I left... maybe that should read Japanese food on the whole, not just sushi.

Nietzsch E. Coyote

05:00 / 12.11.02

In Vancouver, BC, Canada Sushi and japanese restaurants are the cuisine.

Every second corner has a japanese restaurant. The other corners are Starbucks.

wembley can change in 28 days

05:57 / 12.11.02

Toronto is half-sushi, half-Chinatown. That is, unless you're going for Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, or some variation on the falafel. There are chinese trucks parked outside the university buildings which offer scads of rice smothered with dodgy sauce, deep-fried tofu and noodles. Or you could go for the ubiquitous hot-dog-laced-with-crack. In Toronto it really depends on neighborhood, but there's no real such thing as Canadian Food (unless you count them moose burgers).

In Helsinki, the cuisine appears pretty effing local. I am terrified to go near the kebab places, pizzerias, or chinese food, because I have no idea what I'll be getting. Finnish food is comforting and quite bland: think lots of bread and porridge. The smoked salmon every day is a plus, though...

Nietzsch E. Coyote

11:02 / 12.11.02

Yeah, Vancouver can get like that too. There seems to be a slow rise in the Indian food. Especially in Surrey, which has the largest Indian population. But nothing rivals the fad level of Japanese.

11:15 / 12.11.02

Scotland's the home of everything-drenched-in-grease cuisine, or at least that's my current impression, from perusing the chip shops and cafes in this part of Glasgow. It's certainly not vegan-friendly. You can always buy haggis and chips, if you want to play the local card, or, amusingly, one popular accompaniment to chips is a potato fritter. "So hang on a minute, mate - you're basically eating chips with one extra large chip, is that right?"

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:44 / 12.11.02

Round our way it's that most popular of English dishes, the Indian takeaway, and various shops selling kebabs. Just along the road we have 'Oriental City' which is a shopping centre with a few Chinese newsagents and book shops, some ghastly shops selling cheap Japanese tat (I think I saw some Hello Kitty knock-offs in there) and the Japanese equivelent of Tescos. It also has a food court for various different types of cuisine, from Chinese takeaway stuff to more exotic stuff like Thai and Vietnamese.

12:24 / 12.11.02

You can always buy haggis and chips, if you want to play the local card...

Oh, I do love Haggis. Can't really get them round my way...

I seem to recall there being vegetarian (perhaps not strictly vegan per se) restaraunts in Glasgow – isn't there a big one in the Merchant City area? Wish I could remember the name of it...

12:27 / 12.11.02

The 13th Note (in King Street, I think) is vegan, and meant to be really good. I intend to try it out next month, so I hope so. But the Scottish diet isn't exactly known for its healthy vegan tendencies.

12:47 / 12.11.02

I just find it ridiculous that anyone can criticize a Chinese, Thai, Indian, Mexican, etc. takeaway restaurant as "not being authentic." Why should you care, if the meal is filling and tasty? Are you trying to absorb culture through the walls of your small intestine? Do your digestive juices magically transform the right combination of spices into knowledge? Is your stomach an imperialist? I'm all for foody miscegenation. Let the world's cuisines dance together in my belly!

Matthew Fluxington

13:06 / 12.11.02

I'm with Todd. I can't understand food snobs who eagerly embrace fusion restaurants but turn up their noses at excellent Americanized versions of Asian and Italian cuisines, as if the immigrints' contributions and adaptions are less valid or tastey.

13:18 / 12.11.02

Is your stomach an imperialist?

I do love the phrase foody miscegenation. But I also think that the stomach is an imperialist, sometimes. I'm not a purist, either. But it strikes me that if you call a dish of, say, buttered stir-fry "Chinese," then you've appropriated that word Chinese. You are sort of claiming a power to make the word mean whatever you want, and that has implications for all the other objects, including people, that the word is associated with. And indeed you have this power. But I don't think that it's completely ...polite to exercise as you like.

13:22 / 12.11.02

Hmmm....but what if Chinese folk run the Chinese restaurant that makes these bastardized version of Szechaun, cantonese, hunan, or whichever delicacies?

It's a confusing issue, if it's even an issue.

13:29 / 12.11.02

Oh for sure, it's totally complex... that's all I'm saying.

13:36 / 12.11.02

But anyway, the real right food is the Chicago-style hotdog --also known as garden on a bun!

14:04 / 12.11.02

Now, does that hot-dog have a weiner or a frankfurter in it? I need to be assured of its pedigree ...

14:04 / 12.11.02

I listened to a radio doc all about American hot dogs the other day, and was suprised to learn that they actually contain meat and stuff, and there's a tradition of standards and rivalries between the New York and Chicago dogs. In Britain, a hot dog sausage is a soft, pale pink frankfurter made of sponge. Do you get those over there at all? And is your hot dog sausage more like a normal sausage?

14:04 / 12.11.02

Being in Quebec, our claim to fame is the poutine. French fries(chips) smothered in gravy with cheese curds:
"To be really authentic the potatoes must be old. The gravy must be hot and the cheese must be cold. With a Journal de Montréal wherever it is sold. Served with a roll in a bowl by a troll.?Bowser & Blue, from The Night They Invented Poutine"
Thats our main local food..and tourtiere (meat pie) but thats usually only at christmas, we also have the worlds best smoked meat and bagels.

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:10 / 12.11.02

I think Persephone has a point, just as I'm turning into my dad and am unable to go out for a curry without pointing out that 'it's not really Indian food, y'know' But then, it is a business decision to sell a version of your home cuisine that is palatable to local people, and cheap/easy to produce. Interesting issue, actually. eg, Chinese food is the number one choice for eating out in large Indian cities, but the food bears little relation to what British people would consider a 'Chinese' to be.

Anyway, local cuisine

Fish and Chips! Fish and Chips!

As a Great British Seaside ResortTM, it's gotta be fish and chips, eaten on the pier, sitting in a deckchair. Washed down with a can of Coke, a stick of rock and some candyfloss.

But if you've still got some teeth left and want to know what's considered typical round here, then I guess, Seafood/Oyster Bars, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Japanese, Mexican. Another big thing round here is pubs with excellent food, lots of good sunday roasts...

Organic/veggie/vegan places are utterly (to the point of cliche?) typical also. To the point that the best and cheapest greasy spoon in town has a massive veggie menu, and all the late-night kebab places do felafel/humous kebabs!

God, I love living here sometimes.

14:20 / 12.11.02

Just going back to JAMM's point at the top - don't think anyone has mentioned this yet - but "Thai" food is now considered the most popular take away food in the UK, I don't think it's particularly considered exotic anymore at all. It apparently beats all the old favourites like fish & chips, tikka massala etc... I have to admit every second pub/restaurant in London these days does seem to be Thai. Which is nice.

Matthew Fluxington

14:24 / 12.11.02

Decent hot dogs are indeed made of meat. Beef, usually. If you have any inclination to eat a hotdog, the best idea would be to eat one that is Kosher.

14:36 / 12.11.02

I think I probably listened to that same radio program, and it actually raised my consciousness about what I know about eating hotdogs. It's weird how certain foods that you eat the most, you know the least. I learned that a Chicago-style hotdog is an all-beef hotdog, which is the sort of hotdog that we had growing up ...but the reason we ate those hotdogs --as opposed to regular pork hotdogs-- was because we were the only kosher Korean household in the Midwest that I knew about. So actually all-beef hotdogs count as Korean food for me. The other thing is, hotdogs was one of the three lunches that my dad used to fix for us and I thought that this business of piling vegetables on a perfectly good hotdog was another weirdness of his. But I just remembered --and I mean just right now-- he used to tell us that he practically lived on hotdogs when he first lived here, they were only ten cents and the only food he could afford in large quantities. And these must have been Chicago-style hotdogs. He was making us Chicago-style hotdogs!

Anyway. Real Vienna beef hotdogs are pretty meaty, not soft or spongy. But the texture is definitely processed, not like bratwurst. Maybe similar to kielbasa.

14:46 / 12.11.02

No abstract. I'm not sure I should encourage you by replying...

I don't know that we have one local cuisine here. Within a half mile of my apartment, there are two (great!) pizza places, at least 5 sushi bars, at least 5 Chinese restaurants, two Persian places, half a dozen or so Italian joints, four or so Mexican shops, a couple of Vietnamese restaurants, fourish Thai places, two Korean barbeques, and a handful of Russian bakeries/delis. It helps to live a couple of blocks away from two main commercial streets...

(And I'm not counting the nationwide chain restaurants at all.)

15:29 / 12.11.02

Vegan food in Glasgow is hard. A very hearty thumbs up to the 13th Note (great music venue too...) which is up by Trongate. There's also an organic place up at St Georges' Cross called Grass Roots that's probably worth a shot as well. Chinese places can almost always do something, ditto Indian and Thai places.

In London, people seem to eat anything/everything. Most of it pretty greasy.

16:01 / 12.11.02

local cuisine: you name it, except maybe Ethiopian (you have to drive a ways to get to one). local *local* is conch fritters, fried gator tail, fresh fish and key lime pie.
(oh, and wembley, there's a *selection* of Finnish places in my hometown. dill and salmon over potatoes. what brings Finns to Lake Worth is a mystery, but there's a huge population. funny thing is, the Finnish neighborhood is near the Guatemalan neighborhood, so you see these huge, skinny blond people getting out of the way of these tough-looking, five-foot-tall brown dudes.)

Todd:Hmmm....but what if Chinese folk run the Chinese restaurant that makes these bastardized version of Szechaun, cantonese, hunan, or whichever delicacies?

It's a confusing issue, if it's even an issue.

Near where I take tai chi, (Miami's lame stab at a Chinatown), I was getting some takeout at one of the Chinese places, started chatting with this Orthodox Jew sitting inside, turned out he was the owner. All the staff = very Chinese. Odd experience.

the garden gnome

16:22 / 12.11.02

with demonstrable globalization of foodstuffs, hell...all comercial goods, is there even such a thing as a true 'local cuisine' anymore?!

sure there are regional flavors that give it it's own quality, but in the end it's all cow...or soybean.

20:49 / 12.11.02

Canadian food=doughnuts.
Solitairerose would argue that back bacon would fall under the "Canadian Food" category as well.

20:55 / 12.11.02

don't think anyone has mentioned this yet - but "Thai" food is now considered the most popular take away food in the UK, I don't think it's particularly considered exotic anymore at all.

Well thank God for that! I'm moving to the UK in January so I was worried that missing Thai food might be something that I spent a lot of time doing (when I wasn't happily wolfing down chips and curry sauce anyway).
I absolutely agree that cuisine does not have to be authentic to be good food too. Fusion can produce some excellent results but, as someone else pointed out, the result ceases to BE Indian or Thai once it's been fused.
Have you noticed that when you watch those cooking shows that do cullinary tours of various countries, it's always the English speaking "western" countries that seem to be into fusion and a wide range of international cuisines available to all and the "eastern" countries, or non English speaking ones, seem to stick to what's local? I suppose there must be British restaurants in India and of course there are American restaurants the world over (well, certainly the ubiquitous "Family Restaurant" chains anyway) but when these shows travel to China they show regional Chinese dishes, in India they show regional Indian food. I just watched one on Scotland last night and they devoted most of the time to mars bars fried in batter! Ones on Australia do seem to mention Thai influenced food a lot more than anything else but what some countries think of as Australian cuisine, Kangaroo and Emu dishes and the like, are little more than novelty foods in reality here. True, every supermarket has these meats on the shelves and people do buy them and cook with them, but I can only think of one small restauarant chain that actually specialises in what it calls "Australian Cuisine" which mainly uses these kinds of ingredients.

Murray Hamhandler

22:26 / 12.11.02

Bloomington, IN has an amazing array of cuisine from all over the globe (most notably, a Tibetan restaurant owned by the nephew of the Dalai Lama. Goooood eatin'...). And most of the good restaurants are w/in short walking distance from one another (namely, located around the IU campus). And yet I still manage somehow to eat Mexican food 4-5 times a week...

at the scarwash

22:00 / 13.11.02

In Houston, Mexican obviously. And Vietnamese. The best Vietnamese Po Boys in the world are in Texas.

22:04 / 13.11.02

Northern California cusine, I believe, is referred to as "the best goddamn food in the world."

Seriously, though; we have some amazing fresh, organic food, along with some of the best chefs and restaurants in the world.

However, since it's in the USA, it has to be stolen from somewhere else to be any good. In our case, it's a version of Northern Italian/Southern French cuisine with local ingredients.

03:01 / 14.11.02

Philly's got an array of foods that are building on the higher end of the spectrum. Lots of pan-asian cuisine is floating about as Starr keeps opening more restaurants. The Italian market has some great fresh veggies and the food is top-notch. Roll into the bakeries and get some bread and fresh cut pasta. I'd say that the pastries here are some of the best anywhere.

Now...if you're just talking the everyday food thing, then you're talking about the philly cheesesteak. Enough grease, fried onions and cheese whiz to smoke the digestive system but finds it's way in after the tequila on a Saturday night.

03:22 / 14.11.02

Down here in Melbourne town, we're pretty spolit for international cuisine. Within a couple of block of my home in Fitzroy (soon to be down the road in Collingwood) you have Thai (at least 3 resturants), Italian, Chinese (Cantonese and Henan Provincial), African (Ethopian), Tibetan, Japanese, Malaysian, Afghan, Lebanese, Turkish, Greek, Spanish, French and various trendy places doing sort of 'international' cusine. Plus a heap of bars, pubs and cafes as well as the northern gay district (more pubs and clubs). Its a nice place to live...

03:24 / 14.11.02

I forgot the Vietnamese place, and the Brazillian place down on Smith St... There's probably a Mexican place as well, but I'm not a big taco eater meself...

20:26 / 17.11.02

Fool, I was going to post something, but since I live in Collingwood, I'll just throw in a "yeah, what he said".