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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2909 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In my area of the midwest, many Mexican restaurants serve an almost certainly horribly inauthentic paella. Mexican rice plus fajita vegetables (onion, bell pepper, tomato), chicken, shrimp, and covered in queso. As far as I know, proper paella has no queso. Does that mean I never order paella? No, absolutely not, I love the stuff around here. I am similarly told that a chile relleno filled with liquid-ish queso cheese is also not authentic, and I usually order one of those too.

What is your favorite inauthentic dish that has been mangled by cultural transfer?

Hmm. Japanese curry might count. It’s a mangled Japanese imitation of a mangled British imitation of Bangladeshi (?) curry.

But by now very recognisable as it’s own thing so ymmv.

I'll never laugh harder than when I found out what Baa-mon-to kare with apples was meant to be. So many layers of bastardization it becomes original again.

Lots of weird food things like that here.

As you say バーモントカレー is "Vermont curry." The roux is apparently sweetened with apples and honey at some point. It's good. I prefer the 辛口 or spicy version.

There's an "Indian Beef Curry" in a heat-up pouch in the supermarket up the road. I have no idea what's going on there.

Spaghetti Neopolitan / ナポリタン is boiled spaghetti with chopped up wieners, onions, green pepper, and the sauce is...ketchup. That's like Heinz ketchup, not some special Dijon ketchup or whatever.

Though I've literally never seen a pig in 25 years in Japan (other than wild boar), tonkatsu or pork cutlet (katsu is just short for katsuretsu or cut-let and ton is 豚 which is also pronounced buta or pig) is everywhere. (Notably I have seen wild boars, but no pigs, no hogs, none of that. For that matter I've seen precious few chickens either, but chicken is everywhere here.)

One of the most revolting wines I've ever had is relatively popular here and is labeled Bon Marché, which basically means "cheap" in French.

Any new product that presumably is desired to seem fancy will have one of two words associated with it (or both): Premium, or simply the word "The" in front of it. Example 1　　Example 2

Oh, and to be fair we had a store called Bon Marché for years, so there's a good chance they just googled "french advertising stuff"

Yeah, with the price of imported feed plus processing costs I can't imagine making a profit at it. Esp when half the market is satisfied by cheap imports from the US and Canada.

I'd assume most of ethnic food restaurants catering for general US public would be somewhat inauthentic in some way. Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Indian, Vietnamese, whatever it is - they would make some adjustments because otherwise Americans would just not go there. It's not that people's tastes never evolve, it's just it takes a long time to get used to something genuinely new, and the restaurant may not survive that long without customers. This is not true where there are a lot of relatively recent immigrants which have "old country" tastes, then the restaurant can rely on them and slowly expand their clientele to others but if that's not the case then they'd have to do something "inauthentic". I am personally fine with that - as long as it tastes good for me, I don't care it tastes differently thousands of miles away from here.

There’s reasonably authentic Mexican food catering to a white clientele in areas with a strong Hispanic presence.

There can be. I live in an affluent white area with a strong Hispanic presence, and all the Mexican food around here is terrible, which I've verified with lots of real live Mexicans. It's a mystery.

Have the white men there discovered lengua yet? It’s not so much a woman thing, but when the men get into the magnificent mystery meats of Mexico there tend to become authentic taquerias catering towards whites.

I'd settle for authentic taquerias catering to Mexicans! But no, to get lengua I have to go deeper into immigrant territory.

That's my point - if you have a strong presence of the people with non-"standard American" tastes, then you can sustain authentic cuisine. If you're just in a random place without large fresh immigrant population, you probably won't find a lot of authentic.

For sure, and a good pattern for how that can happen, but excuse me, I asked for your favorite inauthentic dish that has been mangled by cultural transfer. Like, worst of the worst, you're-doing-this-so-wrong type thing.

I told a friend from western USA that I put romaine lettuce on my tacos, and he reflexively said an incredulous utterance and immediately went to get his Mexican wife's opinion on it.

I'm partial to chicken tikka masala

Pizza

Question- were you at a mexican restaurant or a tex mex restaurant? They’re different cuisines and authentic Tex mex is a thing you can get. It has queso(the dip), Chili, enchiladas, etc. They’re all authentic, just not Mexican.

I don't think there's any real way to tell out here. Every restaurant I go to serves fajitas, which are Tex-Mex, I'm told.

As I understand it, paella (which hails from Spain) is not even all that popular in Mexico, and certainly isn't "Mexican" per se. So I think there's an amusing double-layered inauthenticity going on here. In fact I don't think I've ever seen it in a Mexican restaurant, only in Spanish ones (although I live in the Northeast, so neither of us is really getting an authentic picture of Mexican cuisine... the one time I went to Mexico we stayed at a resort, but for what it's worth, the resort had both a Mexican and a Spanish restaurant: the Spanish restaurant had paella, and the Mexican one did not).

Anyway, for me, it has to be American-style spaghetti and meatballs. How could the Italians come up with each of spaghetti, meatballs, and marinara sauce and then not combine them in one dish?

Rural Italy was quite poor. Making spaghetti was laborious. Meatballs were a rare treat to be savoured.

They didn't want to drown all that in tomato sauce.

Seafood pasta dishes are actually more traditional.

Once they started extruding pasta in the 19th century it became a lot cheaper.

Italian-Americans could afford meat and had access to extruded pasta and canned tomato sauce. So they experimented with traditional ideas and new ingredients.

Seafood pasta dishes are actually more traditional.

To be fair, that's also true in Japan- instant noodles (just add water and boil for a while) are convergent evolution.

Thank you, I was wondering for a while whether I was actually wrong and that that's just how Mexican paella is. I wish I could drag someone who would know to my favorite spots and ask them about everything on the menu. Are nacho fajitas authentic? What about all these quesadillas? Notable Mexican dish omissions from American-Mexican cuisine includes pozole, which is insanely common in Mexico apparently but nowhere around here makes it. I asked a waiter if they had it once, and he laughed and said "my mom makes it just about every night" but admitted the restaurant does not make it.

I had no idea spaghetti and meatballs was a falsehood. I have to wonder what they do with their spaghetti.

  • Nacho fajitas are not authentic Mexican-Mexican but they are authentic American - Tejano/Tex-Mex to be specific.
  • Quesadillas, if on corn tortillas with an appropriate cheese, are authentic. Fun note, in Mexico City you have to explicitly ask for queso in your quesadilla otherwise you'll get a tortilla with fillings but no cheese. This makes Mexicans from other parts of Mexico angry.

Thanks. I'll have to take some photos of a menu and send them to you sometime.

Indo-Chinese food is excellent, and I prefer it over other varieties of Chinese food. Chinese food in general takes the cake here. I also had a soft spot for delivery pizza, but Domino's is hot trash now.

Does pizza count? By now, most people's image of pizza is the American pepperoni style rather than the original Neapolitan Margherita style.

I had a chance to try Neapolitan style pizza by actually visiting Naples some 20 years ago. It was ok, but also not categorically different from other decent pizzas I’ve had. The ”authenticity” is much overrated.

Pizza definitely counts. I love American style pizza, but it's pretty much nothing like the Italian dish that it shares a name with.

New York pizza (by far the most popular US style I guess) and Neapolitan pizza are different, but not so much so that they’re wholly different dishes. For example, they use pretty much the same ingredients and are recognizably the same dish. Even in Italy Sicilian pizza is called ‘pizza [Siciliana]’ and is more different from Neapolitan pizza than New York pizza is.

I would say the most popular US style by far is mass market pizza chains, which is closest to NY style but isn't exactly the same. When I see NY style it's big, floppy slices which have maybe one or two toppings and you fold up to eat. I agree that's not super far off from Neapolitan pizza, but a Papa John's slice loaded down with toppings is a lot further away imo. And of course once you get to Detroit style or Chicago style (the best pizza style by far, don't @ me New Yorkers) it barely resembles the original any more.

NY style is crispy, while mass market Papa John’s / Pizza Hut are floppier, like the original Neapolitan (albeit with a heavier, thicker dough). Yes, you can add many weird toppings, but the Italians do that too (see their beloved “american” pizza with mini hot dogs and french fries on it, unironically a favorite of many Italians). Yes, you can get it with barbecue sauce as a base instead of marinara, but Italians have their own white pizzas that don’t have marinara either. Order a Pizza Hut pizza with tomato sauce and cheese for an Italian and they might call it (quite justifiably) a bad pizza, but it is pizza.

Huh, I'm not sure. Pizza took off so hard that now it's like there's competing visions of the food rather than one clearly right one and one clearly wrong one. When I was in college, I liked the margherita pizza they served, but it was mangled too. Big, round slices of tomato on each slice of pizza, along with basil in roasted whole leaf form. I'm not sure if I've actually ever tried the proper kind yet. Might be something you have to go to an urban area to get.

This reminds me of American sushi versus Japanese sushi. I think I prefer American by a lot -- maki rolls are way better than nigiri. Raw fish all tastes very similar to me, and I am apparently too unrefined to get much out of raw fish. Interesting texture, I guess.

General Tso's chicken/orange chicken is one of my favorite meals.

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