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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3499 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I just ate at a nice restaurant here with a tribal seafood theme.

This alone is eyebrow raising. The north eastern tribes in India live as far from the sea as it gets, given their iodine deficiency rates, and the other miscellaneous tribes don't sea-fare either. And they had wall art of random Native American tribals and even one panel showing a giraffe. Very mixed messaging.

Even more concerning was that they had Mongolian fish as a menu option.

What.

What.

???

"Ah yes, I will order a preparation of fish nominally based on the techniques of a pastoralist landlocked nation" - - - - > Clueless

Anyway, the food was great, though my absolute distaste for all seafood has made even squid hard to stomach. They've got biryani cooked in bamboo, served so hot you'd swear someone had fired a disposable rocket launcher like the RPG-26 and left it to cool.

What's the most questionable dish you guys have seen on a menu?

There are increasingly large (I mean not large large, but large enough) numbers of Mexicans in Europe, but for a long time it was hilarious to see what passed for Mexican food in Scandinavia, Germany and so on.

While British Indian food was mostly great, I died a little inside at what passed for biryani.

Surely there are lakes in Mongolia.

Lakes, rivers? They definitely exist. I wouldn't expect much of them.

In Ottawa, 20 years ago. A local pub near Parliament Hill had a special. For $200 you could get a bottle of Dom Pérignon and 12 chicken wings. It showed up on the receipt as "wing special" so customers could expense it as food.

The Mongolian fish might just be fish that is prepared similarly to Mongolian beef, which despite the name has nothing to do with Mongolia.

Given that Mongolian beef was invented in Taiwan in the 1950s, though, that would not explain why it* would be served at a tribal seafood restaurant.

Edit: *a fish prepared in the same manner.

I appreciate the answers, though you've substituted utter confusion with only mild confusion in this case haha.

Mongolian beef is popular in the US, I don't know if it's popular in India or the various other countries you've spent significant time in. At a regular restaurant, I would thus expect a dish called "Mongolian fish" to probably be fish prepared after the fashion of Mongolian beef. However yeah, it is confusing why a "tribal" restaurant would serve something like this.

When it comes to at least some so-called "Mongolian" dishes, it seems to be a case of "politics strikes yet again". According to Wikipedia:

Mongolian barbecue was created by Taiwanese comedian and restaurateur Wu Zhaonan. A native of Beijing, Wu fled to Taiwan after the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, and opened a street food stall in Yingqiao [zh], Taipei in 1951.[1][2] While he initially wished to name the dish "Beijing barbecue", due to political sensitivity associated with the city which had been recently designated as the capital of the People's Republic of China, the name "Mongolian barbecue" was chosen despite the lack of connection to Mongolia.[5]

Mongolian barbecue is from Taiwan? I can't believe Ghengis Grill lied to me!

The Vietnamese who run all asian fast food here never told me! I feel betrayed!

Vegan gravy, a loose burger(literally just ground beef scooped out of a hot pan and spooned onto a hamburger bun), insert-not-Mexican-style tacos(especially the Asian ones). And there’s something that I can’t remember at the moment but it was a Jewish dish being cast as Italian?

a loose burger(literally just ground beef scooped out of a hot pan and spooned onto a hamburger bun)

Is this a questionable Dish? Just sounds like an incomplete sloppy joe. You were supposed to put condiments on it!

It's called a loose meat sandwich. They were very popular in the period after ground beef became commonly available but before canned tomato sauce appeared in stores.

And there’s something that I can’t remember at the moment but it was a Jewish dish being cast as Italian?

I am told that New Jersey makes this distinction hard to make at times, but what do I know?

This was a WASPy section of Dallas…

Ah, Bishop Arts. No wait.

Preston hollow…

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