This got a report for xenophobia and, to my mind, it is xenophobic. It could totally be interpreted a different way where it’s inviting you to consider the cross-cultural nature of cuisine that gets boiled down into a single name, but it seems like most people, myself included (having seen how some other “Yes, but” comics go), don’t.
I think it’s worthwhile to leave this post up because the comments surrounding it are worthwhile and actually transform this into something insightful.
or it could be that the larger majority doesn’t see it that way and people are being overly sensitive and that can apply to both the person reading this, and the intentions of the og artist
I have a different take on this.
long answer:
Japanese cuisine uses certain methods and ingredients, even specific ratios and recipes, some of which are passed down generationally either within a family or in apprenticeships or in education and training programs that give official certifications, or even just OJT.
The thing is that Japanese culture places a lot of value in excellence and attention to detail. Traditional Japanese cooking is comparable to traditional French cooking in that regard (and yes, I’m aware that not all japanese cuisine is high-class traditional fare, but even a basic dashi stock or a ramen broth are things that people take pride in and pass on their recipes, complete with regional variants and a lot of subtlety and nuance).
Anyway, I lived in japan for a few years in my twenties and I traveled around and tried a lot of different regional specialties and variants on some of the classics. I also frequented a lot of chains like Sukiya, Yoshinoya, and all the different konbinis. So my description isn’t limited to fancy kaiseki-ryori in centuries-old ryokan villages. Japanese food, even the basic stuff, has a certain quality to it, which is hard for gaijin to imitate unless they train for years with a Japanese chef.
I preface this with all that so you don’t assume I’m speaking from ignorance. Since returning to the US, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of “Japanese restaurants” here. I’ve been to a couple in New York that were good. I could tell the owners and staff were Japanese by the quality of the food alone. Overhearing them speaking Japanese to each other only confirmed it.
But there isn’t much of a Japanese diaspora in my area, and the “Japanese restaurants” around me are all run by Chinese families. I’ve stopped expecting Japanese-quality Japanese food from these. Sometimes I still go just to get my fix. But it’s not the same. The ingredients are different. The ratios are off. The love and care, passion, pride, and everything else that goes into Japanese food just isn’t there, and it shows up as different tastes, different textures, different aromas, etc.
Not to mention it’s just hard to find some things here. Famima chicken just isn’t a thing here. Even Karaage is hard to find. Oden might as well not exist. All the different kinds of yakitori (quail egg, cartilage, horumon, etc.), matsuri specialties like okonomiyaki and takoyaki, taiyaki, and so much else; the little shops outside the train stations and all the smells and tastes that go along with them; so many regional dishes like motsunabe, okinawa soba, etc.; and just so much else (donburi, ebi furai, chawanmushi, onigiri, korokke, katsu curry, soba/udon shops and all their interesting toppings.). Ugh, I’m drooling just thinking about it all. But I digress.
Obviously no one shop could do all of that, but “Japanese food” outside of Japan is typically very limited in options. Some sushi, mostly westernized variants. It’s rare to find many options for nigiri, or any at all but I’ve never seen a kaitenzushi in the US. Occasionally a ramen shop (if you’re lucky, but even then the broth just isn’t right, the chashu and shoyu tamago just aren’t right; and good luck finding moyashi namuru!). Other than that, you’re probably limited to a few things listed as appetizers. Maybe gyoza, edamame, and a couple other things that are considered popular in the west.
It’s just not the same though. It’s not just the selection, it’s the quality. The ingredients, the recipe, everything is just off.
tl,dr: Japanese cuisine has a certain quality, which is a deeply cultural phenomenon, but the “Japanese” restaurants near me are all run by Chinese families, and as someone who spent years in Japan I can tell the difference in the quality of the food.
I don’t see how it isn’t considered cultural appropriation. If a white guy tries opening a Japanese restaurant people will say it’s cultural appropriation (and probably call him a weeb). So how is it any different when a Chinese family opens a Japanese restaurant? I don’t see any way you can reconcile those two things without implying that Asian people are all the same, which is racist.
about the other nationalities:
I don’t know why the picture in the OP shows the Filipino, Korean, and Thai flags. The Korean and Thai places near me are all run by Chinese people too. And there might be a couple Filipino grocery stores but I don’t know of any Filipino restaurants in my area.
Korean, Thai, and Filipino food are all amazing, by the way. I’ve been to all three of those countries too. And just like with Japanese cuisine, each one has so much variety that just gets lost in the US. They substitute a lot of local ingredients which just aren’t the same, they don’t offer dishes that seems too strange to the western palette, they tweak a lot of dishes to make them more suitable to the average westerner, etc. I’ve never had a pad kra pao in the US that even came close to measuring up to how it is in Thailand.
For what it’s worth, Chinese food is good in its own way. I don’t have anything against the Chinese diaspora. I just don’t see how it isn’t cultural appropriation for Chinese families to run Japanese or Thai restaurants.
Its the execution that determines if its appropriation, or appreciation. Appropriation of Japanese is something I’m closely familiar with because my interest in Japanese craftsmanship, knives and blacksmithing
If someone is using the culture to sell a mediocre, tangentially related product, disrespecting the original culture, is appropriation. If the product itself is executed faithfully, with dignity and respect to the culture it comes from, or is inspired from, then it’s appreciation.
There are a lot of Japanese knife scams that poorly attempt to imitate somebody the features of Japanese knives, made out of junk steel, mass produced in China. These are appropriation.
There are some western blacksmiths who are genuinely as skilled as their Japanese counterparts, who make excellent Japanese style knives, faithfully recreating all of the details, features and quality as authentic examples. This is appreciation.
Thank you. I hate seeing people say that if a black woman from Queens opens a Mexican bread shop that it is appropriation.
It depends on how much they care. If the chinese people running the restaurant are just half-assing japanese food and using japanese culture for the name and clout, its disrespectful. Effectively just trying to profit off the culture. Whereas if those chinese people are trying their best to understand and replicate the culture, it’s fine.
Hot take: a japanese person can “appropriate” their own culture. If they just take advantage of their name and ethnicity, without actually learning about the culture. This is just really rare in practice because people of any ethnicity are usually forced to learn about their own culture when growing up
Personal experience:
Right now I live in an extremely multi-cultural city, and generally wildly multi-cultural country. The best Japanese restaurant I’ve been to was a Ramen restaurant stationed in another city that is ran by an actual Japanese chef that (presumably) does not speak any other languages.
In the town I am stationed right now all Japanese restaurants I’ve been to were okay. But nothing even close to that Ramen place. Day and night. Fact is, many Japanese, Thai and Korean Restaurants are ran by Chinese business people and mostly staff. Not all, but I’ve been to few.
To add, Kepab is common back in my homeland, but 99% of the time it was never made by Turkish cook cause we don’t get many foreigners back there. Kepab in the city I live right now is almost always made by Turkish or middle-east-descent person. AND IT IS DELICIOUS! I’ve tried many different joints at different prices and none of them was even remotely as bad as the ones I’ve used to eat back at home.
I’ve learned to prefer cultural food cooked by the person relating to that culture. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Slavic (Polish, Ukraine, Czech, etc.) is always tastes better if it was made by someone who is from that country. It just how it is.
I am Asian. There are Japanese restaurants in my city run by white people and I don’t consider it cultural appropriation. Cultural acceptability is a wide spectrum.
Interesting. Good to know, thank you.
If you don’t mind me asking, how much does your personal identity weigh being Asian compared to whichever specific nationality/ethnicity you are?
Sorry if that’s phrased weird. I mean like for example if you’re Korean, how much do you identify as “Korean” versus “Asian”? Or does it not matter to you?
I’m sure it’s different for everybody, and it might depend strongly on factors like generation and how frequently you use the language in daily life. But I like to ask people for their personal perspectives because it’s better than either assuming, or generalizing based on what sounds right. If that makes sense?
I know for instance people living in Asia are more likely to identify with their nationality or ethnic group, or the language they speak, rather than thinking of themselves as simply “Asian.” But among the diaspora, I’m curious to know how much it blends together into a multicultural “Asian” identity.
Cause I don’t want to be insensitive and say just “Asian” if that sounds overly reductive. But I also don’t know the polite way to ask someone what country their family is from…
But I also don’t know the polite way to ask someone what country their family is from…
It’s not that there are specific polite ways. Sometimes people ask where you are from because they want to know the exact racism and bullshit to hit you with. Let me talk about a specific type of the other times. Gran was a nurse in a town by a military base. She asked everyone where they were from because there was a good chance they weren’t from said town. Gran wasn’t. It was an opportunity to share and connect (and distract the patient from whatever awfulness they were feeling).
If you’re looking for a rule, it’s pretty much the same one to live life by: be excellent to each other. Approach the conversation in good faith and with kindness and you tend to get good results.
They’re about even. Offline, people can obviously tell I’m Asian so it doesn’t make much sense to say “I’m Asian”. On the internet, I prefer a certain level of anonymity so I just go with Asian.
It’s super diverse in my city. So identifying with my ethnicity is generally an easy way to connect with others. They don’t even have to share my ethnicity. People love to ice break on ethnicity and I don’t mind that as long as they’re not trying to be weird about it.
That makes sense. It can be a touchy topic for some people though so I’m usually too nervous to bring it up, even though you’re right it can be a pretty good icebreaker.
Like I’m socially awkward but I can talk about food somewhat comfortably, so if I know someone’s cultural heritage I can ask them about certain dishes or relate my experience with those dishes. But if all I know is that they’re East Asian, I can only guess whether they’re Chinese or Japanese or Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Korean based on how they look, but that’s not always accurate and is dangerously close to stereotyping.
I can go off their name if it’s a traditional one, but if they have a western name then that’s not much of a context clue. So that makes it a lot harder to connect about food, and then I’m left scraping my braincells for something to say that won’t sound weird, and after a few seconds’ hesitation with my eyes rolling up into my head people tend to get weirded out anyway and walk away…
I see how it could be uncomfortable. From one internet stranger to another, I hope you know it’s appreciated. That kind of empathy already goes a long way. It might not come out that way but I see it from here.
Some real advice for situations where you’re not quite sure how to address the ethnicity topic: you could just ask if they grew up in <your city>. If they say no, they might tell you where they grew up. If not, let it pass. Not everyone wants to talk about where they grew up. 1st generation+ Asians can be all over the place on comfort with their identity.
Also, if the vibes aren’t there, they might just not want to talk. That’s fine too.
I mean the best Japanese restaurant around for a while was run by a Vietnamese couple. Just, when people wanted “oriental food” (love how language changes due to bad faith arguments around the word occident?) their options were Japanese and Chinese for the longest time. Like, the county u grew up in (of then 500kish people) had exactly one Indian/Pakistani restaurant (which is Asian but not Oriental fight me) until like fifteen years ago. I’m not sure all y’all yoots understand how good we have it now. Hell, said county didn’t get a Greek/med restaurant until 30 years ago. I would have to wait until the annual Greek festival to get gyro. What kind of life is that.
One of the best sushi meals I ever had was in Japan, and prepared by a Chinese chef. If he opens a restaurant in the US, is that cultural appropriation? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly fine for anyone to learn and embody the culinary technique of another culture. Just don’t claim that sushi was invented in China.
Food is one of those things that doesn’t have cultural appropriation. Food has sharing.
Yep, cultural appropriation is a myth created by white women to put down other white women. I’ve never seen it in any other circumstance.
Damn, I really took it to heart several years ago when I started finding out almost everything I liked was considered cultural appropriation (I always thought it was cultural appreciation, and it’s not like I was profiting off of anything, but nope I was a white dude so apparently it was a problem if the pattern on my shirt looked a little to meso-american. I just liked the shirt).
Like, people were downright cruel about it. It really killed me on the inside, just day-by-day learning all these new things that I wasn’t supposed to like, even though I had liked them for a long time. I didn’t know what to like anymore. Music, clothes, food, etc.; just crushed me more a little each day because it was so cool to gang up on the white guy I guess.
But I wanted to do my best, be a good person, examine my biases and overcome my ignorance, etc., so if I argued with it much at first I didn’t for very long and after a while I started giving up a lot of things I previously enjoyed…
Cultural appropriation is a western weird idea. Nobody outside the western world cares.
Yep. There are definitely some lines though, like I would be offended if I saw Americans tattooing a moko because they thought it was cool. It’s a sacred symbol and has meaning. But wearing generic clothes, cooking food, etc, using parts of every day culture, that’s just culture spreading because people appreciate it. That keeps culture alive.
Ripping on a white girl because she wore a Hindi styled dress achieves absolutely nothing. And I never see those people attacking Koreans for wearing suits or driving cars, which are very much European culture.
Well you know what those people can go suck a soft boiled egg. All of them at the same time, just one egg it’ll have so many diseases.
Good to see a mod comment not being a pile of human garbage. Served as a gentle reminder we’re not, in fact, on reddit.
me: sees reddit.com
me: lemmy can I have some reddit?
lemmy: we have reddit at home.
reddit at home: https://lemmy.world/c/reddit
I clearly didn’t interpret this comic the same way as everyone else has, and if you think it would be better to delete it, I will.
I’ve seen this joke in many forms before, and it’s usually more like “it’s a little humorous when this happens” rather than some sort of xenophobic criticism. Like the cowboy themed restaurant in Fresh off the Boat or Bobby’s Japanese/German restaurant in King of the Hill:
I don’t think it’s better to delete it. I like to interpret it as the Bobby Hill Japanese fusion restaurant thing too even if I don’t think that’s what was intended by it. All the discussion here is really nice.
You are nice.
I need to watch the new season(s?)
It’s different, but I really enjoyed the new season.
Been a long time since I’ve watched King of the Hill - is the second picture Bobby?
Yeah, they started up again recently after many years, and there was a time skip. Bobby is an adult now, and this is his restaurant.
Appreciate this very thoughtful mod response. It’s easy to get too wrapped up on yes/no answers when reality is far more fuzzy and complicated than that.
As an AAPI, I didn’t see anything more to this than a funny little nod to the people who actually prepare ethnic cuisines in countries not of their origin.
Yeah. We’re all called chef in the kitchen. It’s respect. Who cares where you’re from if you can cook it with love (or, as the occasion calls for, salt)
I saw it for the humor too. As a joke, at steakhouses - my southeast Asian wife used to demand “authentic” Texan bbq from REAL Texans. She’d say things like, “He looks like he’s from Wisconsin. I can tell.”
Brutal rare insult
I’m Korean, and I get where this is coming from. You do things right, and it’s all good. But if you use teriyaki sauce in bibimbap, I’ll fucking burn the place down.
Japanese are generally rather xenophobic, so a “japanese restaurant” abroad only having anything else is quite the irony.
This is stupid. We have Japanese chef in Japan who have Michelin Stars for all sorts of foreign cuisine. We also have Japanese chefs who make shit Japanese food. I knew a few in Canada. They only got away with charging more because they were Japanese, and therefore “authentic.” It really shouldn’t matter which side of an imaginary fence a chef was born in.
Wow. Imagine getting offended by “xenophobia” for the most banal of observations.
I only ever see Hispanic people in the buffets.
For the Japanese hibachi grills our cook was from Venezuela and everyone else but one cook was white LOL. The one guy was not Japanese.
In the Filipino restaurant the cashier was Chinese. But her husband was Filipino. Both were amazing and the food was amazing.
Every single Mexican restaurant though is mostly if not all Hispanic.
And the bars and diners and other shit is just everyone.
Or it could be like where I live, and every ethnicity of restaurant, especially the good ones, where the second panel is just 🇲🇽 🇲🇽 🇲🇽.
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
Yeah, food is food.
As a white guy I like to make Indian or Thai from scratch. Sometimes I have asked an Indian friend what spices they would start with in dishX and he’s said “you’re doing it from scratch? I just buy the premix packets at the grocery store”
So who is making the authentic Indian food?
Even the concept of food being “authentic” or “inauthentic” is pretty dumb. Pretty much every food short of raw foraged ingredients is the result of cultural exchange.
You could argue that an Italian cooking with chilis or tomatoes is inauthentic and that the resulting food is more Mexican than it is Italian.
Extending the concept from ingredients to techniques, you could argue that every food that relies on the cold chain (refrigerated/frozen storage and transportation) is an American food because the cold chain was created by an American.
its about expectations. I grew up in California and have some specific expectations about Mexican food. they are different than if I was raised in Jalisco. I went to a “Mexican” restaurant in Budapest and their interpretation of Mexican food is VERRY different.
Mexico, like the vast majority of countries, has wildly different food styles by region city so anyone who immigrated elsewhere will start with their local style and then adapt it. In the US there are a ton of Mexican restaurants that vary significantly. I find it interesting how Americanized Chinese food is actually very consistent between restaurants compared to Mexican food.
I remember watching a video somewhere that touched upon this. IIRC, whenever a Chinese immigrant came to a city in the United States with a large Chinese population, such as San Francisco, they would seek out people from their hometown and would often be directed to benevolent societies. These societies help provide means for the immigrant to start looking after themselves, by offering different professions folks can jump into. Often times that would include providing recipes for dishes they could fix up at restaurants.
I think the video was a documentary about General Tso’s chicken.
-editted for accuracy-
Okay I made a quick pop in to Wikipedia just to check, and I can tell you that General Tsao and General Tso were different people. Several different people in fact, some fictional and others real, but they don’t overlap.
It’s “General Tso’s Chicken” and has been a NYT Crossword clue, which got me started with “in case you ever need it for a crossword clue,” because I know accurate spelling is not really necessary here.
I mean spelling Chinese names in romaji (romachi?) is a crapshoot to begin with. The only consistent English spelling in “General Tzo” is “General”
I agree which is why I checked Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Tsao
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Tso
The list for Tsao includes a fictional character, but the chicken recipe is associated with Tso.
Much appreciated! Accuracy is important
I am well aware of the regional differences in Mexican food (why I used Jalisco as an example).
shit, California was a part of mexico for a a few decades and we definitely have some local variants (CA Burrito is so good)
San Francisco is known for its burritos, but elsewhere in the bay we have a bunch of taco trucks that will fill you up delicious, cheap, and for those of you with food allergies these trucks at least take them seriously. We have “street” tacos at least once a week.
Modern Mission-style burritos, with rice and beans on the inside, were invented in California.
Did you see there’s a national chain of Mexican restaurants that just shuttered their doors in the US after a failed expansion here? It was founded by two Australian men. I’m really curious what their interpretation is.
I went to a “Mexican” restaurant in Budapest and their interpretation of Mexican food is VERRY different.
Very different to what you experience in the USA? or very different to what you’d experience in Mexico?
Most Mexican food in the USA is TexMex which is inspired, but fairly different, from actual Mexican food… same with Chinese food
I dont think most Mexican food in the US is tex-mex. Fast food like taco bell isnt tex-mex, and most taco trucks and takeout places aren’t. The main category of restaurant that seems to be largely tex-mex are sit-down places with names like “El Mariachi” that cater to non-hispanic people and advertise the cheapness of their margaritas.
Where are you basing that off and what regions? Like, I grew up working around the Statesian southwest. I had a good friend (a Mexican immigrant) when I lived in Austin, TX and I would gripe to her about not finding “real” Mexican food. She took me to a few places and then I cooked her tacos to show her what I meant. East Mexico and West Mexico (according to my friend) use entirely different salsas because of different availability of easy fresh ingredients. So I grew up eating baja style tacos, white people enchilada casserole (my mom made a good recipe what can I say. The salsa is tomato and The Duck), while she grew up with lots of butter and molé. So now our eating comprehension quiz: Q1) Which is better? A1) Fuck you they’re both delicious, I just prefer baja style tacos because it’s what I grew up with. I like Oaxaca style better than that. Imagine thinking Mexico was merely one region and one culture. Q2) Which is more authentic? A2) see A1.
Tex-Mex is “actual” Mexican food, the cuisine formed from the Tejanos and is older than either Texas or Mexico. Mexico is a big place with lots of regional variation. Most Mexican food that Americans are familiar with is from or inspired by stuff near the border (which makes sense) with a mix from all over the country like mole, birria, and tequila.
Preach, Soggy. I was fortunate I had a good friend who was patient and taught me this shit. The internet is usually not that kind, but fuck being unkind.
It is wild how much local cultural food is am invention of the past couple hundred years.
I have a family recipe that goes back hundreds of years, it doesnt look anything like people would consider a cultural food from western Europe and even then it uses tomatoes so it literally can’t be truly old.
Heck look at how the world makes pancakes. They are all the same just somehow mixed up based on loose info or available ingredients.
Cooking a nice meal is a modern invention. Before it was just food to not kill you.
Every good Greek restaurant I’ve ever been to had a kitchen full of Mexican cooks. Most of my favorite Chinese takeout places were run by Koreans. Folks cook food.
I mean, yeah, but the head chef and owner, she is still greek. Unfortunately for them I married someone who is not attached to the restaurant except emotionally, like me. or else I might try to get the restaurant Prussian monarchy style
Many of the Greek-owned Italian restaurants and diners in my are being transferred to Albanians, but the language in the kitchens is invariably Spanish.
It’s less the who and more the branding. It’s funny that one has to have the right “look” to sell you the food of a nation, or customers will reject it. The sorts of comments you hear while working in a Chinese run Japanese restaurant in the US…
Like, they have this sushi bar at the HEB I used to shop at. Right next to the tortillary. The folk working the sushi counter are as Latino as I am weird. But you can get an 8 pack of nigiri or a 12 of maki for cheap and made right in front of you.
I have nearly every other gastro disease, but those never made me sick and tasted about what they cost, which was nice when I was broke and still needed sushi to properly maintain a healthy gut macrobiome
My absolute favorite sushi place for ages was a conveyor belt shop run by a family of jovial Mexican sushi chefs and one very stern Korean woman. Cheap, tasty, consistent, fresh. They profited through volume, but doing so was murder on their joints, so swapped to typical prices and seating. I’m just glad that food bigots are the minority in my new area.
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It is a bit surreal to suggest your nation of birth or genetic lineage somehow influences your capacity to slap a piece of fish on some rice.
Also… if you want to get really anal about the history of the dish, narezushi originated in modern day Cambodia/Thailand, and first documented in ancient China around the 4th century. Meanwhile, the more modern techniques for preparing and serving sushi did originate in Tokyo in the 19th century, but spread like wildfire. Sushi restaurants were popping up in Los Angeles as early as 1906.
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
A professionally trained chief should be able to faithfully reproduce a litany of dishes from around the world.
Of course, there’s a lot of regional variation and conditions. I might suggest that you cannot reliably produce a Genovese sauce outside of Genova, simply because you don’t have the locally raised veal, for instance. But that’s not a problem unique to chefs of a particular national origin.
I don’t know that you’d even want to serve truely authentic food since you want to appeal to local tastes. See: Chinese Food in the USA.
Yeah i was just thinking specifically Chinese food. Authentic Chinese food is like chicken feet and scorpions on a stick and stuff.
Eh. Chicken feet aren’t so bad. It’s kind of like pork trotters or whatever those jarred, pickled hooves are called.
What was bad when I got chicken feet was the sauce. Fucking awful.
Both of those specifically are also found in Mexico, funnily enough.
I love maki sushi, but I think uramaki sushi is pretty shit. It just so happens that uramaki sushi was invented by a Japanese chef trying to trick Americans into eating seaweed, which they thought was gross. But I love seaweed and I think uramaki ruins it by hiding it behind the rice. So I prefer authentic sushi.
I’m just happy when they don’t add a ton of sugar to sushi. seriously, what the hell is that?
For some reason, I took this comic to mean a Japanese restaurant that serves food from other East Asian cultures.
“Yeah, we’d love to hire you for the cook role here at Taco Time, unfortunately you’re not authentic Mexican so we can’t.” - something never said before by a hiring manager.
Well, that would be WILDLY illegal but I get your point
“authentic” in terms of food and restaurant culture is just a dog whistle for “racist.”
Like please. I’m not in Italy, it’s not “authentic” it’s just Italian food. Food is a universal language and words added like “authentic” are just plain bigoted.
I know of near me a Chinese restaurant run by Indians, and an Indian restaurant run by Vietnamese owners.
But the Vietnamese restaurant, that’s still run by Vietnamese owners.
They are all pretty good, but the Vietnamese restaurant is the best.
Chinese is the most popular ‘foreign’ cuisine in India, and some popular ‘Chinese’ dishes were actually developed by Chinese merchants living in India.
Also Southeast Asia has a lot of Indian influence, except Vietnam, so that’s a bit wierd.
East Indian cuisine gets fairly close to Chinese food. Most of the dishes in western countries are going to be north Indian, which I think really means northwest. Punjabi and Gujarati regions. They’re the wealthier states with a greater number of emigrants. South Indian is a different style as well, but I’m not familiar with it.
Experiencing East India damn near instantly made me wonder what my country’s tourists/expats look like in comparison to the actual country’s makeup. Just a bit of a surprise that for having a poor international reputation, I feel like it’s a more progressive portion of the country that goes abroad. And we’re still bad? Either my country is even worse than the world thinks, or my people are way too entitled abroad, knowingly or not.
Tustin? That’s the best Vietnamese food I’ve had outside of a cat (best place to read) . Or Vietnam, which I should probably visit.
You know the Panda Express gonna be bussin when you walk in and the staff is 100% Mexican.
Panda express
Dude I’ll just make you Chinese food at this point. you want my secret sweet and sour, lo merton (I fucked up the lo mein but it turned out okay and I kept the fuckup recipe. It just seemed disrespectful to keep calling it lo mein), or I can learn to make sesame beefles.
If this is actually from the real author and not some rage bait meme, this is a surprisingly whiplashing take. I stand in solidly with the second panel.
I see a lot of people responding with “you don’t have to be Japanese to cook Japanese food”. I think this comic raises another interesting point (whether it’s the intention of the author or not).
The analysis would be valid if it was a random set of nationalities: Asian, European, African, etc. But in the comic, all of the employees are Asian. I think there’s a criticism that the restaurant owner is racially biased and only hires Asian staff. Why? I don’t see another explanation that the staff must “pass” for Japanese, which would be problematic of the owner.
I think the idea is that customers expect Asian looking people at a Japanese or Chinese restaurant, not that the owner is racist. Of course said customers can’t actually tell the difference between different Asian ethnicities usually.
The ultimate decision comes to the owner, though. Should he bend to the customer’s expectations? Or is it only his idea of the customer’s expectations; because at least on Lemmy it looks like people don’t care about the look of the staff. Probably not a representative sample, though.
The owner wants his business to make money. If hiring white or black people means earning less money why would he do that?
I am Turkish.
I go to Turkish restaurants.
Lots of Arabs working there.
Same food has become part of their culture too over last few centuries living side by side.
Some of our food is straight up borrowed from them, in fact.
Pretty sure one used to live/work in Turkey.
They cook it well.
I like it.I assume similar?
I have to share this: I have learned that Türkiye has a culture of cats. Cats, tea, coffee, and delicious gyro. It was on the internet therefore it must be true. If it weren’t for the government I’d be looking at a music fellowship there.
> huh, turks are not arabs?
> i suppose they be greeks then
>:3
There was a slight empire situation there. You have no basis to complain about cultural appropriation as a Turk. But yes, many of the pilaf dishes in Asia have ottoman roots.
I thankfully don’t know anyone who goes to a japanese restaurant to stare at the people working there. It’s got its name from the food they make there, not from the ethnicity of the people inside the building.
In my teenage years I embarrassed myself by trying to order in Japanese… The server was Korean.
Oh man, my family is Okinawan, and when we were visiting Aomori, this touristy market had an Okinawa fair going on and my kids went to go get a traditional Okinawan donut snack (we had been travelling for two weeks and they missed the taste of home), and when my kids thanked the staff in Okinawan, they looked really puzzled because I think they were just mainlanders selling Okinawan goods. I’m not even sure if they were even aware that we have a different language here. My kids looked really bummed.
It’s okay, happens to the best of us. I’m half Korean, half Czech, but I look like a big Polynesian dude. Not too long ago I went to a “Korean BBQ” place in the Midwest where the server greeted me in Korean. Which I thought was strange because he looked Chinese, but hey who am I to judge, I look Polynesian.
So I started to speak to him in Korean, and the dude panicked and ran away to get the manger who was Korean. Seems as if the manager/owners were Koreans hiring Chinese immigrants and having them pretend to be Korean to non Korean people.
Are you me? I would do this because I didn’t have anywhere else to practice Japanese outside of class. The first Japanese restaurant I went to the experience was great; the waitress was first or second gen and seemed tickled that this random white girl was trying to communicate with her in broken Japanese. The second place I went the waitress replied with embarrassment that she was Korean. I didn’t try again after that.
Haha this brought back a memory! I also tried to speak Japanese that I learned from anime to a Asian person in a sushi restaurant! They looked at me and said, “Ill go get the manager”
