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I've eaten abroad, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, London, and quite a few other smaller cities in the respective countries listed. From home cooking to street vendors to Michelin-star restaurants, American food is great.
China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu, and it was also the only place where I felt food quality was noticeably worse, especially the meat. Other than that, the big difference is that everyone else makes sugar-free desserts. I think the very light use of sugar in desserts and baking is probably the single biggest culinary divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
It is also always strange when I see discussions like this, because cuisine is so global now. It feels like something straight out of a time capsule from 30 years ago, and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something. That one restaurant that made up half the restaurants in Beijing, we have them here in the U.S. as well, and have for years. You might have to get a table at the back of an Asian market, but it is the exact same food, prepared the same way. And conversely, the best meat I had the whole time I was in China was at a Texan BBQ joint that was positively delicious.
While the above is mostly about restaurants, I stayed in all these places (except Taiwan) long enough to do a fair deal of grocery shopping and home cooking as well. H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world, and their produce is fantastic.
Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.
Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.
Interesting - I live near a little Persian exclave. There’s a few Persian restaurants down the way. Guess they’re hard to find, though.
For bread, there’s a half-decent place I know of, but for anything good I’d recommend Wisconsin. It’s technically coastal.
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If this is happening to you the issue is likely something along the lines of too much fat or too much salt for your digestive system.
It's relatively common in America for Americans to have that problem with salt in Americanized Chinese food for instance.
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I lived in Beijing for a year. It could just be that my Chinese friends loved Sichuan, but outside of the foreign quarter I would constantly get taken to different Sichuan restaurants that all had basically the exact same menu. And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.
Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.
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Ah. Yeah, Sichuanese food seems rather overrepresented (I'd intuitively chalk it up to it having become the default hotpot flavour, and hotpot being the default social activity - the same "hotpotty" spice mix is also exceedingly good at masking bad flavours, compared to most other Chinese flavouring templates).
Breakfast food is pretty standardised in every culture though. Go to the UK and complain about twenty different places all serving sausages and baked beans.
In the week I spent around Shanghai most recently, as far as I can remember I didn't touch anything Sichuan at all, without actively trying to - from what I can still recall, the things I had were either local to the areas I went (neither Shanghai's blanched seafoods, nor the fungal wastes of Anhui, nor the kind of rich pickle stuff in the middle of the two were at all similar to what you describe) or some variant or another of Northern (copious amounts of yang rou chuanr, a pretty good "Lanzhou hong shao" noodle bowl, the ongoing fad that is biangbiangmian).
Yeah I was just in Beijing. Definitely a trend towards Biang Biang/Shaanxi places lately.
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It is if you look hard enough, it is, and you don't have to look too hard, but you have to admit that walking into a restaurant aimed at an American audience (so, including Asian and other ethnic cuisines) is a crapshoot in at least the "incorporating vegetables into their dishes" category. These days "bland, boiled mush" is rare, but "steamed, with butter and salt" might be the median and "your meat and starch comes with so few veggies they're practically just a garnish" is way more common than it should be.
Have you been to Central Market? That upscale subsidiary is the H-E-B of H-E-Bs (except that ordinary H-E-B stores somehow accomplish high quality without high prices, while Central Market ... does not). When their grandmother last visited and wanted to spoil my kids, my son lobbied for (and got) a grocery shopping trip there, I guess on the theory that he had enough entertainment to last until Christmas but who knows when he'd next get let loose in an aisle with four or five hundred (not hyperbole) different kinds of gourmet cheese.
You do still want to get there early and shop in person for the best selection. I usually order online for pickup, and that's still great for most fruits and veggies, but there are a few (fresh okra!) that are a crapshoot unless you pick your own.
H-E-B is also decent with charity and famous for disaster relief efforts. "Better than the government of Texas" isn't as high a bar as it should be in that case, admittedly, but it's still impressive that they clear it.
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I mean, sure, you can get some authentic, quality food in NYC or LA where there's enough of a market for them to import key ingredients directly, but the vast majority of America doesn't have these options. Illinois is far closer to a central example of the American dining experience.
I'll have to disagree here. I don't know the exact reasons (dilution of expertise, ingredient quality, market forces of a primarily American palate), but flavors and textures are noticeably worse in the US. I've spent a decent chunk of time in multiple American metro areas that claim to have top-tier food scenes (by American standards). Outside of NYC/LA, it is a rarity for me to encounter a restaurant that would surpass median standards in their country of origin. The quality distribution is so heavily left shifted.
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