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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   43308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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.

China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu (...)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.

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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