Foreign foreign food in foreign cities

I think that in major world cities, "cuisine" might be difficult to define. Using San Francisco as an example, what sets it apart is restaurants using locally sourced ingredients, a bonus of its location - from wine to sea food, dairy to meat and fruits and vegetables, good restaurants take advantage. So that is the "cuisine" I'll be interested in, whether its American, Asian or Italian, I'll be focused on fresh, local ingredients.

I think of NY in similar fashion since the nearby Hudson River Valley produces amazing cheeses, fruits and vegetables and there is still a good deal of farming within a reasonable distance.

In both cities, the preparation of those local ingredients can be from any other country and I would still be happy.

When I leave the country, however, I really do want to eat more of the historically local cuisine. And sometimes that's good, and sometimes I'm not so happy. Although one of the better little meals I had in Paris last year was at a Spanish restaurant.

The only place I consistently wander further afield is in London, where there are a great many wonderful Thai and Indian restaurants, among others. But then, I think that's probably now a major part of London's cuisine.

I would say that the Western cuisine which lends itself the most readily to mistreatment is Italian. In many countries, they seem to have heard that spaghetti bolognaise = spaghetti + tomato sauce + ground meat and they just improvise the proportions, the kind of meat, the spices. Basically anything goes, and it's pretty much the same with other Italian dishes.

On the other hand, many places around the world follow French recipes with slavishly extreme care. The results often look perfect and do not taste one bit as they should. I have a permanent psychological scar from a Carnival Cruise that I took with my parents one time, where the menu was mostly French but the cooks were Pakistani. Each dish looked exactly as it should and tasted like garbage. I took another short cruise, also in the Caribbean, where the cooks (and waiters) were French and it really made all the difference in the world.

Just for the record, the food makes or breaks a cruise, so if I were ever shopping around for one, I would look for reviews of the food before worrying about the comfort of the cabin or the other facilities.

One thing that has happened with many reworked foreign dishes in our "rich" countries is that they are "better" than the originals, even when tasted by people from the originating country.

Pizza was a very poor dish until it got covered with meat and extra cheese. Couscous was lucky to have any meat in it at all. You needed a magnifying glass to find the bits of chicken or seafood in a lot of the Asian soups. This wasn't because the originators thought that it tasted better that way -- it was because they were not able to put in more ingredients, either unavailable or too expensive. Knowing the Chinese, I'm sure they would have been happy to throw in a whole chicken and ten pounds of prawns if they had them.

Anyway, the problem is that the rich countries have overdone things now -- there is too much of everything, too much fat, too many calories, too much nutrition. It might taste great, but it is not healthy anymore. Unfortunately, it is too late to go back to the old recipes because current generations are not going to want to go back to a piece of flat bread with some tomato sauce and olive oil on top and think of it as a pizza.

Another note about very foreign curries ~~ for whatever reason, several Chinese restaurants in New Orleans used to have curry on the menu. A friend of mine from Cape Town simply could not learn to stop ordering the curry, and was continually outraged at what she was served. Unlike South Africa, there was no Indian population in New Orleans to make curry "historically local". (perfect phrase, Cristina!)

HW, how do you convince people in restaurants that you really do want something local, not what they think tourists want? Their perception is usually reinforced by the tourists themselves. In the bigger towns on the Mexican border, there are always some stuffy over-priced restaurants just for tourists. They specialize in bad versions of Mexican food and "American specialties" such as spaghetti in tomato sauce, which always manage to taste Mexican.
Ironically, the way that sort of thing gets re-introduced is through foodies and restaurants with a bit of snob appeal. I believe it was a couple of decades ago that "better" restaurants in California began to offer plates of olive oil with bread for dipping -- surely the real thing of poverty snack for many ancestors of the very people now willing to go to a restaurant and pay for it.

I do buy frozen fish sometimes, mich, as a lot of the "fresh fish" we get in Québec (far from the Gulf of St-Lawrence) and Ontario is previously frozen. I can get quality fresh fish at the Jean-Talon Market. Some brothers, ironically named Atkins, but no relation to the late diet guru) drive a truck of freshly-caught fish and seafood here several times weekly, but it doesn't come cheap. Their halibut is like chocolate for me, but I've been rather skint of late so there is a lot worse than frozen haddock or other nutritious, plain fish. Those are perfect for making fish stews or full-meal soups. I might also buy some frozen vegetables (not all) in the wintertime, especially things like tiny peas. I almost never buy PREPARED frozen food though. The only exception I cant think of is a very small local business that makes Vietnamese nêm (is that spring rolls or imperial rolls?) filled with crab and shrimp - they also have a vegetarian version that I like a bit less but which is quite decent if I should have vegetarian guests. Often it isn't even frozen yet when I pick it up from the shop. They are ten for $4, which is amazing for something so handmade.

I agree that the trend back to simplicity can be snobbery, but while I want a bit more than olive oil on my flatbread unless I'm having it with other food, I don't like overdressed pizza (gets soggy) or oversauced pasta. Moreover, I'm not 18 any more, and some of the "extreme" toppings just don't go down well.

Though I admit, Kerouac, I'm amused by "vegetarian couscous". There was a lot of vegetarian couscous, hopefully with some chickpeas or other pulses for protein, but it was because a lot of people couldn't afford even some bones with a bit of meat on them.

And I knew an old fellow in Northeastern Italy (Friuli on the border of Veneto) who didn't get the craze for polenta - it was the food of the very poor, who couldn't afford wheat flour bread. Unlike in Mexico and Central America, polenta was not nixtamalized, so it was lacking in several essential nutrients, and very poor people didn't have enough meat, fish, cheese or legumes to make up for the deficiency.

It is also interesting to note what is considered a "foreign" restaurant in many countries. I don't think an Italian restaurant is considered "foreign" in either France or the United States (or Canada). It is just part of the local cuisine (except for the high end ultra sophisticated places). By the same token, I don't think that a Mexican restaurant is considered foreign in the U.S. (even if it is really serving Tex-Mex) just as the French don't consider Moroccan or Algerian restaurants to be foreign -- couscous is after all the #2 favorite dish in France, just as pizza is the #1 favorite dish in the U.S.

I don't think that the Dutch consider Indonesian dishes to be foreign either.

betsie, there is a lot of pseudo-Indonesian food in Dutch supermarkets as well, but I really consider that Dutch food (sites to order Dutch food abroad always include packets to make Bami or Nasi Goreng). There are quite a few rijstaffel places in Amsterdam, at least, but evidently that is very Netherlandised Indonesian as well. Like Birmingham's Balti dishes!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijsttafel

Where do you live in the Netherlands? Hope you'll have some local reports for us!

That is interesting - I thought the owners were ethnically Chinese, but Indonesians of Chinese origin. As we have many Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Cambodians here, and yes, some of the professionals did fall back on opening restaurants.

Friesland! Oh, that lovely bread you could kill someone with! Just joking; I always buy some when in Netherlands or Germany. I'm looking at Wikipedia and other sites to sort out the Frisians living in the Netherlands and those living in Germany. Oh kewl, I see there are also Frisians in Denmark!

I have never been to Friesland. Or rather, not yet. Have been to Delft though. (Yes, I know it is terribly touristy, but it is a very beautiful and historically important small city). I was there in the winter, and it was not at all overrun with tourists.

"SW US versions" of Mexican food are truly American, simply because of the length of their history in that area of what is now the US. I'd include the basic, non chain restaurant Tex-Mex food on the border in that, too. I totally agree with you that they're legitimately regional foods.

Can't answer the second part, obviously.

What was in the torta?

The Mexican restaurants in the Netherlands are horrible: it's as if you let a kid loose in the kitchen and they indiscrimately chucked a lashings of everything into the dish just for fun: everything is pretty much the same: sloppy minced meat, cream, cheese...

That was my point about the food on the US side of the US/Mexico border. One version has been eaten there forever and coexists with the newer wave of exactly the crap Betsie describes.

Betsie, you left out the final touch of nastiness -- serving the hot slop atop a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce for the ultimate in vile texture and taste.

But back to permeable borders, or in many cases, meandering borders. Isn't it the case that foods, language and customs often remain from when part of a country previously belonged to the neighboring country? Also, cross-border marriages would have swapped cuisines back and forth over the centuries.

The foods of the SW United States are interesting because the line is blurred between what's "Mexican" and what's "Native American". Many gardeners are familiar with Native Seeds/SEARCH. Browsing through their catalog is an education in how what could be grown in that region evolved into the regional cooking. A good example is the Colorado green chili. It's much simpler than food found in the south of Mexico, but quite good and obviously sharing the same cooking roots.

I seem to recall that succotash originated with mid-Atlantic native tribes.

There's probably a wide variety of traditional native dishes since there are or were many different tribes across North America. In the Southwest, though, you have what Bixa spoke of since, for example, the Tohono O'odham tribe has lived both in Mexico and the US as borders changed. I do know that the Tohono O'dhams employed a type of flood agriculture that enabled them to grow all kinds of squash in the desert. I don't know how they prepared them, though.

One of the people involved in Native Seed/SEARCH lives (or lived) near Tucson. He wrote a book about a year he spent eating only what grew within a 250 mile radius and learning about the foods that the Tohono O'dham people would have eaten. I should read the book, though (once I remember the name), because I suspect that while the foods he ate were those that the natives ate 2,000 years ago, the preparation was more 21st century.