Food in whose name the worst atrocities have been committed

brooklyn is odd because it's not unusual to have chinese people making your mexican food and mexican people making your chinese food.

that's like every large East Coast city from my experience

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authentic

Anyway repping for pizza as the asnwer to this, you're wrong. There's no way in the world that the answer to this is not curry. The shit they serve up in yer standard British eight-pints-and-a-vindaloo curry house is, uniformly, the worst restaurant food possibly anywhere in the world.

And the shit I have been served masquerading as curry in both New York and Paris is just as bad in different ways.

Actually there may be some attempts at Mexican food that are as bad, but I generally avoid Mexican food on the grounds of it being shite in this country.

hmm i've not had any bad curry experiences that come close to either bad pizza or bad fryups tbh

Have been for a couple of curries in the US and they ask you how hot you want your dish! I don't know about "authentic" curry but my instinct was to be VERY suspicious of this. Both times were ok in their own way but definitely lacked something. Not as bad as shitty pizza either.

they ask you how hot you want your dish!

Wait, where do they not do this?!?? And how do you keep it from being inedibly spicy for your tastes??

You choose a dish whose ingredients make it mild, like korma, or hot, like vindaloo. Usually (UK) there will be some indication on the menu of if it's hot, mild, or medium, but "medium" varies an awful lot.
Anyone tried a 'mild' vindaloo? Curious...

I've been to British curry houses, usually in provincial times, when a medium curry pretty much burns your face off and tastes of nothing other than hotness. I think a lot of them don't even try.

(The good ones obviously are sublime)

max sooo otm in this thread

once went through a capsaicin junkie phase of ordering nothing but phalls...this policy did not last long

I had some terrible curry pizza recently. It wasn't very authentic. Glad I did not order the meat version.

curry is so plastic, really rank "meat curries" are guaranteed a priori. wondering if the tragedy of a bad example is magnified to me cuz I love curry so much, but I guess that applies for all examples.

i agree w/ michael btw but i still think equating authenticity with quality is fuccin dum

― max, Thursday, March 25, 2010 3:05 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's not so much dumb as a lazy shortcut. Authenticity almost always means that the food maker loves what they're making, has respect for the food and their customers, and for the culture from which it came. (All of which doesn't mean that they are slaves to tradition for its own sake.) Usually, but NOT always, this results in higher quality than your median foodery. Conversely, often those who pay no regard to authenticity are strictly in it to make money, have no love of the food or their customers, will take any shortcut or make any substition to save a lil $. This can, but NOT always result in boring or substandard quality food.

doesn't any authenticity debate eventually involve traveling to the origin of the authentic food in question? not everybody can do that, though, can they? so, then the person who is able to travel tells the person who isn't that they have never had "real" such-and-such, and then this really turns into an issue of travel instead of food. and then I am thinking about this and am tempted to start a poll involving Foodies vs. Globe Trekkers.

nah all it really takes is one dude/dudette in your town that can caook and who's from or spent a fair amount of time in a particular place.

though maybe you're saying there's still no real way to know for sure if something is authentic unless you yourself have been to the place?

Someone made the comparison of people caring about originality in music. I get that there's a whole history of people who care about originality looking down on people who don't, and thus the whole anti-rockism thing came about. But to look down on everyone that DOES care bout originality, people for whom originality makes the (music-listening)experience richer to them, is just as douchey. (obv caveat being that those people who do care aren't looking down on you for not caring)

though maybe you're saying there's still no real way to know for sure if something is authentic unless you yourself have been to the place?

I don't necessarily feel that it is the case, but I do think it's sort of the ultimate trump card in an authenticity debate. With your music example, all a person has to do is go find the original music in question - without ever leaving your computer. For food, you either have to be able to afford to jump on a plane or take someone's word for it that some local place is just like they serve it in Saigon or wherever.

ppl very concerned about any aspect of their food obviously trying harder than most others, but I don't think the majority of good food is made by ppl concerned with authenticity. it only really works as a shorthand for "ppl who care about food" and lots of ppl do that without being especially interested in authenticity.

"Authenticity almost always means that the food maker loves what they're making, has respect for the food and their customers, and for the culture from which it came."

YES! I did not feel this authenticity coming from rice krispy treats made with GRAPE NUTS! It fails to meet each of those criteria.

those must be some pretty filling rice krispy treats

it filled me with sadness mostly.

an authentic, if unoriginal reaction

I will be just a bit globe-trottery douchey to point out that many regional cusines are very region-specific. There's a local French baker, for example, who bought a flour mill just so he could stop importing flour and mill wheat to his specifications, specs that didn't exist in the U.S. prior to that. What about the specificity of Norman apples or whatnot? As I've mentioned before translating seafood names from English to french is helpful but flawed inasmuch as the eponymous creatures can be quite different in different places.

http://www.menshealth.com/MensHealth/Media/Frindlys.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3058/2643623745_3c6c626ed7.jpg

Asian Nachos
Crispy Fried Wontons Covered with Chicken in a Sweet-Hot Peanut Sauce. Topped with Wasabi Cream and Melted Cheese

would try

Local place has:
Crab Rangoon pizza
crab rangoon base, surimi, green onion, asiago and mozzarella, topped with crispy egg roll strips and sweet chili sauce

It is delicious

http://www.wumarkus.com/images/hamdog.JPG

I dunno, I haven't eaten at this place (yet), but the menu gives...pause

e.g.

La Pizza Mexicaine
Reblochon: Crème fraîche, Lardons, Reblochon, Fromage, Oignon

When I read the thread title I took "atrocities" to be meant literally rather than figuratively. My first thought was: roasted breast of passenger pigeon.

thinking of it that way, the French munching down dodos on Mauritius would also count

sugar

sugar! dlh otm x 1000

that pizza doesn't seem very mexican to me, but i don't see what's so shocking about it. am i missing an ingredient? its cream, cheese and onions, right?

Assumed that it was the total un-Mexicanness that made it weird. I kind of believe that non-French/non-colonial food in France is uniformly awful.

lardons = bacon, reblochons = ??

http://www.reblochon.fr/

(it's a kind of cheese)

Risotto surely

Caprese, nicoise, bruschetta too

Yeah it's just french takes on Mexican are nuts, like that's just a normal if sorta weirdish french pizza, what's it have to do with Mexican food

fair enough. would gladly eat this pizza tho!

Yeah it sounds good!

Worst pizza atrocity I ever experienced was when my hosts brought me to what I assume was a rather pricey "Western" restaurant in China. My best guess was that the chef had had pizza described to him once but he had never tasted or even seen one irl. It's not that it was inauthentic that bothered me (iirc the dough was sweet and the cheese was underneath the tomato sauce), more that it tasted really really bad.

Ordering pizza in Asia is a real game of Russian roulette ime. Had some perfectly decent ones there, but my god the bad ones are bad.

I'm eating the most disgusting 'sweet chilli chicken noodles' imaginable atm so I nominates that

thinking of it that way, the French munching down dodos on Mauritius would also count

Isn't this a misconception, and it was actually the animals introduced to the island (swine & cats iirc) that did for the dodo? Apparently they weren't very tasty.

the restaurant I linked to in the latest revive has duck fajitas which tbh sound amazing

xp you're right about extinction from what I've heard. but apparently our taxidermy models of the dodo (like in the Natural History Museum in London, and in the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution in Paris) aren't known to be accurate b/c all that made it back on the boats were skeletons, b/c the hungry French scientists ate their meat. so we don't know how the birds carried themselves, since we never got muscled birds.