immigrant & ethnic food cultures, white ppl & appropriation, foodies

yeah paying $30 for pasta? but then again ppl are all about freshly made pasta with freshly made tomato sauce, olive oil that's been jarred this year, regional olives, idk

i had dinner at faro and it was italian redone as a deeply corny bklyn eatery but also v v good. actually only one v but still. their big thing was the grain used to make the pasta is made from organic, locally-sourced wheat. i dont think adam is really arguing against this but there are def other italian places based around similar concepts/marketing. yeah idk

faro is the corniest but yeah delicious

"Back in China the dish is fed to children to increase brain power; at Hunan Bistro, it’s merely the best thing on the menu" reads a little like "the inscrutable natives use this in their voodoo rituals... but to me it's just good eats"

i just gave up on reading it because its was stupid and i am now actually just starving. what i really want is korean though

Eating at an Italian chippy which for those uninitiated is about as Irish as food gets.

has to be much more irish than whatever ills are tagged with your country's name in my land this day of st. patrick celebration

Oh and mine

is it true that some of the american customs have been adopted? I weep

Green beer for all

tipping my green budweiser hat at darragh

america won't stop til ireland's rivers are green

It's not a big deal guys. I'm not shook.

http://www.thelocal.it/20160316/florence-to-force-new-shops-and-restaurants-to-sell-local-foods
https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/kebabs-are-under-fire-in-this-citys-ethnic-food-ban
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/17/jay-rayner-food-culture-protection-too-far-cumbria-sheep-verona-pasta

Italian towns forcing "new businesses to sell local, traditional foods" chosen by city and local officials.
these are opposed by article authors/some locals to kebab shops and mini-markets selling "ethnic" foods

the "foodie" angle concerns tourists to these cities: according to advocates of these new rules, the local food culture is "distorted" by these other foods being available, which "damage the traditional feel of the centre".

are these laws defensible on non-racist grounds?

Not on any grounds

as if those cities aren't full of total shitholes masquerading as "local food". this would prob just make that worse by forcing people to cook food that they have no knowledge of.

"ironically" in my town (also a UNESCO world heritage site), if non "local" or "traditional" foods were banned, as many pizza shops as kebab shops would be closed.

lol where i live there'd be nothing left whatsoever. depending on how racist the rule was - maybe some people can now accept that parts of east london are bangladeshi.

my impression of touristy european towns is that the traditional places, with their hawking maitre ds etc, damage the atmosphere more than any amount of relatively low key kebab shops.

I'd have thought that legislation would almost certainly be illegal under EU rules.

As much as i love Florence, as has been pointed out, the main scourge is frozen Dr Oetker pizza at €15 a pop.

the "historic centres" of both Verona and Florence are UNESCO World Heritage sites, so they may be able to tie such legislation to that, on the grounds that it's part of the local culture that's been recognized by the UN.

if my town tried that then there'd be a slew of medieval french restos here, probably not the gastronomy most tourists are seeking.

feels at odds with the fact that the eu legislates to stop people making food or wine if they aren't doing so in a given geographical area etc.

I might pay the equivalent of $30 for some really exceptional ravioli but it would have to be something astonishing (and also made by a proper Italian chef, not some random London food entrepreneur).

Scratch that, the ravioli at Latium, which is the best I can remember ever eating, is only like £13.

i wouldn't insist on the chef being italian at all. italian food is p well established and engrained in london (in good and bad forms), and there are so many good modern restaurants based on french/italian/spanish techniques. it's not like there's some deep secret knowledge that a french or spanish or english chef can never know.

xpost

Yeah okay maybe, it would have to be a world-renowned chef then.

really? for ravioli? or just to pay 30 dollars for it?

The price tag specifically, I'll eat cheaper pasta made by anyone. $30 is kind of insane.

You'd be lucky. The ravioli at Cracco Peck is $52 and it's $78 at La Pergola.

at that price, about as expensive as flying ryanair to rome

Worst meal i ever paid for was pasta in Como

My most expensive pasta was $90 from All'onda because truffles. It was breathtaking (the bill, not the dish)

I might pay the equivalent of $30 for some really exceptional ravioli but it would have to be something astonishing (and also made by a proper Italian chef, not some random London food entrepreneur).

― Matt DC, Friday, March 18, 2016 10:23 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Maximum price you would pay for a bowl of pasta

this thread on nyc restos > this thread on ldn restos

u.s.a.

how did you feel about the french and italian part? do you own a passport?

iirc you can only possess a passport, they remain government property

Further to the Florence thing, I think it is slightly more complicated than chauvinism / racism and points to some of the deeper problems the city has about maintaining and monetising the cultural legacy of the centre. Florence, like a lot of places, is beset by what it sees as the wrong sort of tourist - essentially people who will pass through the city in a day, usually by coach, wander around the streets and grab the cheapest and easiest food they can find while they are there. They don't shop, they don't buy museum tickets and they don't spend money on sit-down meals. The problem seems to be that there isn't much they can do to stop this, other than restricting fast food outlets or making sure they are selling stuff at premium prices through restrictions on imported produce. The ultimate goal is to reduce the number of tourists but increase the time and money they spend in the city but whatever gains this might bring look incredibly marginal if it just means slices of takeaway pizza (or kebabs with Tuscan lamb).

I am not wholly unsympathetic to the idea of maintaining "traditional" shops in historic places - the proliferation of Costas and lousy chain restaurants in Krakow's Rynek Glowny or Prague's Wenceslas Square diminish the atmosphere of places where "atmosphere" is a tangible, monetisable asset, but the problem is bad planning laws and shirt-sighted commercialisation rather than the conceptual purity of the food.

interesting point about the kind of tourist towns want, & about the kind of food the tourists they don't want, want. if you've but a day in a town then a sit-down meal may be low on your list, even in a town renowned for food. & eating out in Italy in expensive, particularly relative to what you're getting ime; I've had too many meals there with those cruddy packaged breadsticks for instance.

but then I wonder if this is as much a problem about their residents, and their changing attitudes to food, as it is for tourists. here it's normal to take 2 hours for lunch but that's...kind of our thing. you go to lunch, order the menu, it's 3 or 4 courses for your 15-20 euros (with wine), and it'll take 2 hours. I don't think that's the norm in other european countries anymore (or ever).

spain has that in a big way. the menu del dia is a fairly widespread. in the less touristy cities or towns you might get a menu del dia for 8 or 9 euro, three courses and wine or beer. i had a four-course one in gijon before for like 10 euro - a salty plate of grilled padron peppers were the free bonus bit at the beginning.

Tourist restaurants will have breadsticks and shite for 30 quid the restaurants locals use will be more like Euler describes ime

Tourist restaurants will be on tourist routes ime.

Fast food chains not really the problem there ime.

oh pimientos de padron, yes. I don't know Gijon but we drove from the Basque Country to Santiago de Compostela a couple summers back over 3 weeks or so & had sooooo many of those pepper plates. & right, Spain does have menus. I couldn't believe how inexpensive and good the food was along the northern coast. in the little town we were based out of in the Basque Country, a glass of house wine was 50 cents! it wasn't very touristy, at least with non-spaniards, it's not warm enough up there in the summers for that.

spain is an incredible country and the food culture is amazing. i really want to live there one day. i travelled along the northern coast and into portugal a few years back, st sebastian, gijon, santander, vigo, a coruna - all very different but great food for hardly any coins. sevilla, which claims to be the home of tapas, was also v memorable - don't think anyone cooks at home there, i stayed on a monday night and the entire city was buzzing, people eating and drinking in the baking heat. it's prob one of the hottest cities in europe.

yeah I love sevilla, have not been there for any truly blazing days, once in may and once in march I think, when the orange trees in town were in full fruit. beautiful. it does seem that everyone rolls around from tapas joint to tapas joint. my friend who has a family house in Galicia lives in Sevilla and took me around. Galicia's more my style, cooler weather, terrific seafood: all over spain you eat pulpo gallego but in Galicia you get a whole boiled octopus for like 8 euros, so fresh and great. in Santiago I don't remember seeing any fast food, but the tourists there are mostly pilgrims, it's so far out of the way otherwise.

haha - there's a mcdonalds in san sebastian old town - sitting there at the south end of one of the most densely packed 10-15 minute walks of amazing and cheap food in the world.

Every time I see the dumb Seamless ad on the A train that says "Let someone who can spell 'BabaGhanoush' make it" with Eastern/Moorish/Etc-styled illustration around it, I want to take a picture and post it to this thread.

that seems like such an arbitrary standard. like ppl have spell check and google.

Um, isn't 'BabaGhanoush' an Arabic word that can't be properly spelled in the Latin alphabet?

Well I only eat baba made by people who know the correct transliteration from Arabic into roman scrip following english language orthographic rules

I have enough trouble getting Arabic speakers to spell their own names the same way in Roman script twice, let alone food eaten in 20+ different countries.

i prefer baba ghannouj

there need to be more words with j at the end

are we sure we aren't talking about mutabbal