I was talking to my daughter about this situation, and I liked her comment: “People don’t like you to presume things about them, even if they are true.” I think that’s why there can be a big difference between asking a group what would be a good item for the menu, and just saying, “You people like fried chicken, right?”
And just to add, people probably like the presumptions even less if the item in question has been “weaponized,” as Hanna put it.
For fear of offending my hero Sean Connery; ‘haggis, anyone?’
Consolation, you’re certainly right about the raw ingredients being wonderful in Britain. My Scottish grandmother would say that their quality of food was far better than in France, where they had to make all those fancy sauces and use spices to hide the inferior products. Personally, I’d prefer in France any day…though I love the UK in so many other ways.
Having been raised on butterfat, no dessert can be too rich, no pastry too flaky.
All the talk about chicken reminds me of a comment from a small town hospitalized man to my CNA co worker. “I’d trade you some of my pizza for your people’s good fried chicken” She laughed, he was trying to be kind. That is the unfortunate thing about some of the endless taking offense at this or that. Sometimes people might be a bit clueless, but was the intent malicious or kind? Does it help us as a culture to endlessly analyze and castigate what may have been good intent in the first place?
@great lakes mom, I had some type of toffee like square that I loved, and also some type of fudge that reminded me of penuche fudge…we have touristy fudge shops in the area that I live, but no one has heard of penuche.
Regarding Jamie Oliver…I like him, but I find most of his food to have a leftover / messy look to it.
I follow his page on FB.
My husband took me to the Isle of Wight 20 years ago…we went to visit some people he had a business relationship with and they took us out to dinner. One of them ordered baitfish…and that’s what they were…not appetizing at all. I had lamb chops …I was expecting something really good, but it was a blade cut and tough as an old shoe. But that was only one place.
I did not eat the haggis when in Scotland.
Was the theme offensive, chardo, or was the food bad?
Humorous thing to me is that only a relative handful of American have ever eaten actual Chinese food. This goes back to the scene in Flower Drum Song when Sammy Fong takes newly arrived Mei Li to his restaurant and she turns to her father and says, “So this is American food.” And one time I walked into a place near my mother’s house in FL and asked the owners where they were from, which was Fuzhou (as many immigrants to here are). I asked if they had any food from there and the response was “They don’t like that food here.” Outside of a relatively few places on the coasts, and mostly in the NE and CA (particularly parts of LA), there’s very little of the real cuisines of China. And even in places like Boston, real places are scarce.
As for the UK, I think the first 3 star Michelin chef was Marco Pierre White. Funny story in his autobiography: he was engaged to cook for a charity event for Prince Charles and, being taciturn and angry Marco, he tried to hide in his car when not in the kitchen. Charles tracked him down and spoke to him in French … because no one had told him Marco grew up on a Council Estate in Leeds (raised by his dad, who was a chef, after his mother died when Marco was young). And now there’s people like Heston Blumenthal.
But I remember London in the 1960’s when so much of the food was hideous. Wimpy Burgers - even the memory and my stomach turns. Some good fish. Some wonderful Italian, though not very popular then because London wasn’t really cosmopolitan (and still had fogs!). The grocery stores were voyages into the awful, as though fresh food was somehow dangerous. Things have changed so much. I remember when “wine bars” became popular maybe 30 years ago or so - serving food made with some care - and slowly at first then quickly food quality improved.
Jym, the food was bad. No offense at all with the theme.
There is a well-known chinese restaurant not far from us that happens to be next to a veterinarian’s clinic in a shopping center. You can imagine the many cracks that are said.
I’ve been amused by stories from trans-pacific travelers in both directions, whom are dumbfounded that the food they expected is not what they found during their trips. Chinese and Taiwanese nationals whom don’t recognize Chop Suey or General Tso Chicken served by American restaurants; Americans visiting China, complaining that the food served there is not what they eat at Chinese dinner tables in Seattle or San Francisco. LOL.
Jym, we have a Mongolian Grill restaurant located next to The Cat Clinic. I have heard all sorts of jokes about “chicken” served at that restaurant.
When D went to China, her biggest food surprise came in the form of the medium size pizza she and her friends ordered at a Pizza Hut. It was so tiny they could not stop laughing!!! 
" There is a well-known chinese restaurant not far from us that happens to be next to a veterinarian’s clinic in a shopping center. You can imagine the many cracks that are said. "
A few years ago, my extended family met for dinner at a Brazilian Rodizio. My nephew was moonlighting as a limo driver at the time and he couldn’t have dinner with us because he was working…he was able to come by the restaurant and say hello to us , however.
It was right after Christmas and his dog had eaten some sort of treat that made the poor thing very sick. The server ( Brazilian ) was walking around to our side with a spit of meat at the same time I asked my nephew , " How’d the dog " ? The server , very seriously answered me " no, it’s not dog , it’s lamb " ….that got our family roaring
LOL! And did you get a ride in the limo?
I used to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Chicago that had two menus, one posted on the wall and only in Chinese when we started going there with a couple of Mandarin readers/speakers. So that’s the one we ordered from. We would often be the only Caucasians in the place. After a while, they produced a translation and started handing both out to everyone.
There was a restaurant in Boston that didn’t want tipping but non-Chinese speakers paid no attention so they put up signs “no tipping” in Chinese only.
My oldest kid could speak Chinese well. Problem with reading menus was “blue black tofu” translates as “blue black tofu”, which is useless unless you know that that is, and other things like “mountain chicken” are names for dishes that again is useless unless you know what that is.
When I was young, we often tried ordering from the Chinese-character signs on the walls in Chinese restaurants (which we couldn’t read), but we always ended up with chicken’s feet. I don’t like chicken feet!
Despite all mirth about “exotic” ingredients in chinese food, the bottom line is that chinese food is enjoyed widely. I’ve seen chinese restaurants just about everywhere in the world, along w Italian restaurants. Other big cuisine winners: french, mexican, japanese.
Oh where, oh where are the ubiquitous dutch, russian, scottish cuisine restaurants?
They are there, collectively called ‘American’.
"I used to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Chicago that had two menus, one posted on the wall and only in Chinese when we started going there with a couple of Mandarin readers/speakers. "
Calvin Trillin wrote a classic piece in the '80s about a University of Chicago professor who introduced an extracurricular course in Chinese menu reading. (Chicago’s Chinatown was and still is most convenient concentration of good restaurants close to the university.) He did run into the “Three Treasure Soup” problem, though.
The best line in the piece was about when the professor tried to make the project into an official course, and the university rejected it as insufficiently academic for such an august institution, so he offered to retitle it “Aristotle, Freud, and the Chinese Menu.” Maybe you had to be around the university in its premodern period to get the joke, but my U of C family loved it.
Years ago (as a sometimes student of Chinese) I was given a book by a U of Chicago professor friend, on how to order in Chinese restaurants. Perhaps that was the text. The books was linguistically beyond my abilities, but loved the possibilities.
Those cuisines mentioned have little relationship to the average American menu, aside from fries/chips, though Dutch is a cuisine I don’t know.
Here in my town we had a Russian restaurant for a time. The borscht, the bliny, the pirogi. Yummy, hearty food. We do have a pelmeni-small filled dumplings- place that Ds frequent with friends.
I met a Scottish woman who had a small town cafe with specialties, though never drove out there to see what she served. Again, some of what I grew up with does not fit the American palate.
lje, you brought back a childhood memory of my parents making very yummy Helensburgh toffee, more a fudge to Americans. http://www.visitdunkeld.com/helensburgh-toffee-scotland.html
I am a fairly adventurous eater, but some of the things that are delicacies in China tend to push my boundaries. Dried blood in Hot and Sour soup-as I was taught to make it in HK, the fish eyes, the intestines boiling away, the amount of fat used.
Just curious, great lakes mom, what kind of syrup would be used in the recipe for toffee?