Imho, you aren’t missing out on much if they don’t show you the chicken feet.
Where I live just because it’s across from Nordstrom it doesn’t mean its not authentic. Din Tai Fung just opened up an enormous restaurant at my local mall. (take THAT Panda Express)
We have loads of very very wealthy mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong citizens who have bought large homes in Arcadia and Pasadena. We had wonderful independent Chinese restaurants before this trend but now several popular restaurants there are opening restaurants here. They have a very finicky public to keep them honest and authentic. No phony Americanized menus required. When we stand in line for Sunday Dim Sum we are usually the only two people speaking English. Bring on the chicken feet.
Jealous, @musicamusica. That website you linked is making me hungry.
If we were going to take this cultural misappropriation stuff seriously, we’d also have to take into account time and socioeconomic status of our ancestors. Modern British cuisine is not the same as 18th century Yorkshire cuisine. And, for a dirt poor Chinese or Hungarian peasant, eating the food of royalty is, when you think of it, every bit as much a cultural misappropriation as anything else (and vice versa). Indeed, the food in the good years was likely much different than the food in the subsidence years.
Given that most of us probably came from peasants who went through some pretty bad years, I think there is a place for common ground: gruel. Very thin, watery gruel. Most of our ancestors probably spent a lot of time eating it, no matter where in the world they lived. It’s our shared cultural heritage!
Maybe we should open a pan-cultural gruel shack – with the specific grain assigned to the patron being based on a brief survey as to their background.
Seems like the mom-and-pop Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and other ethnic restaurants are doing just fine around here. But then this area has a high immigrant population.
Congee has become trendy lately so could be successful. 
The big issue we should be addressing is the cultural appropriation of American food. For example, the city of Paris has gone burger crazy. Not chain hamburgers (though they are there) but high end hamburgers. And boy are they fantastic. Fresh home made buns, high quality ground beef made on the premises, beautiful sauces and (bien sûr) the best fries ever. Since young Parisiennes love vacationing in California—It seems every hip little cafe needs to offer their version. My favorite –
http://www.cantinecalifornia.com
“nos recettes authentiques qui sont inspirées des authentiques traditions Californiennes.”
you betcha
I think we don’t need food police. If other people like cuisine that I personally might find tasteless, or uninspired, or inauthentic, oh well. It’s not for me to correct. If Pizza Hut or Chef Boyardee or Olive Garden give people what they want - then they want it, they want to spend their money that way, so be it - that’s the beauty of capitalism.
Are we plain-taste-bud-shaming?
Not everyone wants to be a foodie with only authentic artisanal food, or a fashionista with a closetful of designer stuff, or an audiophile with the best sound equipment, or a wine connoisseur with a full cellar, or whatever. It’s ok if people have interest areas they care about and ones they don’t. I like fashion and clothing, but if other people want to buy a t-shirt at Walmart and be done with it, what’s it to me? I don’t need to sniff that they have forsaken quality couture for mass market schlumpf. Not my problem.
I personally don’t think that mass marketed food necessarily"dilutes" food culture. For many it’s an introduction to new foods. I know that my mom served me Chef Boyardee and the only thing that came close to sushi in our house was fish sticks. I survived just fine. Taste, whether it’s clothing or food, is a personal journey. Take it if you want it, if not, so what.
" Are we plain-taste-bud-shaming? "
I suppose I am guilty of that to a certain extent…not to the general public , but in my home . I appreciate people who have desire to eat a variety of foods and not be afraid to experiment a little. I don’t make what I would consider to be exotic food ( and I wouldn’t care to eat chicken feet )
I guess I just love food so much , and making it that I get a bit offended if adults guests in my home eat like a five year old
Responding to @pizzagirl --i don’t think there is taste-bud shaming going on, but I personally DO think that learning about and being comfortable with the world’s cuisines is an important part of being a cultured, well-educated person.
It is definitely an important part of MY value system. Just as I wanted my daughter to have a basic level of knowledge and education about art, film, literature, history, music etc., I made sure that she had an education in food and (and to a lesser extent, given her age) wine.
In the end, someone might prefer Panda Express to (say) authentic xiao long bao (Shanghai soup dumplings), just as someone might prefer porn to Truffaut. But I think it is better for someone to make those choices AFTER having been exposed to the alternatives and having the education necessary to appreciate the differences.
And I do think the general level of taste and culture of the population affects the whole community. I think it WOULD be my problem if there weren’t a critical mass of people in my community who preferred something other than porn and bad chain fast food. The presence of a vibrant food scene in a city or community – as with a vibrant art scene – depends on an interested and educated population. So, it kind of IS my problem, in a way, if other people don’t share my tastes. It doesn’t mean I have any ability to change other people’s tastes, but their tastes CAN affect my quality of life.
We witnessed the hamburger craze in Paris a couple of years ago when we visited. Everyone in just about every kind of restaurant was having a tall gourmet burger - and eating it with a knife and fork, like it was a casserole.
It was funny to see, I guess because we think of hamburgers as very casual food here in the US.
We went to a vegetarian restaurant there, and they had their own veg/fake version of the gourmet tall burger. I ordered it, but picked it up with my hands and ate it. My daughter said, Hey, they eat burgers with utensils here! I told her, Hey, this is the food of my people, and we eat it with our hands. (Although technically, it was not the food of my people - the burger was made of seitan, which was invented by Buddhist monks centuries ago. Western vegetarians have appropriated it in a big way.)
“It is definitely an important part of MY value system. Just as I wanted my daughter to have a basic level of knowledge and education about art, film, literature, history, music etc., I made sure that she had an education in food and (and to a lesser extent, given her age) wine.”
Right. I don’t think highly of the choice to listen to only one genre of music or look at only one school of art, whatever that genre might be. Everybody has favorites, but if you think nothing outside your favorites is worth a listen, that’s troubling. Food is just art for a different sense.
I can bemoan something without feeling that anybody, in particular, needs to feel shame about it. I bemoan the proliferation of McDonald’s in small-town America, because it does push out local stores. (Same with Wal-Mart.) There are good economic reasons for this, but it results in a kind of homogenization that I think is too bad.
Cuisine anywhere is regional, and changes over time. The Pizza were know in the US was unknown in Italy until wel after the second world war, that Pizza was pretty much created in NYC by Italian immigrants, and Pizza Margharita, which came out of Naples, was relatively unknown in the US until relatively recent decades, and in Northern Italy neither that or the US style pizza were common until the 1960’s from what I know. Northern Italians eat rice and a lot more meat, folks from near the sea eat a lot more seafood, the place where my grandparents came from, in the Naples region, their basic diet would be pasta and sauce, bread with onions fried in olive oil, meat would have been rare and scarce, and whatever vegetables they can grow, the more fancy cooking was from the well off north, Sicilian cooking is similar to neaopolitan, but they also tend to have different styles of bread, and they eat a lot more seafood from what I know.
The neat part about food is it grows and adapts, the French and Italians have been fighting wars of words over cooking on who stole from whom for a long, long time:).
And yes, the Chinese food most of us grew up on if you are a certain age, bears little resemblance to traditional chinese cooking (for example, the heavy use of soy sauce is American). The first Chinese food was cooked by Chinese laborers in the US, almost all men, and they opened restaurants that featured what they created as “Chinese cooking”, and also modified it to fit American taste, a lot of dishes people order in chinese places don’t exist in China.
If someone loves Mexican food and wants to create authentic mexican cuisine, why not? There are a lot of Asian restaurants these days that have so called 'fusion cooking", or they have dishes from various Asian cuisines, like Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese…
Appropriation is a label to me is only authentic when someone doesn’t acknowledge the country or group that made it,created it, and acknowledging a debt to it. Reminds me of when the first schools of Jazz started up in this country, many of them would not admit black students or have black instructors, that would be cultural appropriation at its worst.
Just a quick reminder - we are (still!) in free country, enjoy your freedom while it lasts!
Speaking of gruel, it seems cereal milk is a “thing” these days. Sugary gruel. Perhaps the native cuisine of a few generations of American kids?
Yes, congee, or juk can be quite satisfying.
In defense of some of my cultural roots, Scottish food has far more than haggis. The best of it involves sugar. Shortbread, Hellensborough toffee, trifles, and various baked fingers, or bars to us.
I don’t care who is cooking my meal as long as it’s delicious and the kitchen is hygienic.
And even though I am a food snob, I’m not going to shame a plain eater. I raised one, quite by accident. I cater to his tastes, too, because food shouldn’t be a source of anxiety, but of pleasure.
I enjoyed Scottish food when I was there! Restaurants were doing delicious and creative things with haggis, like stuffing it into filo dough purses. I enjoyed eating in the UK in general; I just had breaded fish and peas for dinner. 
Shaming people in general is not a business I want to be in, even if the shamee has done something really rotten like neglect his/her kids. Having a private opinion is a different thing from shaming people.