Ethnic Restaurants

[ottawa-newbie]

DH and I love Vietnamese food

 

[sha_lyn]

I love trying new foods
Just had Turkish/Mediterranean tonight for my birthday dinner.
The only thing I've really had is some styles of Indian food. I know it varies by region and I really don't know the difference. I do know that for me it tends to be love or hate.


My favorite Sushi place is owned by Koreans, so no it really doesn't bother me what ethnic group owns a place. I just care that the food is good.

However I do like to support small local places and enjoy places that are more authentic.

 

[ImarriedGrumpy]

DH and I both love ethnic food and will try anything! DH is an amazing cook, and he loves to try cooking new things - we have a whole bookcase in the kitchen just filled with cookbooks with recipes from around the world. The night we got engaged, he made me an Indian food banquet before proposing.

My favorites are Moroccan, Indian, Thai, Cuban, and German. DH loves Afghani, Vietnamese, Korean, and anything he's never tried before! We'll both try any ethnic restaurant, and we do prefer the ones owned and run by people of the same ethnicity as the food on the menu. No objections to a cross over, but it's so much fun to get into conversations with the servers and chefs about the food, the country it is from, and other cultural information. We once learned all about Afghani music just by asking our server about an instrument hanging on the wall near our table! It was awesome!

 

[LadyBears]

I LOVE Polish, Lebanese, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Chinese, French, Cajun...

I am one who is almost always willing to try anything. Yes, there have been times I'll tell someone not to tell me what it is until AFTER I have tried it, but for the most part, I have been pleasantly surprised!!

I don't care who owns the place - as long as the food is good, I am happy.

The only thing I WON'T do, is order "outside" of the nationality/type of the place. If I am at a Mexican restaurant, I am ordering Mexican food - not something that may be on the menus for an alternative choice. We used to have a REALLY good Chinese restaurant here. The owners have retired & closed the place because their kids didn't want to continue the family business. Anyway, I could never figure out why people (not talking kids) would order fish & chips! Hello - the seafood place is down the street! Why are you here? This is actually one of my pet peeves!!

 

[grlpwrd]

I love ethnic foods of all kinds, but I cannot stand fusion cooking. I just have personal issues when chefs/restaurants do that... I just like homestyle ethnic foods, I guess.

 

[motherhen17404]

If you're ever in Washington DC I'll go to Ethiopian food with you. It's the one type of food that our kids don't want to have again and the restaurants are not real close so my DH and I don't go. I would like to try it again. In all fairness, I think the kids might grow to like it if we brought them a few times. Maybe we'll go and bring our 6yo since he loves to try different food.

A friend of ours went to school in Washington, DC and she was really hooked on Ethiopian food while there. She kept telling us how good it was and begged us to give it a try. Now, DH and I are foodies, we will try anything. So a group of us go to this Ethiopian restaurant in Baltimore. It is a very small place, and only 1 person spoke english. It was very interesting listening to them talk with each other. The food however was not our cup of tea. You eat everything with this strange gray colored sponge-like bread using only your hands, no forks. Eating with our hands was fun, and learning about a different kind of food was fun, but I am not sure I would ever try it again.

 

[Tigger&Belle]

Yeah, the spongy sourdough-like bread is interesting for sure. I think that's what our kids didn't like.

 

[Marseeya]

I love ethnic foods of all kinds, but I cannot stand fusion cooking. I just have personal issues when chefs/restaurants do that... I just like homestyle ethnic foods, I guess.

What exactly is fusion cooking anyway? I've always wondered about that.

 

[Lisa F]

What exactly is fusion cooking anyway? I've always wondered about that.

It's basically a crossover between cuisines. Food will have "influences" from other ethnicities rather than being purely from one ethnicity or another. We have a fantastic asian fusion restaurant here called Umami Cafe. I have never had anything from there that wasn't "eyes roll in the back of your head" delicious but different strokes for different folks. Sometimes fusion style doesn't work (ie things mix that just don't go together), sometimes it does (a good chef can find common ground between various cuisines) and sometimes it works even though you think it shouldn't (where a chef mixes some things that don't seem like they should go and they go remarkably well!)

I love ethnic foods as well. Generally when I get a craving for something it's ethnic. I'd eat ethnic every day of the damn week and will always choose something ethnic over a chain restaurant or steakhouse type place. Indian is my favorite but around here we also have surprisingly AMAZING japanese, mexican (wonderful mexican owner, theirs is a bit more authentic than most) and greek (this guy makes gyros to DIE for). We also have decent italian (we HAD been going to an amazing mom and pop place but they closed) and chinese. No thai or vietnamese that I know of and I miss vietnamese from when I worked in DC.

 

[minkydog]

I did not grow up an adventurous eater, but I like a lot of ethnic foods now. I cook Greek(my DH is Greek) and we love Indian food so much I'm learning to cook that too. There is a Mexican place right down the street which cooks authentic Mexican food. And our fave Chinese restaurnant is run by a large Chinese family. Gosh, I can't think of any "ethnic' fods i don't like

 

[Tigger&Belle]

I did not grow up an adventurous eater, but I like a lot of ethnic foods now.

When I was growing up in a small town in Oregon the only good ethnic food that we had was Mexican. We had Americanized (read: yuck) Chinese and we had French, but I don't know how good it was (and it wasn't there long). Now they have a Thai restaurant which is pretty good--not quite what we have here, but worth eating at and owned by a very nice Thai lady.

When I was in college I met my more worldly boyfriend in San Francisco for the weekend and we went to an Indian restaurant. I was so stupid, though and thought that it was American Indian food (I grew up in Native American territory so it was a reasonable thing for me to think LOL). Never heard of Indian food before that.

As a vegetarian I can't imagine NOT eating ethnic food since it really increases the choices of food. Most other cultures don't concentrate on meat like Americans do--they serve it, but it's a part of the meal, not what everything else revolves around.

 

[AnaheimGirl]

I also can't think of a single "ethnic" food available in our area that we don't eat. Like someone said, I don't even think of many of them as "ethnic", since they are so commonplace. We love Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican and Greek food, and also eat Indian, Moroccan, German, Italian, and Korean on occasion. I had some great co-workers who would bring in specialties from various African countries, as well, those were always delicious! Unfortunately, I know of no restaurants in our area that serve that type of food.

Funny, I'm half Italian and half German, but we eat less of those foods than many others. I never really thought about that until just now.

ETA: oops forgot to answer this part. I don't really care about the ethnicity of the people running an ethnic restaurant, as long as the food is good. In our area, most of the Mexican food is pretty bad, the only good places happen to be run by Mexicans. I've never been to a Greek place not run by Greeks, but some of our favorite Asian places are run by people from other Asian countries.

 

[mariolatry]

We eat at Korean restaurants almost every week, but DH is Korean so that explains it. We definitely consider the nationality of the people who run the restaurant but more important is the type of customer it draws in. We look for Asian restaurants that Asian people go to because that means the menu is usually a bit more "authentic". As far as Chinese people owning a Korean restaurant or Korean people owning a Japanese restaurant, that's usually not a big deal as there is typically a lot of cross-over in the palate of those cultures (i.e. Koreans often eat quite a bit of Chinese food because the array of seasonings is more familiar). The groups often become very familiar with the menus of other Asian cultures. My in-laws will only eat at Korean, Chinese, or Japanese restaurants because those are in their "comfort zone".

 

[Happy Gal]

I enjoy different ethnic food --

Mexican
Italian
German
Japanese (never tried sushi though)
Chinese

I've tried Indian & liked that, too.

I'm trying to get away from the chain restaurants (except PFChangs, lol), and go for the more authentic types