Steve Plotnicki

I'm glad we are in agreement. But Yvonne is right. It has to do with white people describing non-whites. Even though they use a pretty thin measure because they think of Italians and Greeks as non-whites! You just need to find a non-racial word to replace it. It needs to be a word that describes the food, not the people who prepare it.

Yes your contention is wrong .

I read on one of the wine forums that he killed himself with a shotgun in his home. That might have just been a rumor, but we will see. But killing yourself for the loss of Michelin stars or Gault Millau points is taking your food pretty seriously even though he must have been in big financial trouble. It's a restaurant I never ate at. I had wanted to go there to eat the famous Alexander Dumaine chicken dish but by the time I was ready I had heard the place was already in decline.

Mort de Bernard Loiseau, le chef étoilé de Saulieu

You mean in Ogunquit? No I haven't eaten there but wasn't it one of Gourmet or some other food magazines top 10 restaurants of the year? Not that it means anything, but it does mean something. Or am I thinking of another place? And you can always go to the Ogunquit Lobster Pound or even better, The Maine Diner in Wells is just down the road. Or you can stop at all of those fried clam places on Cape Ann on the way up or back. I say go. Bond with mom over a lobster roll.

No, no, no, a large percentage of immigrants to the U.S. were poor Europeans who happened to be from predominantly Catholic countries. Like the Irish and the Italians. The Jews fit this bill too. Not German Jews because they were high class, Jews from Eastern European who are considered ethnic. That the term was applied to describe immigrants from other continents, predominantly South America and Asia, that is a more recent wave of immigration and a more recent use of the term.

Yes, I thought your tone was that in-between the pickups, Stratocaster reverse polarity tone. Try and watch it next time and stick to food board tone oaky.

Ron - I think you might be missing the point or else I don't understand you.. I have no problem with people describing me through my ethnicity, in fact I sort of revel in my ethnicity. But that is not the same thing as a broad brush term that basically says, "not like us." Because indeed the people the term is trying to describe are exactly like us, regardless of their ethnicity.

You've lost me. What is it that you do not adhere to? All I wrote is what I believe the word "ethnic" is code for. I don't even think people are trying to draw a negative inference when they use the term. But I thought that Pan's point was that it doesn't matter. There is a negative inference no matter what you intend to say.

Adam - Not the 50's, the 70's after tourism took off. Tony - Okay I will be more careful with my words. I don't mean there really isn't a cuisine there, I mean that by comparison to other cuisines, and the advances they have made by being modernized and updated over the past three decades, there is little interesting about Greek cuisine because it has been stagnate all that time. How's that?

Tony - But Greek cuisine is dead everywhere because there is no real cuisine there. At least not in the same way that other ethnic (no new word yet) offer a cuisine. The few high end Greek restaurants that have opened in NYC are based on the concept that Greeks are excellent fish cooks (a faulty premise if you ask me, they are the same as everyone else.) And they get away with it because in general, the fish cookery available in NYC stinks. So a new place opens up and serves a better quality version of what you might get in a Greek diner in Long Island and charges $30. And I believe that their popularity stems from people liking to eat fish and there not being good fish easily available. In fact the concept of the New York or New England style fish house has almost disappeared from NYC. There is no J. Sheekey or Scott's here. And we don't even have the next level down like Poisonnerie de l'Avenue or the French copycats like Le Suquet and Le Pescadou. We have Le Bernadin and Aqua Grill, and then the bottom falls out excluding the Oyster Bar which is in a category all by itself. Wilfird - I am not so sure that you should dismiss it. When people decide to immigrate somwhere, they go where they think they can get work. And if they know that the people in their homeland like a modified version of their cuisine, then yes that is an incentive. How much so I obviously do not know.

Excuse me? Under what I just said, anyone who isn't poor could not be considered ethnic. Ducasse is not poor, in fact he's a wealthy guy. Why would he be considered ethnic? But this is why the French, Belgians, Swedes, Canadians, Australians etc. are not considered ethnic. But it is why the Italians, Greeks (read Catholic) generally are.

Tony - But salt cod and offal are what the entire dish revolves around. It's usually a big hunk of salt cod stewed somehow. Or kidneys that are broiled after being coated with mustard or something. They only use a spoonful of dried shrimp paste and it is integrated into a spicing routine that might have 15 other ingredients. So you don't taste it by itself. Wilfird - I have not said that tourism is the only way food culture travels, but it is one of the ways. It only takes one enterprising person to realize that if the tourists like it when they visit, they might like it when they are home. This isn't really such a drastic concept. Just probably one of the ways that it happens.

Thinking about it more and reading Wilfrid's reponse, I think the word has religious, class and racial connotations. If you are not a poor, non-white immigrant, you are not considered ethnic. Nobody considers I.M. Pei or Zubin Mehta to be ethnic. But they do consider many Chinese and Indian restaurants to be. I also think Italian cuisine can be ethnic based on what they are communicating to the public. Diner at Babbo isn't ethnic, but dinner at Don Pepe's is because it is associated with poor Italian (read Catholic) immigrants from the area around Naples. .

Yes but it's not a big component of the dish in the same way that salt cod or sardines are. And soy sauce itself is sort of an off flavor because of the way it is steeped. Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, and the amounts they use, is just a falvor enhancer. But I believe if they gave Western diners a whiff of the bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce, nobody would eat it.

Well where I do agree with you is that once people form an opinion of what tourists like to eat, it is hard to get them to change it. But the reality is that there is very little incentive for them to do so outside of the context of a clear path to making more money. That's why changes happen, as was said on the Spanish regional food thread, in dynamic ways. Still eveything needs a forerunner. In NYC, when the restaurant Mezzaluna opened, they started the carpaccio craze. Within 2 years there were a dozen copycats serving simple menus of capraccios, wood burning oven pizzas and pastas. But for example tapas hasn't been able to catch on here in the same way. And while I can speculate as to why that is, it doesn't really matter. The market has tried to support tapas places on occassion and their success has been very limited. Limited enough for someone to conclude that it isn't going to ever happen unless someone readjusts the definition of what a tapas bar means. As for Thai being accepted, it's not that controversial ingredient wise. It is chicken, beef and pork. What's so difficult to eat there? No different then Indian food, in fact there is more choice. And the spicing routine isn't all that different, just the way they go about assembling the spicing routine. Indian food is a dry spicing routine and Thai food uses a paste. But the spices on the list are very similar. But if Thai food revolved around ingredients with "off flavors" like using a lot of offal or salted fish, I don't think it would have been accepted the same way.

I wish this wasn't just a presumption. As much as I am inclined to agree with you about everything in your post, I think you underestimate how the lousy food got so lousy. They tried, but couldn't sell the real stuff to tourists. Even in local Chinese restaurants in London, the reason they don't translate the specials is because so few non-Chinese order them. So it isn't worth their while. Not only that, but they calculate how many portions they have based on their Chinese customer base and when you order it, it throws them off and they might not have any left for their regular customers. I will once again revert to being a simpleton about this. You give people something to eat and they will like it or they won't. And some things just aren't going to fly no matter what. Regardless of how popular Italian cuisine has become, and no matter how many people now eat squid compared to thirty years ago, the line seems to have been drawn at squid ink. Too exotic for the upper-middle diner. Yes some people will eat it but there is something about it that prevents it from becoming as popular as carpaccio. Why that is the case is a conversation for another thread, and for Wilfrid I might add. It seems to me, that if people think tourists will eat the local food, then they should be sent to local restaurants. But starting a restaurant for tourists that serves the local food is not reverberating with me.

But you can make this argument about almost any word that draws a distinction between people. And if all words were the same, they wouldn't seek to change them for things that have less onerous inferences. That is why we are looking for one that has less of a negative connotation, while still detailing a difference. In this instance, a word that does a better job of describing the cuisine, and not the people who make the cuisine, is probably on the right track.

I made this point at the beginning of the thread. The Brits are not considered "ethnic."

Vengroff - This has to be the post of the day. Congratulations. Pan - The way to do this is to be dogged about identifying each cuisine by their country of origin and if you are going to describe them in the aggregate, the only type of term that will make you happy is American-Immigrant cuisine

How about just Cultural Cuisine?

Hey at least I got the concept right! The problem with the term ethnic is it implies not really American which is not really true. Immigrants with citizenship are just as American as the natives are. But what the term is trying to say is *not reflecting the influence of having lived in America* which is accurate, but has no derogatory implication. So what if it was termed, "Multi-Cultural Cuisine or something like that?

How about FKAE (formerly know as ethnic?)

I don't think Pan's original post is asking whether the phrase is an accurate description of the food or the people. I thought he was inquiring about the political correctness of using the term. The inference I drew from his post was, we might have used this term in the past because it was easy, and Fat Guy, Anna N and Martin explained where that easiness came from, but isn't it about time that we got beyond this word as a matter of respect to the various national cuisines we patronize and the people who practice them? I think he happens to have a very good point even though I'm not sure how practical the implementation is. But now that he has raised it, in the future I will try to be more aware and sensitive about it, lest someone is actually offended by the use of the term.

Well it is based on who they are intended to appeal to. Diwan appears to be trying to appeal to a higher percentage of Indian diners then Tabla is, and as such the cuisine is more traditional or "ethnic" as Pan has put in this thread. Doesn't Nobu seem less Japanese then Sugiyama or Hatsuhana? But even then, I don't think people consider Japanese to be ethnic cuisine in the same way they think of Chinese and Thai as ethnic. But is Shun Lee Palace considered as ethnic as Grand Sichuan International? Nope. The further away you get from the concept of poor immigrants the less ethnic things seem.