Did you try sea cucumber, Berba? That looks just hellish.
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Overrated cuisine
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Originally posted by ad hoc View PostWrong. GaliciaLast edited by Gerontophile; 07-03-2018, 20:30.
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In reply to Berba:Oh i know my view of Chinese food is down to what i eat in Europe, not that i have visited the high end restaurants.
My gf had a similar experience in the Italian Alps, stuff she tried here and found 'ok' like polenta and bresaola became 'omg this is divine'...
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Chinese food is great I'd recommend Fuchsia Dunlop's books if you want to cook it yourself.
I would NOT however recommend cooking Chinese pig trotters (or any other trotters). Made some a couple of years ago and it was very like trying to eat huge globules of fat and bone with the occasional minute bit of meat. I have literally just finished giving them another go and they were equally disgusting (although the sauce was nice). Quite why I imagined pigs had somehow evolved in the last 24 months to have incredibly meaty and lean feet is a mystery to me...
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Another vote for Mexican. The idea of it is always better than the stodge in a wrap result. Though I’ve never been to Mexico and I’d say Europe is shite at it. But a Mexican did once cook up a massive feed for me and his other teachers, and it was fucking rank. I was looking forward to Molé sauce with chicken, but nah it tasted like chicken in chocolate sauce. I’d still like to give it another chance, surely poor Alejandro was just a shitey cook.
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Mexican Chorizo don’t seem right neither. Like “pepperoni“ to salami. Crossed with mince.Last edited by Lang Spoon; 07-03-2018, 21:06.
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Well, yes. British Mexican food is absolutely fucking terrible (Continental European Mexican food is somehow, astonishingly, worse). But even good, delicious, well made Mexican food is broadly pretty limited.
I find Indian cuisine - even allowing for regional variations - to be mostly overrated, too, for similar reasons. It's perfectly nice, but I don't think it has the variation that you find in French or Italian or Chinese or Spanish cuisines.
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The trotters sound awful.
To add, on Chinese food, I had one of the meals of my life in Beijing, cooked in front of me on the floor by a little old fella who seemingly owned one pan and one knife and had to send his kid out for ingredients for each order. And three weeks later, another lifetime experience, slightly more conventionally prepared, in Guilin. So I’m with the ‘better local’ idea.
Not overrated but rather the opposite: until a couple of years ago I’d not realised how seriously Turks take food and how excellently they do simple, fresh food. Again, not overly veggie friendly, but I had some lovely meals in Turkey.
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True enough UA. Even in food desert Scotland of the 70s, Cullen Skink (chowder of the Gods) would be rarely seen on the west coast. I’m sure Wales has dishes that don’t cross from North to South. And class differences too. How many Italians could get access o meat or pasta before the 20th century?Last edited by Lang Spoon; 07-03-2018, 21:18.
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Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View PostI find Indian cuisine - even allowing for regional variations - to be mostly overrated, too, for similar reasons. It's perfectly nice, but I don't think it has the variation that you find in French or Italian or Chinese or Spanish cuisines.
Oddly, most restaurants in India are guilty of mediocre homogenisation too. There’s always a Punjabi dhaba with the same menu as the last place.
If you’re lucky enough to get home-cooking or find street food with a safe bacterial load, it’s a different experience.
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Macarons really pissed me off a few years back when everyone was pretending to be mad into baking. As opposed to just watching Bake Off. Don’t get them at all. Not a dessert man at the best of times, but oh what a disappointing postre.
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- Apr 2011
- 2053
- A bottom-bottom wata-wata in Lake Titicaca
- Atlético Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca Pan flutes FC
- Buñuelos Arequipeños
Antoine has a point in that he has identified a problem re food in France but it has nothing to do with a supposed lack of variety of French cuisine.
The fault lies firmly with restaurants and their over-reliance on “industrial food” (and therefore, by extrapolation, with the public for continuing to patronise these restaurants), namely pre-prepared/ready meals (often frozen and then microwaved) bought from huge food suppliers such as Metro, Pomona, Davigel or Brakes (BTW, we have the same problem in the UK, Brakes, Bidfood etc. are also very popular with pubs, restaurants, chains etc., not much of what you eat is “homemade” these days, as in made on the premises).
According to Synhorcat, the main French hoteliers and restaurateurs’ trade union, about 30% of restaurants use industrial products from readymade food suppliers (2013 figure) but it is most certainly an underestimation. As it still is a hugely taboo subject (even though pretty much everyone in France by now knows of the extent of the problem – dozens and dozens of programmes on the subject in the last decade and a half), we don’t know the % of restaurants who use these suppliers - obviously, no official data - but it usually reckoned by insiders and journalists specialising in that trade that approx. 60% of restaurants use them to varying degrees. One of the reasons they know it's 50-60% is because these journalists regularly go through the bins of a cross section of restaurants (eg in this TV prog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uDW...utu.be&t=1m31s).
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the provenance of what you eat in half of French restaurants is always industrial, but it usually means for instance that while the salad or soup that you’ve ordered may be pukka/made on the premises, the lovely looking filet de saumon à l'oseille or bœuf bourguignon that you’ve also ordered isn’t, and neither is the dessert as it is the least likely item on the menu to be fait maison, the mœlleux or fondant au chocolat, tarte Tatin etc. are all classics in this respect, very rarely homemade (very few restaurants can afford a pâtissier – skills shortage + they command relatively high salaries + big overheads + competition from the chains being the main reasons why your typical French restaurant is finding it hard to compete and therefore very likely to cut corners).
However, where it gets tricky is that industrial cuisine has hugely improved in the last decade so it could well be that these pre-prepared dishes taste perfectly fine. That said, bland, samey food from Dunkerque to Perpignan and Brest to Strasbourg is the end product of this mass standardisation.
Real restaurateurs have hit back in the last decade and campaigned for “fait maison” logos and accreditations (eg “Label restaurants de qualité”) to separate the wheat from the chaff but the “cuisine d’assemblage” (as it’s officially called, also “plats en kit”) is so widespread that the real “homemade food” professionals are now in a minority.
Before 2014, having the “fait maison” accredition on dishes was a cinch (you only had to add a bit of herbs or 2 bits of carrot on your dish and you could legally write “fait maison” next to the dish on the menu). Since 2014, a stricter “fait maison” accreditation scheme was agreed on and supposed to act as a quality guarantee but the wording of such restrictive rules is vague and woolly enough to let the con artists win the battle (rules were tightened in 2015, apparently, but I’m sure that the loopholes are still substantial. The main problem is that the restaurant industry itself knows that if the rules are too strict and the penalties too punitive, plenty of restaurants will eventually fold, therefore plenty of job losses etc. and that's shit for everybody so they've always been very soft over this "fait maison" accredition. Successive gvts do not want more unemployment so they let trade professionals decide).
No One Can Agree on What “Homemade” Means. France’s new labeling law was doomed from the beginning.
As a rule of thumb, apart from the obvious signs (cheap €10-12 three-course menus, touristic area etc.) if the restaurant is small and there are 20-25 dishes on the menu, you’d be right to smell a rat, most of these dishes, if not all of them, will be industrial.Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 07-03-2018, 22:27.
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Originally posted by Incandenza View PostMostly British people complaining about world cuisines...
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