Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

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I live in an area in Toronto that is very chinese (chinese supermarkets, chinese mall, even chinese doctor offices - you can pretty much live normally here without speaking a word of english) and my impression of restaurants in the area has been that rather than it being a dichotomy in terms of "american" vs "chinese" chinese food, the dichotomy is that chinese cuisine is extremely diverse compared to north american fare. You can go to a west chinese restaurant and get food that looks like afghan food, or go to a northern china place and get a mind-bogglingly spicy fish stew. There's dim sum, hong kong style cafeterias, szechuan, shanghai-style, and the list goes on and on and on. And a lot of it is quite accessible food without organs or chicken feet.

My wife tells that me that in china, you get diversity even in north american chains: pizza hut there is apparently considered "fancy food" and you can get all sorts of interesting things from KFC or mcdonalds.

North American food is surprisingly diverse, too. That isn't to take anything from Chinese food, which is amazingly diverse. However, compare the food of Tucson, San Francisco, Santa Fe, San Antonio, New Orleans, Atlanta, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver. (I'm not even comparing to other North American countries such as Mexico, Cuba, and Panama, each with microregions of their own.)

Off topic, I wish there was more Uighur food around the US - that stuff is fantastic.

Yeah, I wasn't saying that american food consists solely of burgers and hot dogs, there's definitely lively food scenes in north american big cities. My impression, though, is that the food diversity in US/Canada has more to do with multiculturalism than with tradition, i.e. you get to pick between indian, thai, mexican, italian, greek, etc and a lot of the twists and novelties are fusions of two or more cultures (e.g. at one festival, I saw a food stand that made tacos... with vietnamese banh-mi ingredients)

Chinese food can also have fusion twists (e.g. there's a chinese indian restaurant a few miles away from where I live), but each regional cuisine also has rich local culturalism, and in addition, chinese cuisine can be surprisingly technical. It's downright impressive the number of different ways you can have beef noodles, for example.

The US has a lot of international cuisines. And as a country of immigrants, there's not much of a "native" culinary tradition. But there are distinct variations in local cuisines. For instance,

New England: clam chowder, lobster rolls

Southeast: barbecue, cornbread, grits, sweet tea

Texas: steaks, Tex-Mex

Louisiana: Cajun and Creole cuisine

Southwest: similar to Mexican cuisine

California: avocados on everything

Went to toronto 2 years ago and the chinese food we've tried there is pretty-amazingly-delicious. And yes, they don't even speak english :-)

> pizza hut there is apparently considered "fancy food"

Ten years ago, but not so much now.

Maybe people don't view it as fancy, but it is still fancy. I went to one a year ago, sit down restaurant with leather style book menu. Cost enough - 130 RMB for a small pizza!

More accurately "exotic" food. For most native Chinese, if you ask them to have western food a few days in a row they'll be desperate to find Chinese food again

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