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Comment by hiisukun | Hacker News Reader

In Australia, we have a number of dishes available as a staple at heaps of Chinese restaurants that are far from 'authentic'. Certainly, this is something I enjoy - though I'm not the biggest fan of honey chicken, I see it as a strength of merging cultures and food preferences.

Vietnamese food is also very popular in Australian capital cities, especially banh mi. The fact at some stage a crusty French bread roll merged with delicious Vietnamese meats is one of those pleasant parts of otherwise complex and questionable colonialism.

In Australia, we're still yet to properly come to terms with some of the unsavoury elements of our colonial history, and I'm reminded of this when I enjoy Australia's most popular foods: the mix of food cultures of the many migrants who have settled here is wonderful, even when their other cultural elements are less visible.

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Living in Quebec and eating Banh Mi is entertaining to think about. A fusion Vietnamese-French dish that has now been brought to another former French colony by Vietnamese immigrants.

Hakka cuisine is also interesting since it is originally Chinese-Indian but now that people have brought it to Canada I guess the kind we get here would qualify as Chinese-Indian-Canadian.

What do you mean by Hakka cuisine being Indian? Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup in China. Did the ones in Canada come via India or something?

I had the same question, which led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_cuisine#Hakka_cuisine_in...

Apparently there was a large wave of Hakka immigration into India, where they developed a kind of fusion cuisine, which they brought with them when later moving to Canada.

I discovered Indian Chinese food while living in the Toronto area and it was mind blowing. I love the Manchurian chicken dishes but I particularly enjoy the vegetarian Hakka stir fry.

It has all the comforting qualities of a Chinese stir fry but is spicy to boot. Interestingly I’ve noticed that most patrons of Hakka restaurants are South Asian, not East Asian, which means more latitude to deploy stronger spices.

Hakka is not Chinese-Indian. The Hakka ancestors who went to Canada might have Indian links but that's a very obscure subset of the Hakka clan and definitely not representative of it.

...and in Chinese restraunts in India they usually have 2 chop sueys on menu. American Chop Suey (red sauce) and a Chinese Chop Suey (white sauce).

The old joke is that when the British colonized a country they left behind railways and a legal system, while when the French colonized a country they left behind baguettes and coffee.

Unsurprisingly, Vietnam is also a major coffee producer.

Hong Kong got that weird breakfast cuisine that looks like it’s made out of wartime rations— among other things condensed milk spread on toast and that coffee/tea mix.

A lot of those products became popular because Hong Kong is a tropical city reliant on food imports. Things like condensed milk, luncheon meats, etc. became popular because they were shelf-stable without refrigeration, and thus were affordable to keep around.