How Americans pretend to love 'ethnic food'
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
And the thing is, I'd happily pay more for good Thai food than I do now, but nobody charges more. Maybe there's some weird market imbalance thing going on, or maybe I'm really weird, but I think local Thai restaurants could charge more and still do well. But as it happens, all the Thai places nearby are in that range of about $11-$13 for an entree and $4-$10 for an appetizer. I'm glad I can get such awesome food for not a ton of money, but I definitely feel like I'm getting a great deal.
For me personally, if there were a Thai place within walking distance of me that was high quality but was 50% more expensive (or maybe even more) compared to say, Thai Cafe on University Drive in Durham, I'd eat there and probably quite often.
I think I could say the same about a lot of the "ethnic" food I eat, although Thai is definitely my favorite. Heck, to be honest, when I say "ethnic food" I consider that a badge of honor or something, not a mark of inferiority.
(Background: I live in a large port city with a whole lot of immigrants, primarily Latinos but also many Vietnamese, Indians, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and lots of others--about a quarter of Houston's population is immigrants.)
This really seems incorrect to me. I don't think there's any sort of price ceiling on what people are willing to pay, as one can readily find Indian, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese places that all are rather expensive per plate. There are a lot of cheap places as well, to be sure, but in the same way I can find both cheap burgers at McDonald's and expensive gourmet burgers elsewhere.
There is an argument also to be made that the more traditional restaurants have a clientele made up of folks from their community, who probably aren't terribly wealthy (because recent immigrant), and so their prices tend to be a bit more reflective of what their normal clients can bear. It's not that they couldn't charge more--it's that the people more likely to be used to their cuisine are less likely to be able to pay high prices.
This is also why, for example, you can get better and cheaper BBQ out in Giddings than you can in Houston...the meat market doesn't have a lot of business from people who are living off of engineering and medical salaries, and they are closer to where a lot of the meat was raised. Oh, and it's been in business for like fifty years. That helps.
If anything, the "ethnic" divide is probably from what the grocery stores do: a couple of aisles are dedicated to ethnic/international foods, adding a few token items to the mainstay of the American dietary needs supplied there. The German/French/Italian stuff has been around for so long in the US that it isn't even really differentiated from normal English cuisine--and that's a shame, because you have to go out of your way to find good ingredients for those dishes.
Part of the problem too is that a lot of stuff like Chinese food is just pure garbage here. Panda Express and any number of low-rent places don't cook anything like real Chinese food (like, drive out to Chinatown and order from the traditional menu Chinese food) and yet they are what most Americans think of when they want to order Chinese. That brand association can hurt places that would otherwise be able to charge more for their food.
(And yes, it's a terrible thing to use the phrase "Chinese food" when there a different regions with different cuisines; I've done that here for brevity. Indian food is the same way, and so forth.)
There is one part of the writeup I've seen first hand:
"Here in the United States, when you buy "ethnic food," you're essentially buying it from people who learn to cook it on the fly, mostly men, who have often never cooked back home."
There's a taco truck nearby whose quality literally doubled as soon as the owners' wives and daughters started working. I've observed this at several other small Mexican places in Houston. The rule doesn't necessarily hold for larger or richer places, though.
Think of the highest end restaurants in your area, establishments where formal attire and reservations are a requirement. The types of places that win awards and accolades, where people that have the means will go to celebrate major life events.
In my experience, having lived in major cities on the East and West coasts, those restaurants are almost exclusivity western cuisine – specifically French or Italian derivatives. Japanese cuisine, as the article points out, tends to be the one exception to that rule. Thai, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, etc don’t seem to be represented proportionally to their global popularity in the high-end market.
I googled around for “highest ranked restaurants in the United States” and the trend seems, in my opinion, pretty well aligned with this article’s claims. And if you believe that the high-end market indicates what we value as a society, in that it’s what we demonstrate we will pay for and praise handsomely, then there does seem to a eurocentric bias.
What I found though provoking in this article, and a sentiment I largely agree with from my own anecdotal experience, is the idea that there’s a sort of prestige hierarchy for types of cuisine in the US.