Restaurant Only Serves Food From Countries The U.S. Is At War With | Hacker News Reader

Restaurant Only Serves Food From Countries The U.S. Is At War With

torontostandard.com

21 pointstorstan13 comments

Well, at least there will be a broad, diverse menu with new food options being added regularly.

I was just in Pittsburgh, and this place has closed down. It was around for a few years though. Cool idea, but perhaps a problematic business model.

"In conflict with" is a broad term. Defined strictly it's "A serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one" and they seem to take great liberties in how they apply the definition. Venezuela for example; while the countries may have disagreements on policy, most other forms of relation are intact (namely trade, which is still humming along seehttp://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c3070.html). Such policy disagreements are similar to personal disagreements on a macro scale. A clever PR move though, I'm sure they're getting the attention they wanted!

Fairly clever. In one direction (food->politics), seems to be leveraging the fact that "ethnic food" is interesting to many people who aren't otherwise greatly interested in world affairs, so can provide a hook. Not sure how effective it'll be at spreading any actual information about anything, but it's an interesting approach to at least get the initial attention. In the other direction (politics->food), it's a restaurant concept that seems somewhat unique in the otherwise fairly saturated market of people who make food choices based at least in part on politics (e.g. organic/fair-trade/etc.).

I know the headline is copied from the article, but I wonder why it differs from the copy. The headline is incorrect and the copy is correct:

"They only sell food from countries the U.S. is in conflict with."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unite...)

I would say b/c it attracts more attention. Right or wrong, they seem to be going the sensationalism route.

Is the US at war with Venezuela, Iran and Cuba? Or, are embargoes and sanctions considered "war"? AFAIK, we're not at war with Afghanistan either, rather, we're warring against the Taleban and others but not the Afghan gov't proper.

"Featured cuisines have included Iranian, Afghan, Cuban and Venezuelan food"

Formally speaking, the US hasn't been at war since World War II [1]. The use of military force by the US government without a declaration of war has rendered the concept rather meaningless. We are left with the colloquial acceptation of "war" which certainly includes the conflicts with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but probably not Cuba and Venezuela.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unite...

Official or not, most (and me included) would consider VN, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I guess my contention is that currently, the US is not at war with any particular country, however, it is involved in conflicts in some and has military presence in others (tho not in active fighting). So I guess my main point is that calling it war is a stretch but I acknowledge that they'd go out of business pretty soon, if they just went by general convention of what "war" is.

Maybe an alternative ideas would be "conflict" food, that would enable them to serve food from ethiopia, india, tibet, afghanistan, sudan, colombia, mexico, phiipinnes, etc. and not let their fate rest on the possibility of peace.

I'm partial to the Waffle Shop (http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/creativity/2009/winter/waffle-sh...), but I guess it's mostly because I'm very particular about how my kubideh is prepared...

Add Ecuadorian food in half a year.

Do Mexican drug cartels count?

I don't think so. As they are a small business limiting the scope makes sense.

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