Article: "How Not to Be a Restaurant Racist"

[Robin Garr]

What do you all think of this? I agree with some, but even as a firm liberationist, I think a couple of her points feel over the top.

http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2015/1 ... urce=atlfb

Like you I certainly agree with most of it but some of it is a little over the top. I found the discussion about the term ethnic food very interesting because I haven't heard that expression in a long time. At least in my opinion and I guess most of the people we normally eat with food types have become so commonplace with so much variety, especially in the Louisville area, that nothing really seems ethnic. Also, maybe it's how I grew up but the only thing I ever really considered true ethnic food was something like Creole or some of the backcountry Southern foods, anything that was for different culture you always referred to by its name such as Chinese, German, etc.

If you know where to look, good food and low prices don't have to be mutually exclusive. pho/pasta notwithstanding

First of all, I'm white. I've been out dining with Asian friends in situations where the server gives me a fork or rubberbanded chopsticks. It's a little awkward to be both the only white person and to be the only person handed kiddie chopsticks, but I never thought of it as racist. Maybe I need to up my fake outrage dial.

I think dining phobias are developed in individuals long before racial phobias. I can see why someone in a smaller town might think, "hey, it's Chinese food it must be cheap." simply because that used to be the case. I tend to price/order dishes based along the lines of difficulty in preparation or scarcity of ingredients . ("I can whip that up at home with ease so I'm not paying $22 for it in a restaurant.") And some dishes, or cocktails especially, have ingedients that I could never source. I'll happily pay more for those. So I guess, at least for me, my profiling runs along the lines of what I can cook vs what they can cook.

What do you all think of this? I agree with some, but even as a firm liberationist, I think a couple of her points feel over the top.

http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2015/1 ... urce=atlfb

I only refuse to pay expensive amounts for things like pho because there seems, at least in my experience, to be a perfect inverse relationship between its price and quality. If I see it on a menu for > $12 bucks, it is usually safe to assume it isn't actually pho.

The pho place has a menu online (http://babarseattle.com/food/dinner-menu/), so the people complaining about the prices need to shut up and learn to internet.

It feels like a "I don't have anything to write about so I'm going to set up some straw men and knock them down" sort of article. If I asked people to sort restaurants into "ethnic" and "non-ethnic" categories, I think everyone I know would put French, German or Italian restaurants into the "ethnic" category. Maybe we're just too Kentucky and see Europeans as weirdly foreign too.

As for making jokes about Korean restaurants serving dog, I watch a lot of Korean TV shows (I mean really a lot) and have only seen that once. I would probably make a joke (if I were to joke about something) about over-cooked steak. I see that pretty often. (Not that there's anything funny about well-done steak.)This is why I don't joke with strangers. My jokes usually only make sense to me and the limited few who know me well. Or maybe they just know me well enough not to expect things always to make sense. That would explain the confused smiles and rapid change of subject.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOY1Okg0RV4