Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* This was never a serious argument for immigration. The reality is that most Americans are perfectly happy with meatloaf and potatoes every night, and only a small minority of foodies and wealthy people who can waste money eating out really care about exotic cuisine.

* He is right in two senses. The first is his argument that there has never been anything wrong with the middlebrow American, meat and potatoes cuisine based off of the northern European immigrants that were the basic immigrant groups to the US. Its still good today if prepared the right way. What gave it a bad reputation was post 1960s, chain franchise McDonaldization’s of the cuisine, and then the damage done by post 1970s federal agricultural and nutrition policies. Neither of these had much to do with the cuisine itself.

You also didn’t need the post 1965 immigration for variety. You always would have had high end French restaurants in the US, for example, even if the ethnic makeup of the US stayed as it was in 1800. But the conquest of Florida and parts of Mexico would have inevitably brought in Mexican influenced food. With the pre-1925 immigrant groups you still get Italian and Chinese influenced food (I realized all of these wound up being highly Americanized).

But the second sense is that you don’t actually need immigrants to have foreign cuisine, you just have to have people who learn about the foreign food, get excited about it, and want to open a restaurant serving it. You are more likely to get more authentic food that way. Mormon missionaries to Brazil opened up a chain of good Brazilian restaurants in the West (my wife, who is Brazilian, liked the one she ate at), none of them staffed by Brazilians. Julia Child popularlized French cuisine. People in China and Japan like to eat western food when they eat out, my friend who is living in China does this all the time, just like westerners like to eat Chinese and Japanese food. They just copy the recipes, you don’t have poor French and Italian immigrants slaving in kitchens in Shanghai.

* Bad Thai drives out good. But even in high end Thai could exist with middle brow Thai, Sailer’s argument is that mass immigration is not necessary for good “ethnic” cuisine, nor is it sufficient. I’d argue even further…one of the best burrito bar burritos I’ve had was near Fleet Street in London. The owner was a brit who had travelled in Mexico and the US extensively, the grill man was a red haired London Irish guy, and the girls doing the ‘fixings’ part of the bar were eastern european and South American. ‘Now that we have the recipe’ indeed!

That said, I’m a big fan of ‘inauthentic’ “ethnic” restaurants. When I was a wee child, a lot of Chinese restaurants still sported ‘Cantonese Cuisine’ on the neon sign in front of the business. The menus started with pages of ‘tropical’ drinks, and then all the classic appetizers for a poo-poo platter. Delightfully inauthentic, but pretty good. And in a sense, really American. So to many of the Japanese-American favorites (teriyaki anything), and ‘red sauce joints’.

* I’ve proposed a corollary to this Sailer rule several places — it is that cheap line cook labor wrecks a lot of American (and other) cooking.

I had this epiphany in the Mission District in San Francisco, where going to a Hipster retro comfort food place, I was served a stroganoff with a broken sauce, my dinner companion had horrid Mac and Cheese (Kraft’s would have been better) that the waitress advised him to drown in Tapatio. And there, manning the stove in the open concept kitchen was a Guatemalan looking dude. And as my companion said — he’s making $12/hr, he doesn’t care if your sauce is broken.

This is hardly the only time I’ve gotten crappy food at allegedly hip or upscale American places — ‘gastropub’/microbreweries are the usual culprit. I used to blame lousy American raw ingredients, and that may play a part. But I suspect that the dishes that feature huge portions but are at once overseasoned and bland can only be achieved by indifferent, Mexican and other MesoAmerican line cooks. I mean, it’s not like males cook in Mexico, so they really don’t know what they are doing when they get here. Same holds for gardening — people think Mexican ‘gardeners’ know what’s up because they presume they are from ‘the Rancho’. In fact they are pretty much butchers with anything but the simplest lawn.

* Didn’t Esau give up his birthright for a dim sum burrito?

* Whenever I bring my wife’s meat loaf and mashed potato leftovers into the office for lunch, the Chinese guys never fail to tell me how good it smells.

* Still doesn’t beat the unlimited breadsticks and NEVER ENDING PASTA BOWL® at Olive Garden.

* Many of the lower end pizzerias in the NYC area are now run by Greeks, Albanians and Arabs, with Central American workers. It’s a huge change from 20-30 years ago when I was growing up and all pizzerias that I knew of were run by Italians with all white workers.

Thai restaurants in the USA are largely coming from Chinese and Filipinos and mostly suck.

Koreans opened a bunch of horrible Mexican restaurants a few years ago but they seem to have all folded.

Koreans seem to specialize in the most worthless businesses — “variety” stores that sell nothing but doo-rags and fake gold chains to a 100% ghetto black clientele or take out places selling inedible microwaved food — all with Central American slaves doing the physical work and Koreans behind the cash registers. I’ve seen a lot of Korean franchise type businesses open and fold quickly where the people running the joint could not speak English and seemed totally clueless about the products they were trying to sell.

Indians seem to own and staff every single Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway in the NYC area.