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Why Do Whites Accept Japanese and Thai Cuisine More Than Other Asian Cuisine?

Ben — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:45:47 +0000

About a month ago I introduce two of my very white colleagues at work the experience of eating Chinese Hot Pot at the Top Gun Hot Pot in Burnaby. In that post, I wrote about my curiosity why despite them being Canadians living in a cities (Vancouver and Toronto) with a lot of visible Asians, that they still have very little experience in enjoying authentic Asian food.

This picture sparked a discussion in a food forum. I thought it was fantastic but apparently to most this is the grossest thing they had ever seen.

Below is a comment that a reader of Chowtimes wrote in response to my question. Dyn’s comments has to be the mother of all comments for length (Thanks Dyn!). I thought it deserved to be elevated to a post on it’s own and perhaps some of you could also chip in with your two cents on this. Here is Dyn’s comments in its entirety:

I myself love every Asian cuisine I’ve tried (Japanese, Cantonese, Szechuan, Vietnamese, Korean, Shanghai, Punjabi, Pakistani, Lebanese, Syrian, South Indian…) – East and West Asian, that is. However, to answer your questions based on my own experiences and those of friends (and those I’ve tried to convince to try book-tripe!):

First, reasons why people are unnerved:

1. Media scaremongering.
There’s the recall freak-outs all the time, plus every bad comedy involving Asia inevitably has the Asian character eating something uncommon or gross to the western palette.

2. Unfamiliarity.
Organ meats are classically foods of the poor, and since most Westerners have had the privilege of being relatively wealthy (and developing cheap, processed food early on), those foods are not appealing to the young. On a related note, those of us who are the children of the baby-boomers or the grandchildren or children of those who lived through the Great Depression had to hear, growing up, terror stories about organ meats and a number of other things, so that adds to the issue. Also, alot of Northern European cuisine that came over with our ancestors was very, very bland, so to many the pungent smells of Asian cuisine are as offputting to Westerners (at first) as the smell of cooking pork is to alot of Asians (I seem to recall reading that there’s a word in some Chinese dialects for the smell of boiled pork?)

3. Looking Silly
Chopsticks are a bit of a learning curve, and people worry about making a fool of themselves, especially when thinking of…

4. Price
it’s not immediately evident to alot of Westerners that that $20 they see is for a family to share the dish, as Western restaurants (beyond some Amish ones in the Eastern US) are not communal in nature. Most Westerners do not realize that 3 dishes for a family of 4 with rice comes to an economical $10-15 per person most of the time, and possibly much less. Those who do know this will tend to want to go in groups and might not want to look silly per #3.

And now the issues that are not so much the people’s fault:

5. Translations
It can be a bit frightening to have a poorly-translated or badly translated menu, especially for would-be new folks. To their credit, most Asian restaurants do indeed endeavor to provide a translation for at least some of the dishes (see #7), but half the time they seem to be using a dictionary from the 1800s. An example of this would be, let’s say, “Yue Choy with Doufu and Fish Maw In Soup.” Let’s say this is a plausible dish. Some might get “Doufu” is “tofu”, but very few will know “yue choy” (which could easily and correctly be called “mild mustard greens” or “Chinese broccoli”) and even fewer will know what a maw is, and for those that do? Maw gives a very poor idea of what the cut/type of fish actually involved is. Similarly bad are one-off’s like “in sauce” or “in spicy soup with noodle” – what sauce? You have more than one, surely? Which soup base? Enough experiences like this can put someone off, especially if the menu doesn’t try and be descriptive. Worst-case, they’ll order a “safe” western dish, which may very well be poorly cooked and leave a bad taste in their mouths, so to speak – a local Westernized Chinese food place near me has lovely authentic Chinese food available (with names like above!), Westernized Chinese food, and hamburgers – anyone foolish enough to order their hamburgers will never return!

6. Hygiene
This comes down to two issues: first of all, the cleanliness. Asian restaurants seem to have a …
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Frappe Bliss in Aberdeen Center (And What Happened To Chowtimes)

Ben — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:46:46 +0000

We might as well just post about Frappe Bliss since it was while we were in the Aberdeen Center we first learned that chowtimes.com had been suspended.

Food courts in shopping malls all around Metro Vancouver is so boring. They all look alike with the same stalls selling the same stuff. I find that all food courts are dominated by the same group of restaurants.

I find Aberdeen’s food court is different and a class above all other food courts around. The layout is very pleasing and they have lots of tables. It is bright and for an Asian food court, it is clean and well maintained. The best thing about this place is the selection of food and it is well represented by some of the bigger names in Asian restaurants like Jang Mo Jib and Cafe D’lite just to name a couple.

Having gone through the long cold winter, do you find that it’s kind of overly warm and hot this spring? We do. We wanted to just get out of the house and go out and look for a nice icy cold drink to cool down. Usually we’ll just go to Timmy Ho’s for an Iced Cap but it is just too heavy for us.

The ideal would be an “ice plate” like the ones we had in Well Tea. We thought the best place to look for one is in Aberdeen since we also wanted to go grab some small plates and place mats from Daiso. The closest we got to an Ice Plate was Frappe Bliss.

You have a choice … make your own ($2.36 Frappe with 71 cents per topping) or get one of their nine concoctions. We had the one called the Peanuts Iceberg which is $3.80.

Was it good? It was awful … pretty tasteless. It was also very light — I say it was very airy and had hardly anything in it. I find it intriging how they managed to make it so fine and that it did not melt much at all despite that. Yucks.

Aberdeen’s Food Court has Wifi. I must add that it was painfully slow. It actually felt like those days when we had the 9600 baud rate modems! We got connected and found chowtimes.com suspended.

If you want to read more about our saga … click below:

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Julie and Julia

Ben — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:34:08 +0000

Oh wow. A true story based on a blog … and a FOOD blog at that too. This, Suanne and I got to watch!

This is going to be released on 07-August-2009.

What’s for dinner?

The Sidebar Tabs and Free Stuff on Chowtimes.com

Ben — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:00:53 +0000

Hi All:

I just want to point out a little change we had made on Chowtimes. Some of you would have used what we call the Sidebar Tabs. I want to call out the new “Free” option on it. But first a little about each of the Sidebar Tabs options.

Twitter: Frankly, I am still trying to get a grip on how best to make use of Twitter. I had that on because it is supposed to be the next best thing since Facebook.

Subscribe: This is where you can sign up to get Chowtimes postings delivered to you by email. Your email address that you provide to us is safe with us. We will NEVER provide your email address to anyone nor will we use it for any other purpose than to deliver Chowtimes postings.

Friends: This is new and is based on Google’s Friends Connect. I am not sure how this will work. I might decide to remove it later.

Popular: This is a neat little look at our most popular postings over the past two weeks. We can change the period but for now it is set to two weeks.

Free: This is what I wanted to let you know. If we have free stuff, we will post it here. Suanne and I will try to get freebies for Chowtimes readers. These are not high value freebies but they are fun!

We hope you enjoy these little changes.

Ben

Howzat for Speed?

Ben — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:39:03 +0000

I am a happy camper now.

It took a long time … but … I figured out quite a lot of bugs on chowtimes.com that was making the loading time go so slow. It used to take 60 seconds to load the homepage. It now takes only 21 seconds. Within the next couple of days, it should even load a bit more faster.

I had made radical changes to the innards on the site and so you might just come across a few cases where you might get a site error. At most times, the error will go away if you refresh the page. Let me know if you come across them and email me the screenshot.

Ben and Suanne

Searching on Chowtimes

Ben — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:00:14 +0000

We received an email from a chowtimes reader (Eric) who asked us if there is a better way to look for restaurants on the site. In particular, Eric was asking if he could look for, say, all Chinese restaurants in Burnaby. Yes, you can … to a great extend.

I can understand Eric’s needs. Chowtimes had grown over the years with a large throve of information. Getting to what you want is not always easy.

We always had on the sidebar a listing of categories by cuisine. Over the many years, we had amassed quite a lot of restaurant reviews (almost 400 now). Some of the categories were too large. We wished we had the time to go back and revamp the categories but that would involve way too much work. The above is hierarchical view by categories.

As a short term solution, Suanne and I had spent a couple of days and categorized all restaurant reviews by the cities in Metro Vancouver. We are categorizing only Metro Vancouver because most of our restaurant review readers are from Vancouver. That list above may help a little.

But what I wanted to point out to you is our Tag Cloud.

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Incorporating Adsense for Search on WP-Vybe Themed Blogs

Ben — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:18:50 +0000

Hi All:

This post is only meant for bloggers, and aimed particularly to those who uses the WP-Vybe theme on their site.

I received an email today asking me how I implemented Adsense for Search on chowtimes.com using the WP-Vybe theme. Instead of responding directly to the one person by email, I thought I write this up and make a post for the benefit of all users of the WP-Vybe theme. The instructions below are meant for implementating Adsense for Search on WP-Vybe theme but conceptually it works the same for any WordPress theme.

By default, WP-Vybe implements the search capability from WordPress. It looks like this:

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