Why are some cuisines more popular than others?

June 21, 2024 6:12 PM

I'm researching different cities, mostly in Europe and North America, and when looking at international restaurants (relative to the country I'm looking at), I find the same cuisines show up all the time, no matter the city. Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Vietnamese, even frequently Brazilian, seem ubiquitous. A lot more inside (including more about food representation in cities than you thought you wanted to know).

This is all about context of how I got to this question, which I think colors the question a little.

The research is for taking a trip next year (I'm in the US and looking mostly at other countries). Yes, I'm using a spreadsheet. Yes, I do this all the time. And yes, I find doing way too much research for a vacation fun for some reason (I started researching this trip the day after I returned from my last trip).

Anyway. I'm tracking 8 cuisines in over 30 cities, and even though I stop counting a cuisine in a city when it reaches 10 restaurants, I have found over 250 Japanese restaurants total and only 46 Ethiopian restaurants, for example. So the question is, why is the food of some countries represented more than others? From what I've found, it happens in many places, but it could be North America, or just the US, monopolizes it.

I understand taste is part of it, of course. If many/most people find the taste unpleasant, there won't be much demand for it. But I've had Iranian and Peruvian food before, they are both quite good, yet they don't appear to be well represented. (If you're wondering which cities I'm researching, they include Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Helsinki, Cape Town, Quito, San Juan Puerto Rico, and Lisbon, and I'm looking at way more than just food.)

I'll use Montreal as an example, since it has a reputation for being a bit of a foodie paradise. Obviously this is far from complete, I just use Yelp and TripAdvisor focused on the more touristy area, because I'm trying to gauge how well represented other countries are in the city. I'm not going for a tourist guide to restaurants. And this is only one city, so the pattern may not hold up completely. These are the numbers for Montreal:

Brazilian: 5
Ethiopian: 3
German: 5
Iranian: 4
Japanese: 9
Peruvian: 5
Portuguese: 9
Vietnamese: 7

I'm not looking at Chinese, Italian, and French because the first two often feel like the standard-bearer for ubiquitous, while French is also very common (and not my favorite). Portuguese is a bit of an anomaly in Montreal, but Japanese at 9 is no surprise and Vietnamese is a healthy 7. Iranian and German at 4 and 5, respectively, are not surprising. I think comparing Peruvian with either Vietnamese or Japanese illustrates what I'm getting at. Vietnam and Japan are roughly twice as far from Montreal than Peru is, yet there are more Vietnamese and Japanese restaurants than Peruvian (for that matter, Germany and Iran are closer, too).

Does anyone know a book that goes into why this happens? I'll also go for a well written article (popular or academic for either the book or article). My guess is it has to do with immigration patterns and, particularly in the case of Asian cuisines, Orientalism may play a role (thinking along the lines of Said's view tl;dr: romanticizing the "East," though of course more complex than that). I suspect there is more to this, though. I'd also be up for multiple books/articles that explain maybe just one cuisine each. I could also understand if the book/article focuses on just the US, or North America.

Any suggestions, leads, or theories are quite welcome.

Thank you!

posted by Meldanthral to Food & Drink (24 answers total)

Why Almost Every Town In America Has a Thai Restaurant
posted by oceano at 6:22 PM on June 21, 2024 [3 favorites]

A lot of it is money and classism. Owning restaurants is very expensive, the margins are often incredibly smaller than you might imagine, and as a business there is a lot of legitimate risk like injuries, food poisoning, drunk people doing dumb shit, and more on top of all of the financial risk. So, a lot of the time the cuisine of a restaurant is determined less by what people think is tasty or by what a chef knows how to cook and more by what the owner can charge higher prices for. And that’s going to mean restaurants that serve food perceived as fancy, which means food from cultures that are seen as prosperous and aspirational to the desired clientele.

So in the specific example you ask about, Peruvian vs Japanese food in Montreal, the answer here is likely to be about racism towards South Americans and a lack of appreciation for Peruvian food among the higher paying foodies of the area. Japanese food on the other hand has been presented in North America as first exotic and mysterious and then fancy and trendy since at least the 90s. That means borrowing money to start a Japanese restaurant is going to be easier than getting lenders on board with a Peruvian place. Then there are less of them so people don’t get to know Peruvian food and the cycle continues.

That said there is the opposite pressure as well. When countries have lots of refugees and they start restaurants wherever they end up, you get some of the tastiest food. (See: Afghan restaurants in the US after we totally fucked up their home; less recently Indian food in Britain, etc.) So sometimes it’s a matter of immigration creating a new demand for a cuisine that isn’t seen as something expensive but is seen as delicious and exciting. Owners can’t charge higher prices but they can get the money to start a restaurant because there is interest.
posted by Mizu at 7:02 PM on June 21, 2024 [2 favorites]

Culinary diplomacy
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:02 PM on June 21, 2024

I think comparing Peruvian with either Vietnamese or Japanese illustrates what I'm getting at. Vietnam and Japan are roughly twice as far from Montreal than Peru is, yet there are more Vietnamese and Japanese restaurants than Peruvian (for that matter, Germany and Iran are closer, too).

Distance is probably not a very useful comparison here. There are many more people of Vietnamese origin in Montreal than there are people of Peruvian origin. Vietnamese food is also influenced by the French history in Vietnam, making it more familiar to western palates than it might otherwise be.

But also, part of the reason Peruvian food is relatively popular is because of the Asian influences on Peruvian food due to Asian immigration to Peru, especially the influence of Japanese food! The Peruvian government has also, in recent years, made concerted efforts to make Peruvian food more of a thing. I'm sure there are fewer Chilean, Venezuelan or Guatemalan restaurants than there are Peruvian restaurants.
posted by ssg at 7:14 PM on June 21, 2024 [6 favorites]

Are you looking at immigration rates? This article has the largest groups. Not that popularity of cuisine has to match but…there’s a reason there are more jerk chicken places than pollo a la brassa.

I can only speak to Toronto but I also think your geographical limits in looking at the tourist areas are causing you issues. Chinatown is a downtown tourist area. But also, as the NYT wrote, a lot of our restaurants aren’t downtown If you read the article closely you’ll find that a lot of restaurants Suresh eats at prefer he doesn’t write/broadcast about them because they don’t want to be swamped.

Basically- looking for the best/most popular cuisine in tourist areas is…not how Toronto works. Sorry tourists! I’m in Scarborough and we have a metric ton of Iranian/Persian/Kurdish restaurants. Not so many Peruvian though, that’s true.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:37 PM on June 21, 2024 [9 favorites]

Vietnam and Japan are roughly twice as far from Montreal than Peru is, yet there are more Vietnamese and Japanese restaurants than Peruvian (for that matter, Germany and Iran are closer, too)

Due to the Francophone connection, a non-trivial number of Vietnamese people who were able to escape the Vietnam War ended up in Montreal, thus leading to a larger-than-expected Vietnamese population there. This, of course, suggests a more general explanatory mechanism: immigration patterns. A place is more likely to sustain cuisine of origin X if there is sufficient population of origin X in that place. This also explains why there are (were? I haven't been out much since pandemic) a surprisingly large number of Ethiopian restaurants in Seattle.

Of course, this doesn't explain everything. Again using the Montreal example, there isn't a sizeable Japanese population in Montreal (casual googling indicates that it's something like 1/10 of the Vietnamese population), yet there are many Japanese restaurants. Another mechanism driving dining choices is, of course, consumer tastes. There's been a robust demand for sushi restaurants in Montreal since at least the 1990s (fun fact: back then, nearly all the sushi restaurants in Montreal were run by Vietnamese chefs); since the 2000s, these tastes have expanded to ramen and izakaya as well. Imho, I'd say that Montrealers' tastes here are/were influenced by the larger trends in North American dining.


Portuguese is a bit of an anomaly in Montreal

Meanwhile, while I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that the large number of Portuguese restaurants you're finding in Montreal are a function of: a) the fact that many (most?) of these restaurants are primarily about the Peri Peri Chicken, and b) Montrealers' pre-existing appetite for roasted chicken (e.g.: St. Hubert, Benny Chicken, etc...). It could also simply be a fad, which is really just a specific manifestation of consumer tastes.
posted by mhum at 7:42 PM on June 21, 2024 [5 favorites]

There was a big wave of Portuguese immigration to Canada starting in the 1950s, with many of them settling in Montreal. Montreal's high number of Portuguese restaurants (and chicken joints in particular) definitely comes from that wave of immigration.
posted by ssg at 8:00 PM on June 21, 2024 [1 favorite]

Overseas Chinese (UNESCO), and Wikipedia.

Chinatowns around the world.

For Chinese cuisines adapted to local tastes, these articles explain a lot of the historical driving forces that led to the present condition. It's basically that there's a lot of Chinese people all around the world, and moreso and more generally than a lot of other food cultures.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:16 PM on June 21, 2024

I think that you need to consider migration patterns in your thinking. If at some point in time several people from one culture or country have migrated to an area, then usually more will locate there. They're not evenly distributed.
For example, in the past many Portuguese, especially those in the fishing industry, located in and around Gloucester, MA and so you will find Portuguese food there, but not necessarily in Florida despite it also having a fishing industry. In Florida, there will be more Cuban restaurants than other areas.
posted by TimHare at 8:30 PM on June 21, 2024 [7 favorites]

> A place is more likely to sustain cuisine of origin X if there is sufficient population of origin X in that place.

It's worth pointing out that a larger base population of immigrants/expatriates from that region helps in two distinct ways - first, in that a larger population brings a greater supply of people who might be interested in or knowledgeable about or experienced in running a restaurant based on that particular area's food.

Second, that same immigrant/expatriate population forms the base clientele of any such restaurant. If the population is large enough - and concentrated enough - to sustain the new business venture then it has a chance to survive and perhaps also build a clientele among others in the area.

A lot of the restaurants of this type I see around definitely serve as a base of sorts for people from that part of the world. They often have a grocery or retail area of some sort, and also may deal in cds/dvds/spices/whatever else from that part of the world that people from there want and have a hard time finding elsewhere.
posted by flug at 8:30 PM on June 21, 2024 [3 favorites]

Best answer: FWIW the only book I am aware of that investigates this from the entrepreneurs’ point of view, rather than the consumers’, is The Ethnic Restauranteur. Its scholarly, and has a lot of data and interviews.
posted by graphweaver at 9:43 PM on June 21, 2024 [2 favorites]

I wonder how much of what you see is based on immigration systems in the places you are visiting varying in what they reward aspiring arrivals for and how well those systems line up with the people who have the knowledge and the desire (or perhaps the need) to work in food service.

In some countries’ points-based immigration systems, for example, being a young, multilingual professional who loves cooking and who might have even worked in a cafe or a restaurant at home might not be enough to get past the threshold — they might still need to have earned an advanced degree in something totally outside food service, and perhaps even be nominated by a region or a province to move to a rural area to be the dental surgeon they trained to be instead of a restaurateur, which they might actually deeply desire, because being a dental surgeon is what the national government tells them that particular labor market is demanding.

If their priority is to get to another country and build their professional life through the specific scheme they are allowed into the country under, it is wholly understandable that even the best and most ambitious chefs would not set up a restaurant business because they have to work a certain number of hours a year in their field or location, and that if they stay long enough to attain citizenship, might no longer want to work in food at all.

Interestingly, some countries that use this system know they will need to attract the chefs their home labor market cannot provide, but quite obviously struggle to make the system work well enough to meet the market’s desires without distorting it. I found a fascinating PDF from 2017 written by members of the Thai restaurant industry in New Zealand, explaining to the government how they would be negatively affected by proposed changes to the “ethnic Thai chef” visa classification they offer — at the time of writing, according to the document, it seems the visa could be renewed an unlimited number of times, and the proposal was to cap this at three years’ worth of renewals. The industry writes that the existing system meant restaurants could keep good chefs and thus generate good profits, since training local chefs was impossible given the fact that New Zealand simply doesn’t have the right ingredients or culture to create its own Thai chefs “indigenously”.

Yet, more importantly, the industry resisted the change because they did not need to bring in new chefs every three years and retrain them. The document goes into a lot of detail on how what makes applicants seem appealing to NZ’s immigration department — having a lot of certificated, documented, salaried and familiar-looking work that took place in a name-brand Bangkok hotel that mostly does food service through large buffets, for example — is actually way less important than being able to meet the low-margin and comparatively grueling practical demands of a suburban New Zealand Thai restaurant with an all a-la-carte setup, a nearly-entirely-non-Thai clientele, and a kitchen that churns through many times more orders in a shift than hotel buffet chefs do, requiring incredible speed at the same time as delivering decades-long consistency to locals who want predictably good dishes from “their” local Thai place.

The document describes the change as existentially threatening — how, they ask, will we keep our good reputations — and maintain our financial solvency — if we cannot keep quality staff we know and trust long-term, but also cannot, as evidenced by the existence of the visa scheme in the first place, train Thai-cuisine chefs in a country without a single Asian culinary academy or training scheme?

In the end, it appears New Zealand did indeed cap the visa validity period; the government’s page on the visa here says that you’d have to leave New Zealand at the end of your fourth year there, regardless of how good a chef you are, for three years before trying to get the visa again. You’d also have to work for the same employer and in the same location the whole time, which seems like it would expose you to a risk of exploitation that other folks — Thai dental surgeons who would qualify for a much more generous “straight to residence” visa, for example — would not need to worry about. It also isn’t clear if you could bring your family, or if they could work, or if they’d have to rely on your income alone.

With rules like that, and with market conditions like the ones the document goes into, it’s easy to see why many Thai chefs thinking about New Zealand might indeed go elsewhere — and why any country’s diaspora population in a destination country might or might not cluster in food service, where you might encounter them making food from home.

Enjoy your trip!
posted by mdonley at 10:48 PM on June 21, 2024 [4 favorites]

There also may be a sort of "coattail effect" that amplifies one national cuisine over some others. For example, Indian food is well-established as A Thing. Pakistani food, not so much. If you're a would-be restaurateur from Pakistan, maybe you swallow your pride and call your restaurant Indian because that's an easier sell to would-be customers. I'm pretty sure I've seen this with Honduran-run Mexican restaurants.
posted by adamrice at 10:48 PM on June 21, 2024 [7 favorites]

It's worth pointing out that a larger base population of immigrants/expatriates from that region helps in two distinct ways - first, in that a larger population brings a greater supply of people who might be interested in or knowledgeable about or experienced in running a restaurant based on that particular area's food.

Second, that same immigrant/expatriate population forms the base clientele of any such restaurant.

In some cases there also a third benefit: if the cuisine uses a lot of ingredients not available locally, especially fresh ones, then it helps to have a steady and cheap import pipeline for those ingredients. Which gets more doable the larger the demand is and (I think) the more flights there are between the two countries. If you're a tiny immigrant community with little demand for your food, it's going to be much harder to get the ingredients you need. (There are many cases where people deal with this by making localized versions of their cuisine, which sometimes catches on and sometimes doesn't.)

Being that I think there are some other ways for popularity to breed more popularity for more restaurants of that cuisine, and possibly also make it a little harder for less popular cuisines to compete.

For example, there a familiarity effect. Where I live if someone says "let's get sushi" or "let's get pizza", everyone knows what kind of food they'll be getting even if they don't know which place they'll be going to, because they're are a million of both types of places and they're familiar categories. But if you say "let's get Nepali" or "let's get Hungarian", then that means going to some specific restaurant (because there are very few) and not really knowing what kind of dishes or flavor profiles (or even prices) you'll encounter. So for the familiar category you're getting a more or less known experience, and for the second quantity you need to be looking for or open to a culinary gamble/adventure. I think known quantities are easier sells to a large audience, in general.

Secondly it's usually a very narrow version of an imported cuisine that catches on locally. Someone has to hit on the dishes and flavors that local people actually like in large numbers (for example, in the US everyone knows pad thai for Thai food, General Tso's and sweet and sour for Chinese food, bi bim bap and bulgogi for Korean, sushi and tempera for Japanese... Those are a tiny part of the overall cuisine and sometimes don't even exist natively in the originating country. If you're opening a restaurant for a cuisine that's already caught on locally, you know which dishes people know and like and can build on that. And you probably have a large network of restauranteurs in that cuisine who can give you advice, hook you up with supplies and cooks (and financing and landlords), etc. There are probably even pre-established marketing and branding approaches that you can tap into. But if you're opening the region's first Whatever cuisine, then you're in less charted waters and have to figure out a lot of things from scratch, which makes it easier to fail. (This is another way in which having a large immigrant community can make things easier - you know what they like, even if you haven't yet cracked the code of which dishes cross over successfully to local audiences. So you at least have a customer base while you try to figure that out, and maybe you don't have to figure it out at all.)

An extension of all the above is that in some countries many restaurants apparently rely on companies that supply partly prepared ingredients (e.g. Sysco in the US) to lower costs and simplify logistics. Being a large enough category to be served by a supplier like that can make it easier to run restaurants in that category.
posted by trig at 11:27 PM on June 21, 2024

Another angle on the "immigration patterns" theory is that it's usually only one region of cuisine that takes hold in other countries. We think of it as "Thai food" or "Chinese food" or "Italian food" or "French food", but if you look into the actual cuisine from the home country you learn that what we think of as "Chinese food" or whatever is found only in one region of that country. And - that's likely a reflection of what part of that home country was seeing the most emigration; Italian immigrants to the US largely came from southern Italy, where the economy was poorer and resources were scarcer. And - southern Italy is where you find more of a tradition of pastas, vegetables like tomatoes, and olive oil; whereas Northern Italy has more of a tradition of rice, polenta, and butter and cheese. Southern Italians brought those foodways with them when they emigrated, and that's why we all now imagine "spaghetti and meatballs with tomato sauce" when we think "Italian food" as opposed to "risotto with game meats".

Also - cities attract immigrants, and often there is an existing community of those immigrants where they end up. And often that community of immigrants get homesick - and so someone starts a restaurant to cater to their fellows missing the homeland. The first Japanese restaurant in a given city was likely not "for" the general public, it was likely "for" an existing Japanese community in that city. The fact that some of the rest of us also wanted to try it out was just a bonus. (And in some cases, savvy restaurant owners started tweaking their menus to cater to outsiders; a lot of the Chinese takeout places here in NYC also offer fried chicken and french fries, neither of which is traditionally Chinese but both very American, and thus likely to increase the odds of getting a customer.)

In the really big cities, or with countries that have had a very long history of immigration to other countries, you'll start to see more regional diversity. What we think of as "Chinese food" is largely Cantonese, since most early Chinese immigrants came from a handful of specific parts of China. Over time, different groups also started emigrating from other parts of China with different cuisines - and that's how Sichuan food also started gaining a foothold, or Hakka cuisine or (more recently) Uyghur cuisine. But that's still been tied to immigration patterns.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:17 AM on June 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

For example, Indian food is well-established as A Thing. Pakistani food, not so much. If you're a would-be restaurateur from Pakistan, maybe you swallow your pride and call your restaurant Indian because that's an easier sell to would-be customers

In the UK, all restaurants serving cuisine from the Indian sub-continent will be described as Indian. Many of the founders of such restaurants are Pakistani or Bangladeshi (or of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage). There are of course vast numbers of such restaurants in the UK because of the strong history of immigration from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and also South Asians who had been living in East Africa.
posted by plonkee at 4:41 AM on June 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

If you haven't watched it already, it sounds like you'd enjoy David Chang's Ugly Delicious show. It's not encyclopedic by any means, but it covers a lot of history of different cuisines within the US (and beyond). But yes, I think the simplest answer to your question is "migration and marketing" (i.e. some Thai restaurants might actually be say, a Laotian restaurant, but they know Thai is what Americans understand).
posted by coffeecat at 6:10 AM on June 22, 2024

I'm pretty sure I've seen this with Honduran-run Mexican restaurants.

All the good Salvadorean food I've had has been from "Mexican" restaurants, that usually have a menu that is mostly Mexican (or Tex-Mex) standards and then a handful of Salvadorean dishes for the adventurous or informed. Likewise nearly every strip-mall Chinese place I've been to has a couple of dishes that very clearly are not part of the American strip-mall Chinese food tradition (although I'm grateful to have a local place that reverses this - tons of interesting highly-spiced dishes with organ meats and other non-standard-to-white-Americans ingredients, and then Orange Chicken and a few other standards for those who want them.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:15 AM on June 22, 2024

CBC did a recent featurette on how Portuguese chicken got so popular in Montreal.

My sister emigrated to the Netherlands and, with apologies to the Dutch, one of her observations to me was that there are good reasons there are no Dutch restaurants internationally. Some cuisines just sparkle. Others don't.
posted by zadcat at 7:24 AM on June 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you all. Lots to consider.
posted by Meldanthral at 8:00 AM on June 22, 2024

I think operational factors also play an important part.

How expensive is the food? How much training does it take to prepare it? How much does the kitchen equipment cost, how much kitchen space is needed, and how quickly can the food be prepared? Is the food perishable? How many seatings can you do per meal (i.e. do people eat it quickly and then leave)?

Also important: does the cuisine have a standard menu which is very similar at most restaurants, or will a restauranteur be expected to develop a custom menu under the direction of a chef?

Japanese food is an example of a cuisine that is highly industrialized, Japanese noodle restaurants even more so. There are probably a dozen Japanese noodle restaurants in my town. It feels like every time I turn around, there's another Japanese noodle restaurant opening up somewhere. I put that down to the economics and the operational simplicity. The ingredients are cheap and largely shelf stable. You don't need a large kitchen, a lot of expensive equipment, or a highly trained chef to prepare the food. The meals are simple and reliable, they can be priced economically and eaten quickly.

Many of the same factors apply to taquerias. The food is inexpensive and it is suited to mass production by relatively low-skilled staff. It is reliable and quick to prepare and eat. It is suitable for takeout. People know what to expect and don't have to puzzle out the menu. Most menus have tacos, burritos, enchiladas, quesadillas. Boom, done.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:02 AM on June 22, 2024

In my experience (western US), the prevalence of a given cuisine is usually proportionate to the immigrant population, with two huge exceptions: Thai restaurants are far more prevalent than Thai immigrant populations would suggest, because of the Thai government’s subsidy of overseas restaurants; and Filipino food is far less common than it should be given the size of the diaspora. I’ve heard a number of explanations of why there are so few Filipino restaurants from Filipino cooks: racist attitudes by white diners, a cultural preference for eating at home over eating out among Filipinos, and an inferiority complex among second-generation Filipinos. Things seem to be shifting, as recent years have brought a number of high-profile Filipino restaurants around the country and lumpia has shown up at Costco.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 9:23 AM on June 22, 2024 [1 favorite]

As others have said above, there are a number of factors in which cuisines have critical mass and where.

Local Demographics: Certain immigrant populations are very well represented in certain places. The west coast has a greater breadth of east Asian cuisine than eastern and inland areas because it is and has always been (since at least 19th-century influx of Chinese to San Francisco) the primary destination in North America for east Asian immigrants. Likewise, Florida has a lot more Cuban cuisine than anywhere else in the US, because it has more Cubans.

History: American-Chinese food has been a thing for over a century; it's its own thing now and has a momentum here which makes Chinese food (well, the specific Americanzied takeout version of Chinese) ubiquitous. Also, turmoil and mass emigration tends to produce bubbles of influx from places where refugees are welcome, and puctuated series' of immigration often produce little ethnic enclaves. There are "Little Saigons" all over America since the mass war exodus. A number of specific refugee-welcoming cities have developed Somali communities over the last decade. Places with higher stabilitty and less emigration haven't really built the sort of diaspora communities that support their cuisine abroad.

Familiarity and branding: For sheer purposes of commercial success, a particular cuisine might easily be conflated with a similar and geographically proximate one, even if the actual staff and recipes are from a different country. Your "Mexican" restaurant could easily be run by Hondurans (or pretty much any other central Americans). "Indian" food has pretty significant overlap with Pakistani and Nepalese. Until Korean food became trendy, an aspiring Korean restaurateur would as likely as not open a sushi place. If someone's opening a central-European restaurant whose menu leans Austrian, they might nonetheless bill themselves as a "German" restaurant. This is particularly true with newly arrived ethnicities whose cuisine might be unfamiliar: there have been refugees from Myanmar's anti-Muslim government not only from the west (the Rohingya, whose cuisine is distinctive but bears similarity to Indian), but also from the southeast (the Karen). Apparently, Karen entrepreneurs in the US mostly open Thai restaurants, because that's what sells. As tastes become more cosmopolitan, this trend is somewhat reversing: I think Nepalese is becoming a more prestigious identifier than Indian, and region-specific Chinese restaurants have started trumpeting an identity as Sichuanese or Cantonenese or Hong Kong or what-have-you more prominently.
posted by jackbishop at 5:32 AM on June 23, 2024

An addition to the familiarity and branding above: there are countries very closely identified with certain establishments. Brazil isn't the only place in south America with grilled beef, but if you're going to present churrasco, people expect "Brazilian". Latin rotisserie chicken is delicious, and it seems to be locally variable as to which country gets to have their name closely associated with it (here in Louisville it's "Peruvian"; in the DC area when I lived there it was "Salvadorean").
posted by jackbishop at 5:37 AM on June 23, 2024