Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:WaPo ran articles on this a few years back. The term 'cheap eats' is offensive, because everyone knows you're talking about immigrant foods 95% of the time.

There's simply less premium placed on other cultures' (i.e. outside of Europe) foods due to ingrained ethnocentrism.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/restaurants/my-columns-name-does-a-disservice-to-the-immigrants-whose-food-i-celebrate-so-im-dropping-it/2018/12/31/101a28de-07c8-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.html


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/22/the-great-ethnic-food-lie/

That’s absurd. It’s simple economics- places like the bahn mi shops in Virfinja are “cheap eats” because the ingredients are affordable and its a sandwich shop setting in a mall, not a high-rent fancy restaurant in downtown DC with waiters and sommeliers etc. The entire business model is immigrants providing cheap eats to other immigrants. And of course fine dining is incredibly diverse in this area these days, with “immigrant” cuisine regularly included

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's funny, because I just went to Thailand and visited the Museum of Siam in Bangkok. They had a room on Thai cuisine with a figure on the wall describing how to make massaman curry:



It's crazy how many ingredients and prep go into a 'simple' dish like massaman curry, yet go to any Thai restaurant and most are selling it below $18. Meanwhile, go to an Italian place and they're trying to sell you cacio e pepe for $20+, which is just pasta, pepper, butter, and some cheese.

I’ll let you in on a secret - the cheap Thai place is buying jarred curry.

And that still takes more prep than cacio e pepe, lol. I just looked up an Italian restaurant in the area for fun....$17 for linguini with olive oil and nothing else. It's a ridiculously stupid premium just
because it is Italian food.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's funny, because I just went to Thailand and visited the Museum of Siam in Bangkok. They had a room on Thai cuisine with a figure on the wall describing how to make massaman curry:



It's crazy how many ingredients and prep go into a 'simple' dish like massaman curry, yet go to any Thai restaurant and most are selling it below $18. Meanwhile, go to an Italian place and they're trying to sell you cacio e pepe for $20+, which is just pasta, pepper, butter, and some cheese.

I’ll let you in on a secret - the cheap Thai place is buying jarred curry.

And that still takes more prep than cacio e pepe, lol. I just looked up an Italian restaurant in the area for fun....$17 for linguini with olive oil and nothing else. It's a ridiculously stupid premium just because it is Italian food.

Anonymous wrote:WaPo ran articles on this a few years back. The term 'cheap eats' is offensive, because everyone knows you're talking about immigrant foods 95% of the time.

There's simply less premium placed on other cultures' (i.e. outside of Europe) foods due to ingrained ethnocentrism.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/restaurants/my-columns-name-does-a-disservice-to-the-immigrants-whose-food-i-celebrate-so-im-dropping-it/2018/12/31/101a28de-07c8-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.html


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/22/the-great-ethnic-food-lie/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's funny, because I just went to Thailand and visited the Museum of Siam in Bangkok. They had a room on Thai cuisine with a figure on the wall describing how to make massaman curry:



It's crazy how many ingredients and prep go into a 'simple' dish like massaman curry, yet go to any Thai restaurant and most are selling it below $18. Meanwhile, go to an Italian place and they're trying to sell you cacio e pepe for $20+, which is just pasta, pepper, butter, and some cheese.

I’ll let you in on a secret - the cheap Thai place is buying jarred curry.

And that still takes more prep than cacio e pepe, lol. I just looked up an Italian restaurant in the area for fun....$17 for linguini with olive oil and nothing else. It's a ridiculously stupid premium just because it is Italian food.

You're confused. It's the area, not the food. That's regular food price in 2024. Yes, it's expensive - and restaurants are hurting and are raising prices even more. But it's not a "European" premium. It's just this area and the times.

No, you’re confused, because IN THE SAME AREA, Thai restaurants, for example, have a price ceiling for nearly all of their dishes that require tons of ingredients and prep capped below $20:

https://www.kiinimmthai.com/_files/ugd/2ed49a_78f02265f31c41b68cdbe92357e4adf1.pdf


Contrast that to the local Italian place selling olive oil linguini for $17:
https://fontinagrille.com/menus/


The area is the same. The premium markup is because it is Italian food. The markdown is because it is Thai food. Area has nothing to do with it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's funny, because I just went to Thailand and visited the Museum of Siam in Bangkok. They had a room on Thai cuisine with a figure on the wall describing how to make massaman curry:



It's crazy how many ingredients and prep go into a 'simple' dish like massaman curry, yet go to any Thai restaurant and most are selling it below $18. Meanwhile, go to an Italian place and they're trying to sell you cacio e pepe for $20+, which is just pasta, pepper, butter, and some cheese.

I’ll let you in on a secret - the cheap Thai place is buying jarred curry.

And that still takes more prep than cacio e pepe, lol. I just looked up an Italian restaurant in the area for fun....$17 for linguini with olive oil and nothing else. It's a ridiculously stupid premium just because it is Italian food.

You're confused. It's the area, not the food. That's regular food price in 2024. Yes, it's expensive - and restaurants are hurting and are raising prices even more. But it's not a "European" premium. It's just this area and the times.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There used to be cheap French and Italian restaurants around - like Italian Market in Philly and French bistro places. Certainly there are expensive Asian restaurants. I think the more interesting question is why in a standard restaurant there will be a default Italian-American pasta dish, but not say a default Asian noodle dish like Pad Thai?

Time, exposure and numbers. Something like 300,000 Thai people have immigrated here vs 5.5 million Italian immigrants, and Thai people, along with most Asian people, weren’t allowed to immigrate here. Therefore Thai food hasn’t had the same period of time to assimilate into “common” food (and will likely do so in a different way given that Italian food really made it big here outside the east coast after WWII).

Anonymous wrote:Take French or Italian restaurants for example. You will almost always undoubtedly pay through the friggin’ nose for those types of cuisines, despite the fact that a restaurant in those categories may be throughly mid. It’s not like Italian food here in America is often prepared with that many complex techniques and exotic ingredients. People will pay $30 for a basic pasta dish, which might even be prepped with boxed dry pastas. Contrast that to say Chinese, Thai, Mexican etc. where customers expect cheap eats for high quality food. Have you seen the prep and number of ingredients that go into say making a Thai curry from scratch? It takes far more prep work than 99% of pasta dishes, yet you’d be hard pressed to sell Thai food to customers for $40 per plate. Or Mexican places making all their masa from scratch while cooking marinated meats for hours. Oh so an Italian place may make pasta from scratch? Big whoop. There are so many Chinese places that make hand pulled noodles and dumplings from scratch, yet people expect to pay $15 or less per bowl of noodles and probably even less than $10 for a plate of dumplings. And French food is even more overpriced. Big whoop, throw in salt, tons of butter, and a few herbs into most dishes that have one dimensional flavors. The French never really wow your palate with pungent herbs, sourness, spicy, and sweet. So why do people have no qualms about paying exorbitant premiums for bland European foods, yet foods in other ethic categories often require far more complex prep yet people want high quality and for it to be ‘cheap eats’? It’s pretty egregious to charge over $20 for any pasta dish when it is a low technique and limited ingredient entree.

Anonymous wrote:WaPo ran articles on this a few years back. The term 'cheap eats' is offensive, because everyone knows you're talking about immigrant foods 95% of the time.

There's simply less premium placed on other cultures' (i.e. outside of Europe) foods due to ingrained ethnocentrism.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/restaurants/my-columns-name-does-a-disservice-to-the-immigrants-whose-food-i-celebrate-so-im-dropping-it/2018/12/31/101a28de-07c8-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.html


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/22/the-great-ethnic-food-lie/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's funny, because I just went to Thailand and visited the Museum of Siam in Bangkok. They had a room on Thai cuisine with a figure on the wall describing how to make massaman curry:



It's crazy how many ingredients and prep go into a 'simple' dish like massaman curry, yet go to any Thai restaurant and most are selling it below $18. Meanwhile, go to an Italian place and they're trying to sell you cacio e pepe for $20+, which is just pasta, pepper, butter, and some cheese.

I’ll let you in on a secret - the cheap Thai place is buying jarred curry.

And that still takes more prep than cacio e pepe, lol. I just looked up an Italian restaurant in the area for fun....$17 for linguini with olive oil and nothing else. It's a ridiculously stupid premium just because it is Italian food.