There are some exotic foods we tend to take for granted exist. Almost every city for example has a Chinese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and maybe an Outback Steakhouse. But this isn’t universal for some reason. Someone asked me if I wanted to go to an Egyptian restaurant and I was like “wait, they have restaurants?”
A question for all those who would say they consider themselves ethnically fluent. What are all the cultural categories of food you’ve had?
Is this something people track? What’s considered “exotic?”
Anything associated enough with another country/culture to pair it with that group of people.
I have eaten Romanian food , Polish food , Guatemalan food , Salvadorian food , most of the Latin American countries.
Romanian was very homemade feel like , and Polish was okay not great. I am from Latin America where our food has so many spices and very tasteful
I don’t know how to answer “exotic”. “Exotic” can easily slip into xenophobic territory.
Maybe I answer with a restaurant from a specific culture that I had never been exposed to before? In which case, Himalayan/Tibetan/Nepalese. I could eat momos every day. But I say that about every savory-wrapped-in-dough thing. Dumplings, empanadas, bierocks, meat pies, xian bing, piroshki, is there a culture that doesn’t have some variation of that? And it’s always good. If ever there is need for a flag to represent Humanity, it should be of a savory pie.
I love Chinese food and will eat it almost daily.
Wait, you thought Egyptian restaurants don’t exist? Especially for a melting pot like the US, I assume the opposite, that there is always a food place that serves a particular cuisine from somewhere in the world.
But to answer your question, and assuming by exotic, you mean anything that isn’t your standard fare American, European, Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Japanese food, then I’ve had:
- Ethiopian
- Thai
- Singaporean
- Filipino
- Taiwanese
- Iraqi
- Afghan
- Indian
