Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Western Foods Are Popular In Japan?
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GVman
 Posts: 729 |
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Speaking of alternative food in Japan, there's kebab joints all over the place and they're good eatin', too.
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 2521 |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18210 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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That's not so much adventuresome as just lacking in edibility. I have no qualms about pouring gravy over crumbled-up bread (been doing that since I was a wee kid - that's farm eatin' for you), but oil? No thanks. Never been a fan of your fancier and/or more exotic bread flavors, either. Banana bread, or some other dessert-type bread? Sure, no problem. French bread? Okay. But you can keep that really fancy stuff that upscale restaurants use. Oh, and why would you cook meat well when medium-well works just fine? |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Do you mean to jeopardise the livelihoods of bakers? Buns are a sine qua non of a respectable burger! How quaint it would be to order something that is, in effect, a takeaway steak haché.
Some of us like to taste both the cow and the grill simultaneously! I gained a preference for rarer meat having first tried it in France, and will always request a hamburger to be slightly pink if a restaurant can accommodate the request. But de gustibus, as they say.
This may be a controversial question, but dare I ask what colour the gravy was? |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh, I definitely understand. My parents' line of reasoning, however, is that a restaurant owner must be insane to pass up the opportunity of expanding a successful single restaurant into a chain, and thus the only restaurants that are not chains are ones that, for one reason or another, were not able to make enough money to establish at least a second location, are too new to have done so, or have owners who are bonkers. In other words, they believe that the only reason a sane restaurant owner would open a restaurant is to make money, and to turn down the ability to expand a restaurant into a chain is turning down free money. I know that is most definitely not the case. I know that chefs tend to be very passionate about cooking (otherwise, they wouldn't be chefs), and I'm sure most chefs get their greatest pleasure in seeing people enjoy their cooking. And in order to most efficiently supervise the kitchen crew, the chef would need to restrict him- or herself to a single location. (Bear in mind that this does not apply to just restaurants, but any sort of business. Neither of my parents ever understood the concept of work that you enjoy. They only ever understood the concept of work for the paycheck.)
My parents never considered chefs as artists or even a respectable profession. I do, but they don't. If being a line worker pays better than being an artist, as far as they're concerned, then they should be a line worker. (Which is ironic, considering we personally know the head chef of Jitlada, one of the most famous Thai restaurants in L.A. None of us have ever once eaten there though.)
Though I much more often visit hole-in-the-wall restaurants rather than boutique locations because I eat on a budget but I'm still curious about what local eateries have to offer, I can say with certainty that when you're eating at a non-chain location, you're taking a gamble. The quality of their food can be anywhere on the spectrum, from the most amazing thing you've ever had to something so bad you have to spit out your first bite. The latter tends not to last long, though so many of them pop up in every town everywhere in the world that it's not hard to find one. (And then there are cases like Amy's Baking Company, which was infamously bad and stayed in business far longer than it should've because people kept visiting to see if it really was that bad or to mess with the owner's narcissism. And cases like this one place less than a mile from my home that, over the past two years, has gone from a fried chicken place to a hamburger joint to a chippery to an empty lot to, bizarrely, a place that combined all three menus together, complete with Disney artwork plagiarization.)
I've actually heard from other people from Austin about a number of really bad experiences with local restaurants, such that those people are afraid to try anything that isn't a big chain (or a regional chain). Must be something about the Austin food scene that's awry. I'm sure at least one really good non-chain eatery exists in Austin though.
Oh, it's not about health issues, but about the quality in general. As I mentioned above, they (especially my father) were under the impression that a restaurant that exists only as a single location must be failing at something if it isn't a chain, and that if it's a chain, they must be doing something right. By the way, I live in a place so packed with nationwide chains, there are major roads around here with upwards of 12 different chain restaurants within a mile of each other. It wraps back around to where they are in tough competition with each other, and whatever liberty they have as businesses, they have to perform to their best lest the nationwide chain across the street crushes them.
Is that the Denny's on Figueroa immediately north of the Los Angeles Convention Center, right next to the Fatburger? I've been told the owner of that Denny's has a pretty low opinion of convention-goers. He used to outright shut down the restaurant on days of major conventions (AX included, but also E3 and the LA Car Show). If you're able to drive, I recommend going south instead. Starting several blocks south and until Adams Blvd, there are a lot of restaurants, chain and non-chain, that are open very late. Most stay open until at least midnight. The Jack in the Box, Yoshinoya, Ono Hawaiian BBQ, and the local taco stand are open until 2 AM. The Popeyes drive-thru is open until 3 AM. The McDonald's and Grinder's are open 24 hours (last I checked). But you said you were drunk though, and I don't recommend driving while drunk.
Wow. That's something I want to at least see in person. Do they still have them?
It's the customer's decision as to what they want, and personally, that should not be questioned. A good restaurant owner and a good chef will respect their customers' preferences, even if these preferences don't sound logical to them. We once went on a road trip with a family that, some time ago, got food poisoning eating steaks ordered at medium. Out of fear, the entire household always orders their steaks well done. Also, though it's not the case now, I know there have been some parts of the United States where cooking a burger at less than well done was a health code violation. (This may have been a response to the incident in 1993 that killed four people and hospitalized hundreds of others via undercooked beef in hamburgers from Jack in the Box. Even now, the USDA recommends ground beef to be cooked up to 160 degrees Fahreinheit, or just below well-done.) Ground beef is far more vulnerable to contamination than beef in the form of solid chunks, like steak. Ground beef has long had that reputation of getting you sick if you don't cook it properly. It's why White Castle went to great measures to look as clean and sanitized as possible: They were essentially saying, "We are so clean, our burgers won't put youin the hospital!" (It's been argued that this is why the hamburger with a bun took off as well as it did: The bun made it such that you never physically touch the beef while eating it.)
Is that how Hirohiko Araki knew so much about kebab for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Part 3... |
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Snomaster1
 SubscriberPosts: 2803 |
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I've got a question. Since french fries are one of my favorite foods,are they any different in Japan than what we get here in the States?
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18210 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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^
That's a bit of a loaded question, since French fries can vary widely in the U.S. in terms of how they're made. That being said, the Burger King fries I tried in Japan were just ordinary Burger King fries. The French fries I had or saw at a couple of other places were also pretty typical. I think they sometimes have a different name for them in some places, but there didn't seem to be a widespread Japan-specific variation of them. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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To me cooking beef well-done does not destroy the flavor, it just gives it a different flavor, a flavor that I prefer.
But it is just a matter of taste, in more ways than one, and personal preference. Since people here are anime fans I wonder if somebody is going to say that cooking beef well-done is disrespectful to the cow. Or tell me that I am not experiencing beef the way that it was intended to be experienced. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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My take on Austin food is that it falls into three buckets: #1. (VERY rare) Exceptional "local" restaurants, these are the very few places that are individual local restaurants and ALSO really, really good. I haven't been to many of these (in part because of my preference to "stick with what works" like Key was noting, but there's are a few local places that are very specific that I've tried and liked) (more common are): #2. Chains - is what it is. Notably, there's a decent number of chains that are "pseudo-local", ie. started in Austin and followed the path your parents speak of by becoming more successful #3. Single local and SOMEHOW stays in business despite being PAINFULLY MEDIOCRE. While I understand that part of how this happens with Texas Chinese restaurants is "it's a Chinese food restaurant... in TEXAS", the fact is that there are SO MANY restaurants across the gamut of food types and they're ALL painfully mediocre. Not so terrible that the restaurant drives people away and they go out of business, but not good enough that you ever "want" to go there. So when you're choosing a meal its basically the choice between a chain and a non-chain that's pretty much about the same quality. Most EVERY restaurant within a 5 mile radius can often elicit a "meh" out of me when I just search "dinner" on Yelp, and I am in NO way a "connoisseur". (its how the wife and I often end up at Olive Garden and other chains in fact, that and the fact that (like I said) I have a more "limited" palate, I actually often get "combini" food at least 1 meal a day while in Japan, and not primarily due to budgetary reasons) |
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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OH MY GOD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? GO EAT THERE!!!! I mean, it's super spicy and not for everybody, but if you have any kind of pain tolerance at all, eating at Jitlada is like meeting Spicy Jesus. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Hmm. Now that you've pointed it out, maybe that's how my father, who grew up in Texas (albeit Dallas-Ft. Worth, not Austin), got his ideas about what a restauranteur should do. Maybe that IS the preferred path for the people who run restaurants there when he was younger and applied it to other places whose cooking culture isn't the same. Also, it makes me wonder if the scene in Dallas-Ft. Worth is similar to in Austin. Maybe he was disappointed eating at different local places and gave up on them.
Well, if it counts, I have eaten her cooking at her house, which might be the next best thing. Or the next step up. That's where she cooks food she considers too spicy to use at Jitlada. |
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v1cious
 Posts: 6203 Location: Houston, TX |
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This brings up an interesting question: With sweets like this being pretty much everywhere in Japan, why is there no obesity? Is it balanced out by the regular diet, or is it how they make it? Edit Did a little research, and got part of the answer... and it's a little disturbing: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1hqHo6lyUU&time_continue=38 Last edited by v1cious on Wed Jul 13, 2016 7:24 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5947 |
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I've been known to do this even while knowing it can cause the meat to dry out. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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That is scary, this is bound to escalate in the years to come, you might get a ticket on the road for being overweight *no laughs were heard, only the sound of crickets* I restrained my urges to say "taco hell" is not mexican food (albeit the chichuaha in the tv commercials is cute), but I stole this link from rocketnews24 for people who can't tell the difference 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mruUpBdGUQA Last edited by mangamuscle on Wed Jul 13, 2016 6:39 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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GVman
Posts: 729 |
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I will say that, while I was in Japan back in the end of May, I saw a fairly large number of fairly large Japanese folks. Safe to say that the govt ain't succeeding.
That's awful. I knew about the bullying, but being held back for being over that weight is ridiculous. Hopefully, it's a rarely-occuring thing.
You could say the same thing about folks that huff paint.  In all seriousness, being able to cook well-done meat well is a rare skill, and it's one I'm not usually willing to test. About the only place I let fix me a well-done burger is this local Exxon that makes the best damn burgers in town. The well-done-ness of the patty works in this lovely greasy synergy with everything else I typically get on the sandwich (namely cheese, mayo, and raw onions). They also butter and grill the buns, which is a must in my eyes.
Medium-well is just as icky as well-done if cooked by the wrong person.
I had an opposite experience that led me to rarer meat. My uncle was grilling at our house one summer, and fixed some very rare hamburger patties that he planned to take home and nuke in the microwave. I ate one by mistake, and my eyes were opened.
There's a few joints I've encountered that refuse to fix me a medium rare burger. It always saddens me, especially when the same joint offers a burger with an undercooked egg on the top of the patty.
Possibly. I wish we could get joints like that set up here in Texas. Hell, it's the kind of food people would love here. It has meat, spiciness, and a vaguely tortilla-esque wrapping. |
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My experiences with "wildly amazing" or otherwise high-class restaurants have rarely been satisfying ones. (For instance, give me good, toasted garlic bread over some fancy bread meant to be dipped in oil any day.) 
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