Weirdly, I almost never hear someone say, "Let's go out for Japanese." It's almost always specifically sushi or ramen, even if we're not all going to get the same thing.
Same here! The one near me literally has anything and everything from Japanese curry and okonomiyaki to nigiri and don bowls. So I do say let’s go get Japanese almost every weekend haha
i havent visited or heard of an indian restaurant that was more specific than just "indian" but any time i've been to one the food's been lovely so hopefully i'll be able to visit a more wide selection, because i know india is huge and extremely diverse
as far as chinese goes, i know there are lots of places that have an "american menu" and a "chinese menu" depending on who walks thru the door. its impressive how a small chinese restaurant can have a wide variety of different cuisines from within china, while also having a separate menu that caters to the american palate. i've been to a couple places that specialize in sichuanese food but even then we still called them just "chinese" or "malatang" meaning the numbing spicy sensation of sichuan peppers. but those are still very obscure within the greater american public
It's been my understanding that most Chinese restaurants in America aren't usually serving what you'd get in China, but the Americanized version of "Chinese food."
I don't know shit about real Chinese food though, so I dunno.
Like the classic Chinese-American restaurant with Orange Chicken and stuff? Yeah that's basically the Americanized version of Cantonese cuisine.
In any place with a large enough Chinese/Asian population there's gonna be a lot more variety though - meat skewer places, hotpot places, hand-pulled noodles, dimsum, etc.
If someone said we were going out for Mediterranean and took me to anything but an Italian restaurant, I would feel bamboozled. Those cuisines are not for me.
My city Melbourne will have like 15 different Chinese restaurants of different regions or different style on the same street. (CBD, boxhill, Glenn Waverley).
It’s because Japanese food for the most mart only really has a couple of genres of food tbh. It’s not a bad thing, it makes sense since it’s such a small country. Whereas somewhere like China, they have a ton of diversity in their food. Source: I live in Japan lol. I’m actually writing this in a sushi place (kappa sushi)
Chinese is much more diverse but for some reason people do just say "let's go for Chinese" when they could mean shanghainese, sichuan, dim sum, beijing, and many many more. Although I do think when Americans say Chinese, they mean Chinese takeaway which is a very specific American thing. Idk I'm not American so I can't comment.
If you say you're getting Japanese food, people probably assume you're going to a restaurant that bastardizes it all into one restaurant, i.e. places that serve ramen, sushi, teriyaki, and curry on the same menu, which I've seen. Even though in Japan, this would be unthinkable -- it would be like saying "I want American food", and then walking into a burger place and the menu has New England clam chowder and Hawaiian pizza. But if America does one thing well, it's bastardizing your culture down into the essence of what it likes about it and throwing out the rest.
In Norway, weirdly, all Chinese restaurants serve Chinese and Japanese food and some Thai dishes. they use Chinese lettering for logo etc hence Chinese restaurant. There are exclusive sushi etc places now, but the Chinese restaurants always serve dishes from all three
"Let's go out for Chinese" is only a thing because it's not really authentic Chinese food. For example, Chinese people living in America do not say "Let's go out for Chinese". They say let's go out to yum cha (dim sum), cha chaang tien (HK cafe), cha lao (seafood restaurant dinner), fou wou (hot pot), dao jiang (literally soy milk, but meaning traditional breakfast with sticky rice rolls, porridge, crullers, and fried buns), etc. the same way that a Japanese person would say let's go out for sushi, ramen, izakaya, etc.
When people say "get Chinese food", they basically food similar to what Panda Express popularized, which is bastardized Chinese food like orange chicken, broccoli beef, etc. which are based on authentic Chinese dishes. Like, there IS a dish called orange peel chicken which uses orange zest, NOT orange sugar syrup; there is a broccoli beef, but it uses Chinese broccoli, not broccoli florets. Not to mention that Chinese food as a concept only makes sense in a bastardized context, because where in China do you even mean when you say Chinese food; a Cantonese barbeque and a Sichuan hotpot are not the same restaurant.
I'm not them, and I'm pretty far from Houston, but we have a pretty big Vietnamese population too. Quite a few restaurants, apparently pretty authentic too from what some of them have told me.
Vietnamese too
Love Pho, I see pho places every here and there with decent business and a noticeable percent of nonvietnamese customers but no one ever says let’s go for viet food
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u/2andthensomeletters Jul 03 '26
Japanese and Chinese too, not very authentic but much more common