Hint, when deciding go to a restaurant always check to see if there are people of the ethnicity the restaurant food is eating at said restaurant.
That's racist.
But not entirely inaccurate, albeit for a different reason. Namely, the non-chain family-run restaurants tend to be the best, and the family-run restaurants tend to belong to families who at some point immigrated from the region, which then means that they're using something closer to authentic recipes. The more of a hole in the wall it is, the better the food will be. Family places also tend to avoid that bullshit you get from chains where "spicy" is measured in pinches of dehydrated pepper shreds and the spiciest they'll make it is barely enough to notice. If you're weeping uncontrollably by the end of the meal, you're in the right place.
That aside, I've been to one of those "asian buffets" and walked out after I saw the onion rings. It's like going into a period-style diner, ordering a milkshake, and watching it be poured out of a bag.
This thread moved quickly overnight.
Anyways, I was wondering how that statement would be taken. I actually agree with your assessment, but wanted to know how the thread would react. You shut it down in the very next post. Not sure if happy or disappointed.
It's in that hazy area where the stereotypes hold water and it's hard to decide if it's racist or just honest. It's not as if it's a one-way street, either; food does tend to be better when cooked by people who are familiar with how it is supposed to taste and be prepared, assuming equivalent levels of cooking ability, regardless of what sort of food you're talking about. It's the same as how I'd much rather have a cheeseburger from a little hole-in-the-wall family restaurant than from a fast food chain, the only difference is that that sort of food doesn't necessarily carry the connotations of "otherness".
And, frankly, calling the one racist but not the other is pretty damned racist in and of itself, seeing as how it's defining family restaurants run by [insert ethnicity here] families as being somehow different from those run by [insert other ethnicity here]. The bottom line is that, as I said, food is better when cooked by people who are intimately familiar with how it is supposed to be, regardless of what sort of food it is. The only really notable difference is that "ethnic" food tends to have a larger share of that sort of restaurant because it hasn't been totally supplanted by chain garbage.
Somebody at my university thought that it'd be a great April Fools joke to show up outside the dorms last night with a longgun of some sort, pace around until everything was put on lockdown, and then drive away.
BUT WERE THEY JOKING?!!?
Seriously though, that's pretty dang funny.
Are... Are you sure? That's a really good way for someone to get shot or seriously disrupt a lot of people.
Frankly, I don't even feel comfortable walking around with my color guard rifle even though it's little more than a rifle-shaped bit of plastic wrapped in white tape. People freak out over less, like camera tripods.
That's my initial assumption is that it was some moron's "no really guys, I have this awesome idea for April Fools" joke, considering that from the reports he basically just hung around long enough for the lockdown to be announced, then hightailed it out of town before the police arrived.