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[Yoink]

I hate health inspectors and that whole kind of thing. You think I don't know this little hole-in-the-wall takeaway joint is a total mire of filth? I couldn't care less, I want my [INSERT GREASY FOOD ITEM HERE] goddamnit!   



In other WTF news, I noticed the word "MILF" used on the front page of a local paper yesterday. Umm.   

[JoshuaFH]

I really wish I 'understood' Chinese food. I'm a picky eater, but the biggest gripe I have with it is that I never know what the items on the menu are supposed to actually mean. Last time I got Chinese on a friend's strong recommendation, I chose steak. Just steak, I thought it was a safe choice. What I got was steak chopped into pieces with roughly 3 green peppers worth of diced peppers piled on top, with some eggrolls that had some odd vegetable I'd never seen before added in. Like, was I supposed to know that this was what the menu meant?  I hated it, and left it mostly uneaten.

[pisskop]

My coworkers get mad at me because I spend, like, 12 dollars on a sandwich or buy weird muslim food like shewarma or buy a dozen 4 dollar donuts every week to hand out to the drones.

I suspect its a combination of 'why are you 'wasting' your money that way' and 'you should be more like us, and get mad when you see a biden sign'.  They didnt even want to smell my turkish coffee, which was so aromatic I could feel my nostrils opening.

[Rolan7]

Schoolmarm (wtf autocorrect) shawarma is delicious!  I get it sometimes from a a muslim store near me - I coexist with a lovely community of muslims, in an otherwise african american area.  We play Pokemon GO, some of us.  I'm an introvert but they're friendly neighbors and we get along great.

Gods I love that community store.  It has quality rice at marginally-above-wholesale price, and canned beans with arabic script on them.  It's just fava beans (in my shopping cart) and the price is good, and I can walk to them.  That's the value of urban planning.  I don't have to drive to get the staples to live.

I have no idea where I was going with this, my neighbors are lovely

[pisskop]

It is good food.  There's a sizeable Mediterranean undercurrent downtown, though it seems more like it caters to the Yale students than to any minority group.

I get greek on Saturday, Italian on Fridays, Polish Deli on Tuesdays, usually one of the many coffee shops makes me a panini of some kind on Wednesday, and I do high-brow snobby-ass-but-hot-owner omlett bar on Thursday.

There's also a Crepe bar I want to look at whenever I get the inkling to go.  I have to find a way to better balance all the shops, but some are just better than others.

[Egan_BW]

I don't eat out anymore, because pandemic.

[Rolan7]

It was primarily a deli and I miss that so much, but they always had a wall dedicated to grocery for the community.  *thumbsup*

And I have used them as a wholesale, taking large sacks of rice and dry beans (and canned seasoned fava beans, and hnngghhh the delectable riceballs wrapped in grape leaves, as an absolute fricken luxury)

And literally like 3 times I've had them cook meat for me.  I am not a vegetarian.  I just try to value the meat I eat!

... I have like 60 pounds of frozen meat from APRIL, but I've only had one chicken out of it!

I do my best to balance my proteins, but sometimes I fail and a delicious spiced shawarma tides me over.

Edit:  Sorry, it's still a deli, I just can't in good conscience use it as such... until I'm suffering from an obvious nutrient imbalance due to my own failure.

[hector13]

I really wish I 'understood' Chinese food. I'm a picky eater, but the biggest gripe I have with it is that I never know what the items on the menu are supposed to actually mean. Last time I got Chinese on a friend's strong recommendation, I chose steak. Just steak, I thought it was a safe choice. What I got was steak chopped into pieces with roughly 3 green peppers worth of diced peppers piled on top, with some eggrolls that had some odd vegetable I'd never seen before added in. Like, was I supposed to know that this was what the menu meant?  I hated it, and left it mostly uneaten.

Yeah Chinese food can be hit or miss. I’ve also discovered that Chinese restaurants in ‘murrica aren’t as good as the ones from my part of the UK, though I may have just been unlucky in that respect as I have found a Chinese restaurant (also does sushi) in my new town which has the most delightful kung pao fish (and tofu!) as well as doing very tasty fried rice.

They do weird shit to their crab rangoons though. Spring onions I think.

[delphonso]

I hate health inspectors and that whole kind of thing. You think I don't know this little hole-in-the-wall takeaway joint is a total mire of filth? I couldn't care less, I want my [INSERT GREASY FOOD ITEM HERE] goddamnit!   

100% agree there. I want my food to have character, even if that is a risk of salmonella.

I really wish I 'understood' Chinese food. I'm a picky eater, but the biggest gripe I have with it is that I never know what the items on the menu are supposed to actually mean. Last time I got Chinese on a friend's strong recommendation, I chose steak. Just steak, I thought it was a safe choice. What I got was steak chopped into pieces with roughly 3 green peppers worth of diced peppers piled on top, with some eggrolls that had some odd vegetable I'd never seen before added in. Like, was I supposed to know that this was what the menu meant?  I hated it, and left it mostly uneaten.

American Chinese food is obviously different, but a lot of this comes from food names being descriptive in Chinese and that not translating well with food expectations in English. For example, fish-flavor eggplant sounds awful.
But, yuxiang (fish fragrance literally) is technically a seasoning (though it has about 15 ingredients or something). That usually ends up as a sauce thanks to the oil used to cook anything. So you end up with eggplant and green beans in a thick garlicky semi-sweet sauce. It's also vegetarian despite the name. The green beans come out of nowhere but they're just part of the dish because they go well with the sauce and the eggplant and everyone knows yuxiangqiezi has green beans in it.

Add on location preferences and it gets worse - so this dish in Guangdong almost always includes bits of pork for flavor. You know that just because you're in the area that always does that, or a restaurant serving Guangdong style food.

All that is absent from the seemingly descriptive name thanks to connotations. But half the names are descriptive enough to give you an idea, so menus often just get thrown into google translate and that's enough.

Now imagine barely understanding English and understanding what a "Moons-over-my-Hammy" is.

[LordBaal]

We have/had a lot of shawarma places, only most of them here are from the catholic/christian minorities from Siria and middle east that came to live here.

I remember eating 2 whole mixed (chicken and meat) shawarmas with a liter of milk once. I was fairly young, in fact my father was still alive. Was an odd choice for drink but I did love it.

The clasic "chinese food" is not actually chinese but it was developed in San Fransisco by depauperated chinese. Real chinese kitchen is different.

Some china places will actually have two menus, the regular one you always get and one they offer to their countrymen.

[Doomblade187]

I honestly feel like the "dual menu" thing is a variant on the "secret menu" urban legend, and that it's usually people who know what they want, ask for it specifically by component, and then the place makes it. Also, some places just don't translate their entire menu.

[LordBaal]

Here is more a matter of "people won't eat that anyway", the menus aren't secret at all and some restaurants do have both rosters on the same menu for the adventurers to try out real chinese cuisine.

But for the most people the chinese food is eggrolls, chopsuey, fried rice, chicken balls and pork ribs. It's very rare to see people eating other stuff in any chinese restaurant here and that's basically the whole menu of most of them. There is quite a lot of them here.

[Yoink]

We have/had a lot of shawarma places, only most of them here are from the catholic/christian minorities from Siria and middle east that came to live here.

My old favourite falafel place turned out to be actually run by Coptic Christians from Egypt. Don't think I'd ever even heard of the Coptic church before a more gregarious friend got talking to them one time.   
All I knew was that they were almost all big, intimidating dudes covered in tattoos that would put a cliche Russian prison inmate to shame, but they made a damn nice falafel wrap for five bucks. Man, that was a great deal. Pretty sure that whole restaurant was mainly some kind of tax dodge (it closed and re-opened like, three times or so, with different business names but mostly the same menu and staff), but the food was good so who cares.   

100% agree there. I want my food to have character, even if that is a risk of salmonella.

Zacktly! Just look at SE Asia and its fantastic array of street food vendors. That's more like it.   

[delphonso]

100% agree there. I want my food to have character, even if that is a risk of salmonella.

Zacktly! Just look at SE Asia and its fantastic array of street food vendors. That's more like it.   

Indian street food is infamous for giving people food poisoning. As someone who experienced that, I can say it is 100% worth it. I had a friend shit his pants in an airport because of it and that still doesn't stop him.

[methylatedspirit]

So I'm looking at notes for my Economics class, and at some point it talks about the types of economic systems, which according to these notes are capitalism, socialism, and Islamic economy (yeah, I live in a conservative Islamic country, this was bound to happen). For the first two, it describes its advantages and disadvantages, but then, at Islamic economy (described as a mix of capitalism and socialism, with a bunch of God-stuff in there), the notes just cut off there.

Now, I'm no expert, but every economic system has its advantages and disadvantages. To not give a pros-and-cons rundown for Islamic economy implies that it is perfect... which is not possible. There is no free lunch; when you optimize for a certain set of parameters, you must necessarily end up with sub-optimal parameters elsewhere. Pure, unregulated capitalism is great if you want loads of money, but it's absolute dogshit at ensuring the social welfare of people. Pure socialism (which by these notes' definition might be closer to communism) is great for income equality, but then there's no incentive for companies to compete. You gain something here, you must lose something elsewhere. You could combine the best parts of socialism and capitalism, but then it's a jack of all trades and a master of none.

I probably can't say anything of the sort to my lecturer or my classmates, though, which is why it's going here. They'd think of me as either an atheistic heathen or a madman (of the not-fun kind) for objecting.