I enjoy all kinds of food, authentic or not. Traditional or not. I am successful in surrounding myself with a lot of great food, carefully selected even at places that are not great as a whole.
But I also explore so I am in the habit of eating food that I don’t know I will like, including (though rarely) at franchises. I live in hope.
China has its own version of a burger, the roujiamo, or 肉夹馍.
It’s a Xi’an specialty, although it (naturally) doesn’t roll with cheese, and isn’t a patty.
As for your hypothetical burger place, sign me up … big fan of huajiao (the Sichuan pepper). Throw in some cumin, too.
Hmm, you don’t consider chain/franchise restaurant eats good in any country?
At what point is a brand a chain, once a place has a twin, or once it has numerous siblings?
Just curious, really.
I’ve been to plenty of restaurants in cities that were mediocre, yet the chains might have provided a consistent mediocrity that could have saved me grief at a “local” place.
Then there’s this very small Mexican chain (maybe less than a handful of brick-and-mortars) called Pizza La Sierra, which was bitchin’. How did I choose this place? Consider that, in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc-- there wasn’t much choice beyond corn and beef, and that Mennonite cheese and apples were famous. Pizza La Sierra not only offered a change from the norm, but also availed of those local ingredients.
I think I’ve been eating the Xi’an “burgers” you mention for years, ever since the 1st Xi’an stall opened in the Roosevelt Mall in Flushing. Now their chain is everywhere. Good burgers.
Indeed, Xi’an Famous Foods popularize the roujiamo, at least in the NY-area.
(of course, it’s not really a burger, more of a stepsibling to it)
I’ve been to Xi’an, in 2005, but the food I most fondly remember is walnut dumplings (coincidentally, they were shaped like walnuts).
Would be a hoot to go to the Muslim district now (that’s arguably the most famous food area in Xi’an, and home to the roujiamo), with Chinese language skills – and a much weaker stomach – in tow.
I applaud @linguafood for the attitude, even though we disagree on some things. It’s not about if one can possibly eat worse at a local place (yes it’s possible) , but at least you explored something new. You can’t win 'em all. Near home, I am sometimes, though rarely, willing to eat for the sake of speed and low cost. On the road, I become completely chain phobic.
And I am completely jealous you’ve been to Xian, though I did go to Lanzhou.
Oh, that was 18 years ago.
When were you in Lanzhou? I had a damn good lamian there. (of course; the most common hole-in-the-wall in China is called Lanzhou lamian/兰州拉面)
I feel like Gansu has some other exciting food experiences going on that most of us don’t know about.
In 20009, I went to Southern Gansu Province and Northen Sichuan. The food was crazy good. It’s part the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (of course no longer officially Tibet), with a lot of Tibetan population.
I was struck by just how prevalent noodles are in Lanzhou. We saw people carrying huge baskets of noodles down the street, sometimes two men to a basket, delivering them. We went into an unmarked eatery, a true hole-in-the-wall. No menu, but I did know to ask for lanzhou la mian.
I’ve mentioned the German seafood chain Nordsee in the thread about which fast food chains people “love.” It’s a fishmonger that sells fresh seafood and prepared seafoods (salads, fried fish, grilled fish, etc.). That may be the only chain restaurant I would consider to have good food available.
I eschew chains, I find the predictability and blandness uninteresting and would rather support an independent small business.
I’ve not visited every single country in the world, so I can only speak about the ones I’m familiar with. I don’t go to the usual 'murrcan chains unless there is absolutely no other option (there usually is).
Would a hamburger at a McDonald’s in India be considered predictable?
I generally avoid fast food chains as well, but I can’t say they all follow the same menu throughout the world. While living in China, when I was tired of getting served bowls of meat and vegetables drowned in cooking oil, I’d occasionally pop in to KFC for a taro pie, or an egg tart. Can’t find those two at a KFC in the US or Germany.
That Nordsee place sounds like it’s worth a visit … for a fast food-type of place.
For slower fast food, I like Nando’s Peri-Peri.
But Nordsee isn’t a fast food place. You can buy fresh fish (whole/filets), various seafood salads, seafood and fish sandwiches (smoked, pickled, fried), and other items to takeout or eat there.
McDonald’s hamburgers taste like baby food to me. I don’t seek them out in my home country, and I most certainly wouldn’t waste a meal at a FF chain while traveling in a foreign country.
I believe I stepped into a McD’s in Bangkok once, just to look at the different menu options.
And while I may not be able to find an egg tart at a KFC in Germany (not that I would even look for one), I can get good quality egg tarts elsewhere.
Chain foods are simply not my thing.
I love Nordsee. It’s better than a lot of full service seafood restaurants in Canada. But - it’s novel for me since I only visit Germany once in a blue moon.
I also like the Movenpick rest stops (truck stops on the autobahn/ main freeways)in Germany. They have better cake than a lot of indie pastry shops in Canada. My last visit to a Movenpick rest stop was in March 2019- on my way from Landeck Tirol to Munich. Little did I know that would be my last trip to EU for quite a while.
Another German chain I like ( probably only in Bavaria ): Rischart in Munich.
I’ve never been to Wienerwald. That looks like it might be pretty good.
The truck stops and train stations in Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece seem to have a lot more good food available than what you find along most Interstates, Turnpikes or highways in North America.
As a lab tech running the military hospital lab nights and weekends, I had to explain to several nurses that if they all kept ordering every test STAT (first priority) from their respective departments (ICU/SICU, Onco, E.R., which were 95% of the late shift workload), then everything would necessarily have routine priority and I would do them in the order received.
The E.R. nurse thought hers was the only dept. that “deserved” to order everything STAT and the other two didn’t realize all 3 depts were doing the same thing. Apparently they’d just been yammering at the old guy I’d replaced for years, without him ever explaining the problem. I got them to agree to start vetting priority instead of just automatically checking STAT.
I’m curious about when that was.
This was before my time in a military hospital, but I remember when I was a peds intern we collected samples and did many of the labs ourselves. Not like you did, I’m sure, but spinal fluid and blood slides, all things urine, sputum, bodily fluids up the wazoo. Yes, the wazoo.
Centrifuge, staining, counting stuff; yikes! Do interns still do that?
I remember having worked who knows how many hours, putting a test tube in a centrifuge, and having it fly out and shatter.
Ouch on the tube, good thing you didn’t get hit by high-speed glass.
This was in the early `80s. Never had any docs do labs and honestly, I don’t know if they had any MD residency training programs at that hospital, but think they did not - it was pretty small, serving maybe 60K troops/families/retirees.
DENTAC in the hospital did have a residency program. I know because Dr. Richard Pryor (DDS) supervised a dental grad trying (failing) to pull 2 of my wisdom teeth. In her defense, Dr. Pryor also had quite the time trying to get it done, too, and I ended up feeling like I’d gone 30 seconds with Muhammad Ali and didn’t run hard/fast enough.
great point. i often think along these lines when i’m passing by a neighborhood furniture store with a giant ‘SALE’ banner displayed prominently. since i live in proximity, i’ve known that this sign has been affixed every day, for YEARS on end. if your inventory is always on ‘sale’, then it’s not a sale, it’s the price.
Yeah, a lot of states regulate terms like “sale”, “clearance” etc., and limit the time they can be used because otherwise it’s essentially false advertising. Where regulated “sale” is pretty easy to get around because they just shift the sale to different products weekly (or whatever is needed to defeat the timeline). Clearance and especially “going out of business” regs are harder to get around. One state I lived in got a new AG that got aggressive about enforcement, picking the biggest names he could argue were misusing the signage and that had a pretty good trickle-down effect.
This relates to my comment how?
Seemed a similar concept - if everything is uniformly great, then it’s all average. If all lab tests are ordered high priority, they’re all average priority (routine).
To get to the great food where I live, I have to kiss (or eat) some ugly ducklings. Exploration is the key. I wade through the mediocre to get to the good stuff, but once I find it I know what to hone in on.
If I simply stuck with what I know, then I am happy to say I am surrounded by a lot of wonderful options.
