My question was how do you describe the area as a whole, not a specific establishment. Int’l is fine by me, but that doesnt quite pass as an alternative. And some of the same logic that makes Ethnic a potential dirty word can also be applied to Intl in the future, depending on the use
The Dominican point is fair. Just like whats Western and whats not, its not clear what belongs to what category, and does it really need to be.
“Culinary diverse”?
“A culinary wonderland”?
I’m confused by some of this conversation which seems to conflate national borders with ethnic identity- no matter where. It’s fine to refer to international groceries by their region (East Asian, Mediterranean, South Asian, Caribbean, Polish are amongst the shops on my road alone although I’d refer to the East Asian ones by names of grocery or “the Thai shop with the super talkative cashier”).
In my large supermarkets there are international aisles with specialities from these places and US and Ireland. Sometimes Italian is there too.
But national/regional makes sense and it’s specific without assuming a singular “ethnic” identity (which as we know is a lot more complex).
One can certainly overthink things… or just call them what they are. That seems to be the easiest & non-offensive-to-anyone solution.
English, Scottish and Irish are used here in Canada as descriptors for restaurants, bars or pubs that have English, Scottish or Irish foods.
The garden variety Canadian bars and pubs that serve wings, burgers, etc, that aren’t connecting to a specific heritage, of foods which may have had a specific origin, but have morphed and bastardized, and are available everywhere (Caesar Salad Wrap, nachos, ham and cheese sandwiches, poutine, Chinese chicken salad) ,don’t typically have a descriptor connected to an Old Country or Old Region. Or maybe the restaurant has a self-made descriptor connected to marketing that makes little to no sense. Some Canadian-run restaurants have described themselves as Italian American or California -style, when there’s no real connection to either place or style.
I am a bit of a culture geek, so I’ve got my finger on the stores, bakeries, pubs and restaurants
serving specific British foods.
I think it’s also important to consider one’s audience in some cases.
I sometimes tailor what I say, something depending on the person I’m talking with.
Chinese is a good enough descriptor to include many regions and styles of food when I’m talking to a generalist.
I’ll use more specific language here, because people are interested in the details.
In an old fashioned grocery store, I’m not going to care whether the store calls the aisle with the Portuguese, Mexican and Chinese ingredients the International aisle. I haven’t really seen Ethnic used for the aisle here in Canada. It’s usually labelled International Foods. I did use Ethnic to describe what I didn’t perceive as the ordinary food of Ontario, which I’d describe as something similar to Midwest Foods. Casseroles, chicken pot pie, garden salads with French (red) dressing, Italian dressing from a bottle, apple crisp, funeral potatoes.
I started avoiding using the word Ethnic around the time the articles started popping up criticizing it.
I studied The Other in University 30 years ago.
I, despite being white, was considered The Other, being of non- British Isles lineage in a city that had 90 percent British Isles lineage 40 years ago. Greek food was foreign, German food was foreign. Polish food was foreign. Indian food was foreign. Korean food was foreign. Caribbean food was foreign. Kids were teased and bullied for their lunch foods and their last names.
This is my friend’s comedy bit about a Greek lunch.
Labels are in flux. Languages changes. I try my best to keep up-to-date, and not offend anyone.
Diverse is certainly good. When I have visitors to Washington, DC and environs, I point out that it is a truly international city with a range of places that reflect that. Almost any cuisine you can imagine from around the world. You can even specify what kind of Indian or Chinese food you might want to try, down to the state or province. Some cuisines that you might have trouble finding elsewhere, like Bolivian or Lao are here in abundance.
But I try not to give anyone the impression that ‘ethnic’ is reserved only for some cuisines and not others.
Again, it’s probably been a very long time since I’ve heard anyone use that term, so I think most people around here are already clued in.
When Mark and I were in a two-week class in Virginia just outside DC back in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time finding a different “ethnic” restaurant every night. After a week of Ethiopian, Thai, etc., I asked Mark one day if he’d prefer Serbo-Croatian or Japanese, and he asked rather plaintively, “Can we just get a hamburger?” (I should note that this was most atypical of him. He’s the one who orders not just the most unusual item on a menu, but the one that isn’t even translated.)
That said, we ate at a Persian restaurant in Vienna (VA) while we were on vacation a few years ago. We still don’t have those near us here.
BTW, Serbians make these wild hamburgers stuffed with cheese called pljeskavica. Comes out to the table like a meat balloon with tons of melty cheese served in pocket bread the size of the plate. So you could have Serbian AND just ordered a hamburger…
How very Eurocentric of you.
Regular pljeskavica don’t come with cheese filling but are more like regular patties (only often larger). With cheese filling it is a sar pljeskavica.
In addition, as you can expect based on the history several of the countries are claiming to have invented pljeskavica (and related cevapcici) - so I wouldn’t call it Serbian
Wasn’t that exactly the point that’s been made (IIRC multiple times, in multiple threads)?
Isn’t that the inherent criticism of the term?
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Thanks for the enlightenment. I now remember that I did have a ‘regular’ pljeskavica at a place in Brooklyn as well as the sar pljeskavica in Miami Beach.
The one in Miami Beach was spectacular, though I don’t know if I’ll ever have to order one again. It was big enough to eat me instead of the other way around.
I’m obviously all for removing words that are used as slurs or have negative meanings. If its causing harm and people are offended, no questions asked. There’s a certain word that is making a big comeback now describing my kind that is used that way. I’m also an immigrant, and my food can be seemed as exotic to some.
Words have meanings, but they dont change because someone wrote an article about them. NYC 's diversity is one of the reasons I live here. More for the ethnic than Int’l. It just feels like we sometimes teach to embrace “different” and hide it under the carpet at the same time.
But I respect people’s opinion on this, and I dont use the word as much as I used to
In some parts of Canada, ethnic traditionally has meant anything that isn’t white bread Anglo food or white bread French Canadian food. There’s a derogatory term, mangiacake (sometimes shortened to cake or caker), which is used by Italians, Greeks, and other groups to describe white bread type culture.
I grew up in a house where we served plain Canadian Anglo food like roast beef to guests.
Our neighbours, the Smiths, ate Shepherd’s Pie once or twice a week. Beef Shepherd’s Pie, which is what typical 4th or 5th generation Anglo Canadians consider to be Shepherds Pie, as lamb is considered a little foreign in Canada, even if their own ancestors or their present day 8th cousins in the Welsh, Scottish, Irish or English homeland enjoy lamb. Cottage Pie is found in a few somewhat authentic Pubs, but a typical white bread Canadian does not use Cottage Pie as a term, and would be disappointed if lamb was used without an explicit warning.
Our Greek family recipes and German family recipes were prepared for close friends, or for special family events.
In the 1970s, most of our 4th Generation Canadian neighbours did not use garlic and did not like garlic. That has changed. It’s also been amusing to see the children of one garlic phobic couple marry spouses who were Polish in one case and Chinese in the other. The Grandma has now broadened her palate to include garlic and regional Polish and Chinese foods. She still eats plain at home. She still likes her chocolate plain, not too fancy, no nuts.
I have a feeling what is considered ethnic, exotic or foreign is very different in a city like NYC, where there is so much diversity, than say, London, Ontario or the suburbs of Colorado Springs.
When I visit the burbs of Pittsburgh, my Irish German cousins eat pretty plain food overall, although there was a large Italian and Polish population, so perogies, cabbage rolls, sauerkraut , Polish sausage and Italian sausage had become part of my family’s northern Pittsburg suburb diet. There are often perogies, cabbage rolls, and sausage served at weddings as well as at funeral lunches. Partly because these foods are sometimes prepared by church halls, and the foods reflect the comfort foods of the community.
The cousins that have married into Italian families enjoy a lot more Mediterranean foods and ingredients. This isn’t even ancient history. My cousins’ kids, who are Irish German Italian American, born in the 1980s and 1990s, have a much broader palate and are more open to trying new foods than the kids of my cousin who lives in Canton, Ohio (small town that is highly white bread in my limited experience) who married another German Irish American. Apparently, the kids of the Canton cousin (born in the 1990s) turn their noses up at most Italian foods other than pizza, and made jokes about eating eggplant long before the eggplant emoji jokes were a thing. (I’m okay with the eggplant jokes, I make jokes about their wedding vows and wedding banquet food, after their family weddings)
I have been to around 2 dozen Pittsburgh weddings and 3 Canton, Ohio family weddings (same extended family).
I can tell you, the Pittsburgh wedding cookie tables are a lot more interesting and better tasting when my cousins marry into a family with some Italians, Poles, Greeks or Croatians, compared to when they marry into a family that only eats chocolate chip cookies and shortbread. 
All of this underscores that the word “ethnic” is perspective-dependent.
As long as we all acknowledge and recognize that, there should be no taboo in using the word.
To an American, a Chinese person is “ethnic”.
To that same Chinese person, that American person is “ethnic”.
Which is ok, and perfectly fine, as long as we all recognize the fluidity that is the quiddity of how “ethnic” is perceived.
Exactly.
Tangent
The fussiness is not only coming from White Bread people, or from people of European ancestry.
Most groups have people who have issues with xenophobia, or people who are not willing to try foods they see as foods of the Other.
I remember have long, light-hearted debate about perogies with a friend who was an immigrant, raised in Montreal from the age of 5. I’m not mentioning which country she immigrated from, because I don’t think her xenophobic behaviour reflects that country or its people. Her (first) husband, from the same community, was open-minded and very eager to try new foods. This story is more about the concept of what is exotic or foreign being relative, and maybe how not to behave in a restaurant when one is not familiar with the foods offered.
I had organized a group dinner for 4 classmates at Café Polonez, probably Toronto’s best Polish restaurant. None of us were Polish. The friend made a big fuss about not being able to find anything to eat at the restaurant.
Well, she basically ate food from her family’s ancestral homeland which is rather spicy food, fancy hamburgers at nice pubs, fast food fried chicken and McD’s.
She was already called to the Bar, she was 32 yo, she had worked in hospitality at the front desk of a nice hotel in downtown Toronto prior to law school. She was making a fuss in a restaurant because Polish food was too weird for her.
To me, it was obnoxious on her part. She was loud. Other servers could hear. Other customers could hear.
The Polish restaurant had Caesar salads, Greek salads, grilled chicken and chicken schnitzel available, in addition to the Polish stuff. I suggested she try the chicken schnitzel because it was essentially a large chicken McNugget. I think it was the word schnitzel that was the issue for her. It didn’t matter that it was translated as breaded chicken cutlet on the menu, right next to Schnitzel.
I think she eventually ordered the grilled chicken. It was edible. She choked it down. She looked unhappy throughout dinner. She didn’t die.
A few months later, at a house party, she continued on this rant about the concept of perogies being vile. I don’t know if it was just attention seeking. Or to poke fun at something other people liked.
After that, if I saw her socially, we went to very plain places. I think I stopped arranging group dinners for our classmates after that dinner at Café Polonez. She was a no- show for my 40th birthday party at a Neapolitan pizza place. ( Maybe the pizza was going to be too wet) .
Which means, I haven’t seen her since I was 39.
Everyone belongs to an ethnicity (or perhaps even a hyphenated one). To call someone ‘an ethnic’ is demeaning.
“You’ll find happy hearts and smiling faces
And tolerance for the ethnic races
…in Denton.”
I’ve been called “ethnic” all my lfie.
I don’t find it demeaning.
Maybe I’m just too stupid to realize it’s demeaning. So maybe it’s a “me” problem.
