Monday, June 15, 2026

Who's Cooking?

Though I have biases like everyone, for the most part, I consider myself reasonably open-minded. That said, I'm providing the Wikipedia link below to help you decide if what I'm about to confess makes me guilty of ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism - Wikipedia

With respect to restaurants specializing in ethnic cuisine, I'm less confident about what I'm about to eat when folks preparing my meal appear to have no trace of the ethnicity in question. Call me ethnocentric and read no further if you choose, but before anyone reports me to the PC police, hear me out. 

I don't necessarily need to hear Italian spoken by cooks in an Italian restaurant, but for me, it is preferable to hearing Russian or German. Now because I speak only English - admittedly bolstering my ethnocentric bona fides - I struggle to differentiate some languages from others. However, if any Polish or Slavic speaker working as a cook in a Mexican, Thai, or Lebanese restaurant stumbles across this post, allow me to respectfully suggest you stay silent when encountering me - or some equally prickly individual - as a customer. Even we monolinguists can usually pick out blatant auditory clues and, in my case, it could start me wondering if my meal is going to pass muster. Sorry in advance if this offends you.   

The ethnicity of cooks in a diner? A less cut and dry matter. Given the number of choices on a typical diner menu, a United Nations contingent would be necessary in those kitchens to fully satisfy my narrow requirements. However, to be painfully honest (what have I got to lose at this point?), I will almost always bypass a diner not featuring spanakopita. And I also pay attention to the name of the diner's proprietor when advertised, on the lookout for first names like Stavros or Eleni. Another technique? I listen when a diner's proprietor pronounces gyro.  If I hear something like "jiro" (hard "J" and long "i") instead of something close to "yiddo" (rhymes with "kiddo"), that could signal my last trip to that particular diner. I love my spanakopita too much to take chances. Same goes for my pasta primavera and all those other yummy ethnic dishes that have been passed down through generations of folks who originated the dish in the first place.    

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