Ethnic Food

I've been posting increasingly on Sietsema's Table, the web discussion board led by Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post food critic. The current topic is whether the presence of people from the ethnicity of the food in the restaurant means anything. Here were my preliminary thoughts:

I think this is all really a disagreement about what "best" means.

If best means "most authentic", then clearly a higher percentage of native diners is a good proxy for quality. Native diners may not be great judges of food, but they know whether what they're eating tastes like what their grandmother made.

If best has a broader meaning that includes quality of ingredients, innovation, inventiveness, etc, then I think native diners don't help you much. I'm of middle eastern descent, and I can guarantee you that if you give my relatives lamb kebabs dusted with zataar, say, they'd leave that restaurant and go to the place that keeps the zataar for breakfast. But I like zataar on lamb - it's an interesting flavor, albeit one we don't traditionally use. So a restaurant that has zataar dusted lamb may well be very good, but also have not a single olive skinned family sitting inside.

I think the interesting point is that the same person can want both these things on different occasions. Sometimes I want to learn about what people in such and so country eat, so I find myself nibbling on cold, spicy, pork ears in some authentic chinese restaurant. Sometimes I want to see what a really talented person is doing with new traditionalist farming and traditional ideas, so I go to the zataar kebab place. They're both good, but at different things.

I guess the real answer is that if a restaurant claims to be a traditional ethnic restaurant AND there aren't any natives sitting inside, I'd give it a miss.