China Doesn't Understand the Concept of American Chinese Food (2014)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/chop-suey-...

Can't tell if you're trolling, have never been to France, or just went to all the wrong places. The center of Paris would be the worst place to eat any great French food, unless you only care for pretentious, overpriced restaurants which get featured in tourist magazines. Go spend some time in small restaurants in Bretagne, Lyon, Alsace, Marseille, ...

> Cheap Chinese food in Paris ... you'll be sick for days.

Paris' immigrant Chinese population has been growing pretty wildly recently, and I've been to many Chinese restaurants with Chinese friends who are studying in France who find them pretty legit. Again, sounds like you need a better guide for when you're spending time in France :)

> Turkish fast food, specifically Kebab, is as far as I know a German invention taken up by Turks, rather than something that historically existed in Turkey.

Wikipedia disagrees with you:

"With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape. It was not until a century later, that döner kebab was introduced and popularized in Istanbul, most famously by Beyti Güler. His restaurant, first opened in 1945, was soon discovered by journalists and began serving döner and other kebab dishes to kings, prime ministers, film stars and celebrities. [...]

In Germany the döner kebab was popularized by Turkish guest workers in the early 1970s with a center in Berlin."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab#History

To be a touch contrarian, I'd even argue that the kind of food served in some of the newer chain restaurants isn't even proper traditional American-Chinese food (which seems to have shown up sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century). One of the things I've come to appreciate after lots of travel and lots of -Chinese food is how well developed and embedded American-Chinese food is as an American cuisine.

There's rough variants of it in Western Europe when you can find it, but it's a little different. But you can find an American-Chinese restaurant in almost every po-dunk country town across the entirety of America. I've been to places where the only places around to get prepared foods was a local gas station and a Chinese takeout. And the menu is both incredibly standardized, but quintessentially American.

P.F. Chang, Ka Pao, and a couple other of the new food places seem to be putting an effort to "de-ethnic" the food and make the preparation and presentation of it shift a bit more into familiar American diets. It's actually kind of hard to talk about without ending up confused with the words, but the nearest I can think of is a spectrum from:

- to -

These new Chinese dining places seem to shift a bit more to the American side, and lose some of that scrappy mom&pop Chinese takeout joint charm and replace it with fresh faced, often Caucasian college kids serving healthy optioned brown rice and not too spicy or oily (and not too tasty) variants of American-Chinese favorites.

America has a lot of very interesting quasi-ethnic cuisines that are no longer recognizable by the people from their origins, but also don't really exist outside of the U.S. in any meaningful way.

Some day, perhaps, we'll just think of it as "food" and it'll be solidly on the right of that weird spectrum, much in the way Ramen is thought of as "food" in Japan even though it's also Chinese-Japanese cuisine. P.F. Chang's is a step towards Ramenizing American-Chinese food, but it still makes me feel a bit sad.

My only hope is the more recent trend of more "authentic" regional and modern Chinese cuisine finally starting to show up as a new wave in the U.S. Non-scary (for Americans), high quality, and tasty Chinese foods are starting to appear in American cities, often with an American-Chinese section on the menu.

Hah! Lyon is the stomach of France, and it is very, very outside of Paris. There are many regions with amazing food in France. You're probably trying to make a point, but what you wrote makes no sense.