Chinese food is like a chameleon. It gets adapted very significantly to whatever local ingredients are available in a way many others don't, and also intentionally adjusted to local palates (I remember when the first Chinese restaurant in Oslo to serve "authentic" Sichuan cuisine in the late 90's -- the unimaginatively named Dinner in Stortingsgata for any Norwegians on here -- had to warn people to interpret the spice levels the way you would at an Indian restaurant, because most Norwegian Chinese restaurants before that made their food more bland to fit local preferences but the Indian restaurants didn't, so they became the benchmark)

New submission: The Ottomans invented the doner kebab, yet its fast-food variant served as a sandwich with sauce and extensive salad was invented by an ethnic Turk in Berlin. Berlin has, for historical reasons, a lot of ethnic Vietnamese inhabitants. Some of these have moved to Vietnam, taking with them the kebab, and inventing a variant called banh my doner kebab, which uses pork for the meat part, and adds sour vegetables and chili sauce.

Oh my. That sounds like something I need to try.

As noted, Lebanese immigrants to Mexico led to Al Pastor through a similar process.

I find it interesting that Cilantro which is in so many Mexican dishes is an Old World plant. Culantro is native to the Americas, as is Quillquiña.

And the mexican taco pastor is pretty much similar and also come from imigration.

> My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.

It depends on where you are and what you order.

I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting:

- dim sum of various types

- mapo tofu

- kungpao/gongbao chicken

- twice cooked pork

- scallion pancakes

- Peking duck

- noodles of various types

The list could go on.

I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.

Even then, mapo and kungpao often contain a lot of chilis, which came from the Americas via the Portuguese. So it's not untouched by American (continent) influence, just much earlier.

What percentage of this menu [1] would you say is tradition Chinese food?

[1] https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden...

I’m not sure what your point is.

Yes, every city has Chinese restaurants with stylized Chinese food. It’s usually “Americanized”, but it can just as be as easily Thai-ized or Korean-ized or Japan-ised or whatever.

Fwiw, I recommend this place:

http://www.ocean-harbor.com/

There are many other good ones.

> I’m not sure what your point is.

That Americanized Chinese food is American.

The same is true for Chinese food in Netherland; it's mostly a Dutch invention. Or more specifically, it's Indonesian food for Dutch colonialists.

It's so incredibly ingrained in Dutch culture that the very first restaurant of any town or village is either a snackbar or a Chinese restaurant.

lol... That's part true. But I wouldn't use "almost entirely"...

Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China.

Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)

Same for Chinese food in the Netherlands.

It's more like Indonesian food (former colony), but not really, it's more a collection of Asian-like dishes with tons of sugar added.

Sort of. Even if you had simply isolated a group of Chinese people in a new location for a long period, you'd expect the food to evolve independently.

This generalizes more than you'd think. $(Foreign food) in $(Country) is largely an invention of $(Country)

This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.