American capitalism “stealing” food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they’re mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they’re high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule.
I’d guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe).
In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine.
This wouldn’t explain the “German restaurant phenomenon” you identify, but I think you’ll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: “chicago “german restaurant”“ and “chicago “French restaurant””. There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.
I’ll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.
American capitalism “stealing” food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they’re mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they’re high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule.
I’d guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe).
In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine.
This wouldn’t explain the “German restaurant phenomenon” you identify, but I think you’ll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: “chicago “german restaurant”“ and “chicago “French restaurant””. There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.
I’ll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.
I wrote a reply to this but it got too long, so I posted it as its own post.