Ethnic restaurant pretentiousness

This week's inductee into the "Overrated Hall of Fame" is ... Ethnic restaurant pretentiousness.

It's not so much the restaurants themselves that are pretentious. I'm talking more about that certain type of person who frequents ethnic restaurants out of a sense of self-satisfied open-mindedness. There's not a damn thing pretentious about 106-pound, off-white immigrant restaurant owners who work seven 18-hour days each week at Pho Danang's Deli just to meet the restaurant's produce bill at the end of every month. Or, if we're talking Greek restaurants, there's not a damn thing pretentious about the 300 pound hairy-backed owner who maintains order in his kitchen with a string of Greek curse words and an eight-inch cleaver.

No, what's overrated is the attitude of the 28-year-old wonderchild from the outskirts of Terre Haute, the pride of her blonde family who, through hard work and ass-kissing, has found her way to a decent paying job in the big city, and in a never-ending effort to rid herself of her small town roots - and the lack of sophistication that the snobby city folk attach to yokels who have "come up" - has decided that she will eagerly immerse herself in every cultural experience the big city has to offer, from modern art shows which feature solid blue canvases that (allegedly) make brilliant statements on the slow decline of the American empire, to the photography exhibit that showcases photos of nude octogenarians which (supposedly) symbolize man's core animalism, to the poor inner city kids who set up empty drywall buckets and beat the shit out of them with wooden dowel rods in a (fruitless) attempt to pass off their migraine-inducing cacophony as brilliantly improvised rhythm. Trying (and just loving!) every type of ethnic restaurant in the city is one more transparent attempt to appear the urbane sophisticate.

Now, when I say ethnic restaurant, I don't mean Italian, Mexican, Chinese or even French. I've never visited those countries, but I'm betting that the food you get in those lands is nothing like the mostly bland fare that gets served up in those types of ethnic restaurants in this country. If a bowl of pasta in Italy is anything like the bowl of soggy noodles and canned sauce they overcharge you for at Olive Garden, I think I'll set aside my dream of an Italian vacation and continue to eat vinegar fries and corndogs at the beach each July.

The ethnic places that are loved by the terminally pretentious are more along the lines of Vietnamese, Moroccan, Egyptian, Lebanese, Greek and, of course, the trendy ethnic flavor of the past decade, Thai. I know you can get some decent food at these restaurants, because I've eaten at many of them. I just don't separate my shoulder patting myself on the back or wear out my friends' patience with stories of my exotic night out at Taste of Saigon or The Marrakesh Café.

The pretentious lot I'm referring to are those people who are more into what they are doing rather than what they are eating. For them, it's all about being able to announce at work on Monday, "...and then Saturday we ate at this delightful little Peruvian place on 18th Street in (Insert not-so-hip section of city here, for the lack of hipness of that area makes them feel that much hipper, because they are hip enough to shun whatever passes as hip and instead try to create their own hip part of town, the hipness of which is established by the very unhipness of the area ... get it?), and it was marvelous!" At this point, they give you a full report on what each person in their party ate, and there's a hefty load of pretentiousness attached to this exercise.

They will rattle off a list of the dishes their party ate, knowing good and goddamn well that you have no idea what those dishes are, baiting you to show your ill-bred coarseness by having to ask what those dishes are and allowing them to recite the detailed description they memorized from the menu. Of course, these desperate-to-appear-worldly phonies had never heard of the dishes before Saturday night either, but they'll tell you in a dismissively cool offhand manner what's in them, as if they've been eating these ethnic specialties since they were eight years old. "Tabboulah? (Rolls eyes.) Oh it's bulghur wheat in chicken broth with scallions and mint leaves. Anyway ..." Then they'll continue the Saga of My Ethnic Dinner, barely concealing their disdain for your lack of international food knowledge, and not even trying to hide the smug air of superiority you granted them when you inquired about the stupid foreign meal they were bragging about eating. What makes the whole conversation extra painful is that you didn't give a shit in the first place.

As they continue the epic tale of their wildly adventurous dining experience, they'll sometimes expose a bit of condescending, soft racism, a bit of American arrogance to which they would never admit. One sure sign of this hidden cultural superiority is when they spend too much time describing how cute and authentic the help were. The owners and workers at these restaurants are just hardworking humps trying to make a living in the highly competitive - and usually unsuccessful - American restaurant business. These ballsy people left their homelands and moved to a new country - where they might barely know the language - and set up a restaurant in the cold American business world. This is a bit more impressive than moving from Mansfield, Ohio to Washington, D.C. for a cushy job with your state senator, which is what our immigrant-adoring diner has done, much to her self-satisfaction. Yet Miss Middle America will find these tough-as-nails people "adorable." They'd never describe Gary, the dirty busboy from Applebee's, as cute, but little Nguyn Doc Tu, their toothy waiter at Viet Gardens who is no bigger than a whisper and can barely understand English? Why, he's just the most precious little thing they've ever seen. And that nasty argument in the kitchen between Stavros and his wife, the argument heard throughout the entire restaurant by smiling, highly entertained diners? That was so ... authentic! But let two cooks named Joe and Vinnie get into a shouting match at Denny's, and you can bet Miss All-Foreigners-Are-Awesome will be on the phone to corporate headquarters first thing Sunday morning with a formal complaint.

These people are also suckers for the ethnic decor that's supposed to evoke images of the homelands of the too-cute-for-words workers. The most effective bit of interior design is the one in which the walls are covered with huge pictures of the people "back home." It doesn't seem to matter to the wide-eyed, cooing diner that no one in these pictures is ever smiling, or that the people in the pictures are still grinding their own wheat by hand, or that they women can't show their fucking faces because it would drive the uber-religious, uber-repressed menfolk into raping rages. No, they just see a simpler life led by good, salt of the earth peasants who no doubt love their simple lives of struggling to find food and trying to avoid dysentery. Somehow the touched diners never make the connection that if life in those vowel-less, seldom visited countries was so quaint and simple, the poor, skinny bastard who is serving their baladi and shamar wouldn't have dropped everything to come to America to open a hole in the wall diner just for the privilege of having cloying simpletons from smalltown USA find their every mis-pronounced English word just adorable.

Perhaps the phoniest aspect of the whole thing is that they pretend to love food that really isn't that good most of the time. Hey, I'm no stereotypical meat and potatoes-eating American male schlub who scoffs at trying anything that can't be found on a Bob Evan's menu. I've had some terrific meals at ethnic restaurants, and I'll try anything that doesn't have a mushroom in it. However, one of those terrific ethnic meals was not eaten at a famous local Afghan restaurant, something Miss Midwest would never be honest enough to admit. Yes, I said Afghan restaurant, and I said famous. The place is often packed on weekend nights. Can you think of one famous Afghan dish? Of course you can't. There are none. But the place is packed with pretentious putzes out in pursuit of another metropolitan experience they can write home about. Not being a phony, all I can remember from my lunch is a flavorless breadlike creation (cardboard?) that we dipped in a flavorless oil (Valvoli ne?), all while looking at walls covered with huge pictures of desolate Afghan mountains devoid of life. Okay, that's not entirely true. Some pictures did include Afghani people. They were doing that catcher's stance thing where they sit on their heels, their eyes vacant and empty of hope, staring past the camera and looking instead at a tomorrow that will be more of the same: sitting on one's heels and waiting for another shitty tomorrow, the only excitement being the possibility that some passerby will snap their picture for a restaurant wall in America. But what kind of gushing review does this place get by Miss Midwest on Monday morning? "Oh, it was so cool! The pictures were so moving, and our waiter wore sandals and smelled of goat urine, and his hands were so dirty! I almost thought we were in Kabul! Mike had the braised bland beef tips."

All these places have some crappy selections, just like any American restaurant. (I mean, does anyone really like buffalo chicken sandwiches?). I remember seeing a dish on a Greek menu that was nothing more than ground meat and rice wrapped in grape leaves. I guess I grew up in a pretty worldly house in my shitty little Pittsburgh borough, because we used to eat this same dish, minus the grape leaves, every Wednesday for dinner growing up. I think it was called Ground Meat Gravy and Rice, or maybe it was called Today Is Payday, And Until We Go Shopping Tonight, This Is All The Food We Have Left In The Fucking House. I certainly don't recall finding it European. I found it needed a lot of salt. But at the Athena Tavern, it's a signature selection that goes for $14.95. And who in their right mind, meaning people who are not starving or not Greek, eats a fucking grape leaf anyway?

The phony baloney types are also fooled by the semantic tricks these ethnic joints play. They take foods we eat every day in America, change their shape and name, and - voila! - you're feeling wild and adventurous because you're eating something Central European or Middle Eastern. Fahoud grills some meat and vegetables on a stick and calls it a kabob. Marook grounds uncooked pasta to the size of thick sand, then boils it for two minutes and - presto! - it's now couscous. Luigi cooks grits in chicken broth and calls it polenta. Raheeb turns perfectly good bread into a flat, hollowed out, flavorless meat holder and gives it a fun name like pita. Antonio slow cooks some rice in broth and makes you pay $18 because now it's risotto. I like kabobs and couscous and risotto and even polenta. (Pita, however, deserves an Overrated column of its own.) I just don't feel like a world traveling jetsetter every time I order them.

I know many ethnic restaurants serve up some culinary gems that make the taste buds sing and the stomach stand up and applaud. I'm sure many of these places give homesick immigrants a few hours of respite from their daily struggle of navigating the ever-changing cultural landscape of this 90-mile-per hour country. We would all do well to sample more of this international flavor now and then. Maybe it would help quell the close-minded xenophobia so many of us feel. (I'll give the pretentious Patties their due in that regard - at least they're not afraid of foreigners and clamoring for a big wall to keep out all those illegal grass-cutters and kitchen workers who are apparently devastating our economy.) But just be honest about the food you eat there. If it tastes good, great. Let me know and I'll be glad to try the joint. If it sucks, say so. This won't make you a boorish, unsophisticated, provincial American. It will mean you're an honest diner who wants to pay for food that actually tastes good. And when that happens, I'm betting the dish you loved had a fun, fancy name. And I bet it was not wrapped in a goddamned grape leaf.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.