The worst airline food I've ever been served had to be on a flight to Guinea with an African airline (I forget which one). After take off (in a seat that I had to hold onto the back of to stop it falling completely flat) I was handed a 'room temperature' (given that it was about 45C on board) slice of bread with some chopped up, barely cooked, meat and onions on it. E-Coli on a plate (except there was no plate).
If you go Chinatown in London, you can get the same food you'd be served in a Hong Kong restaurant, though only in a few of the restaurants, most have drifted into making the same sort of dishes that you'd get in a takeaway(I've found the same is the case in the odd place I've been to in Manchester's Chinatown). Some stuff is the same, egg fried rice etc, but most of the other dishes are more cooked, the Chinese serve a lot of boiled chicken, which looks a bit raw and probably wouldn't sell so well here. They also take great pride in their seafood, so you'd never get any of those little frozen prawns in a dish over there, everything would be fresh, including the veg, which they heat rather than cook and it's all nice and crunchy. Not that I'm one to judge, I barely eat any Chinese food when I'm over there and I usually get Curry and Chips from a takeaway here(which is about as far away from Chinese cooking as you can possibly get).
Congratulations, I'm sure you'll have a great time. If you want to treat yourselves and eat somewhere a bit special, try the Strip House, 13 East 12th Street, NY 10003(it's in Greenwich Village). It's the best steak place in New York, the place itself is fantastic, it's dark, the atmosphere is brilliant, it's almost always full(you'll have to book) and I don't think anyone should visit New York without going. It's not cheap, you need need to be particularly careful with the wine list(that's where it gets really pricey), but it's worth every penny. http://www.striphouse.com/
Western tastes are different. We get a lot of visitors from China where I work and they unanimously say that the Chinese food in the restaurants here is "too sweet". I know its not Chinese but I have this great Indian cook book that does a side by side comparison of dishes as served in an Indian restaurant here and in India. They are usually totally different. As fas as I can tell its the same for Chinese food.
It's true, the Indian food served here is normally covered in sauce and it's almost fluorescent in colour, but in India, most dishes are quite dry and look nothing like most of the UK versions.
I wonder why the countries, whose food we consume so readily, never have English/British-style restaurants and takeaways..... (....or do they?)
There used to be a massive Harry Ramsden's in Hong Kong and there's also places like Bulldog's, which is supposed to be a traditional English pub, but isn't really.
You are right, even though is it a bit on the spice side. The best Szechuan food I have had was at the top of the Sheraton in Beijing, if you ever travel there worth a try.
Those disgusting fish balls are call Surimi, I love Japanese food, but this one I am with you its horrible.
I actually agree with you, I also love Sashimi (raw fish) but not Squid, Squid tenticles fried I just love though.
I hate squid, though not quite as much as I hate the ridiculously expense delicacy that is abalone, which is utterly disgusting and happens to look a bit like a.... please log in to view this image I've got a mate who used to be a deep sea pipe welder, he used to eat this **** raw off the sea bed, going through the rigmarole of putting it through the outer mask, then the inner mask, to get it to his mouth. Mind you, all those lads were mental, it took a week to get to the sea bed, then they worked a week down there, then it took a week to come back up. One lad managed to cut his arm off while he was working and they still had to take a week to get to the surface in a small metal box with this bloke screaming all the way, even though he was full of morphine. He never went back down again.
