Though not a revelation to attentive observers, I enjoyed this well-written article’s overview of some intersections among cuisine, wine, and ethnicity in American restaurant culture.
I thought the wine list at Majordomo had a lot of good reasonably priced bottles. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to plan ahead re bringing your own wine.
i think its interesting that the article spends a lot of time talking about specific restaurants here in the US that have pushed wine with asian cuisine forward, but not a whole lot of time discussing how wine in asia itself is much more commonplace than it was in the earlier era referred to
I don’t understand why people insist on wine with Asian food. Just drink beer or whatever the local alcohol is like sake for sushi. I’ve been eating at Old Mandarin Islamic since it opened and their food does not go well with wine. Ice cold Tsing Tao. Or tea.
I ve eaten at Old Mandarin several times and the idea of wine never crossed my mind. But who knows?? Jon turned me on to a restaurant we call CHOP…Chinese House of Pancakes and we have taken wine there.
The ubiquitous mirrors at Mandarin kinda freak me out.
I don’t understand why people insist on wine with Asian food.
I kind of agree in some respects, but not entirely. A lot of salty fermented things just don’t work with a lot of wine. But it’s the same when you deal with some eastern European cuisine - Polish food isn’t always brilliant with wine. OTOH, some things can work really well. It all depends on what you are eating.
I like this article because it does away with the belief that wine evolved with the local cuisine so it’s always best to match the two. I’ve never thought that concept made all that much sense and I like the idea of trying different wines with different foods. Since the concept of “Asian” food is so broad it’s hard to make any generalization anyway, I’m happy to try mixing them. I’ve had some really good wines with sashimi - even better than CdP!
Consider for a moment the name of the board you just posted that on. We are people who love wine.
As far as the general population, there aren’t usually a large percentage of people drinking wine when you dine at Asian restaurants.
I wonder if there is a beer message board somewhere, and half the time there is a discussion about some kind of food or social situation, a bunch of posters scoff that you can’t drink beer then, you should just drink wine (and, to complete the parallel, just any “wine”). It’s, to me, the strangest thing about this board.
Almost every tread I look though has at least one post from someone wasting their time telling us, how much they don’t care about the subject at hand, how the other posters are wasting their time and that what is being discussed is dumb. I find it exhausting.
Here’s a fun idea, if you are looking though the latest comments and you are not interested or find the subject dumb, just don’t click on it and don’t waste your time reading about it. This really work, in fact I do it all the time!