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CariceHouten wrote:We all know America's soft power is unparalleled and your popular culture (tv/film/music/literature etc) has massive reach across the world. But does it work the other way around? Which other countries' modern popular culture impacts on America? If any actually do so?
Linguaphile wrote: In terms of food, the largest impacts are probably Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, French, and Indian (then also Thai, Middle Eastern, Mongolian, etc).
awrui wrote:Linguaphile wrote: In terms of food, the largest impacts are probably Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, French, and Indian (then also Thai, Middle Eastern, Mongolian, etc).
Really? Is Mongolian food a thing in the US? It's such a tiny country people-wise...
awrui wrote:Really? Is Mongolian food a thing in the US? It's such a tiny country people-wise...
CariceHouten wrote:But does it work the other way around?
vijayjohn wrote:Do they actually serve Mongolian food? Especially without Thai food or something on the side?
vijayjohn wrote:That doesn't sound much like Mongolian food to me, but I'm no expert on Mongolian food, either.
linguoboy wrote:There are more than 7,000 restaurants in the City of Chicago, and more in the suburbs. I know of exactly one that's owned and operated by Mongolians.
It's a sushi place.
Linguaphile wrote:It looks like in Chicago you can get beef хуушуур, бууз, банштай цай soup, хуйцай, and other Mongolian foods from Mongolian Cuisine and бантан, цуйван, хуушуур, and бууз from Mazalae Mongolian Restaurant.
Looks like in Chicago you can also order бууз and хэрчсэн гурил from a place in Glenview: Amtat Buuz. That one is not a restaurant but rather a place to order from.
Linguaphile wrote:Basically (since I'm the one who brought up Mongolia in the first place) I never meant to imply that Mongolian influence is one of the largest in the United States. It isn't, but, it is one of the ones (of many) that is here and has influence, and it's one that came to mind when answering the question from personal experience.
linguoboy wrote:Thanks for the information though. Mongolian Cuisine is permanently closed. (It was only technically in the city anyway, being located in Schorsch Forest View, which is basically a suburb, being a roughly square mile area sandwiched between the enclave of Norridge and the Schiller Woods Forest Preserve and only bordering the rest of the city proper on one side). Mazalae is in Morton Grove, a true suburb which doesn't border Chicago at all.
....
It was just such a super random choice, I'm not surprised so many posters seized on it. There are something on the order of 10,000 speakers of Mongolian in the entire USA, which doesn't even put it in the top 100 most spoken languages here. It's a similar story regarding Mongolian ancestry. The impact of Mongolia on American culture is pretty much undetectable.
Linguaphile wrote:Well, I detected it and didn't consider it random, and know Mongolian speakers here... I guess if I felt a need to be defensive about anything it would mainly be "it wasn't random". Calling it random and undetectable seems very dismissive of a population. And I did state in my first post that I know it varies by region.
'Wikipedia says there are 5,000 people of Mongolian origin in California (and another 3,000 to 4,000 in the Chicago area). Not huge, but not nonexistent.
Linguaphile wrote:I was just surprised (astonished, to be honest) that there wouldn't be any Mongolian food in Chicago or the Chicago area too and found some, that's all. But some of the posts did seem pretty dismissive or argumentative or something: first that it's probably not even Mongolian (yeah, I get that one because some are called "Mongolian" when they aren't), then okay maybe in some restaurants it's Mongolian food but it's not owned by Mongolians, then it's "only bordering the rest of the city proper on one side" so... what, now it doesn't count as Mongolian influence if the restaurant is not in the city proper or owned by Mongolians? I wasn't trying to prove anything, just curious if I could find some (the idea that my town could have had more Mongolian food than a big city like Chicago with a larger Mongolian population was absolutely baffling) and glad to see that I could. So it's there, for those who want it.
linguoboy wrote:Linguaphile wrote:Well, I detected it and didn't consider it random, and know Mongolian speakers here... I guess if I felt a need to be defensive about anything it would mainly be "it wasn't random". Calling it random and undetectable seems very dismissive of a population. And I did state in my first post that I know it varies by region.
'Wikipedia says there are 5,000 people of Mongolian origin in California (and another 3,000 to 4,000 in the Chicago area). Not huge, but not nonexistent.
As I said, there are about 10,000 Mongolians in the USA or about 0.003% of the population. In chemistry, that would be called a "trace element".
But it's not just about numbers. There are only about 25,000 Tibetans in the USA, yet they have a much higher profile. This is in no small part due to the Dalai Lama and the importance of the Tibetan tradition within American Buddhism. Tibetans here have established not just restaurants but also temples, study centres, galleries, shops, academic programmes, etc. Most USAmericans may not be able to find Tibet on a map, but they've heard of it at least and could name some things associated with Tibet due to the mark it's left on popular culture, being portrayed in movies, television, comics, etc. as an exotic locus of mysticism and magical power. I wouldn't call it one of the cultures with the "most" impact on American culture, but what impact it has had is at least detectable to someone living a city without a Tibetan community. You just can't say that about Mongolia.Linguaphile wrote:I was just surprised (astonished, to be honest) that there wouldn't be any Mongolian food in Chicago or the Chicago area too and found some, that's all. But some of the posts did seem pretty dismissive or argumentative or something: first that it's probably not even Mongolian (yeah, I get that one because some are called "Mongolian" when they aren't), then okay maybe in some restaurants it's Mongolian food but it's not owned by Mongolians, then it's "only bordering the rest of the city proper on one side" so... what, now it doesn't count as Mongolian influence if the restaurant is not in the city proper or owned by Mongolians? I wasn't trying to prove anything, just curious if I could find some (the idea that my town could have had more Mongolian food than a big city like Chicago with a larger Mongolian population was absolutely baffling) and glad to see that I could. So it's there, for those who want it.
I'm not saying it doesn't count; it was more of an aside than anything.
But, again, the subject of the thread is "influence" and the Schorsch River View dining scene is, shall we say, not exactly trend-setting within the city of Chicago, let alone the country as a whole. It surprises me not at all to find not one mention of this place in the local food press (despite the existence of food writers like Mike Sula who make it their mission to seek out obscure places selling minority Asian cuisine, even in the far-flung suburbs).
(We do have some odd gaps. It's only within the last 20 years that you've been able to get rijsttafel here, for instance. We have scores of South Asian restaurants, but they overwhelmingly serve Mughal cuisine. The regional selection has expanded in the last decade or so, but I still haven't seen a Bengali restaurant return since Bay of Bengal closed over twenty years ago. African food is especially spotty; we have a good-sized Nigerian community with its own restaurants and, like Thais, refugees from the Horn of Africa seem to open restaurants out of proportion with their overall population, but the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is hardly represented at all.)
awrui wrote:That seems more like chinese and less like mongolian to me.
How can the lamb be happy when there are so many lamb dishes on the menue?!
linguoboy wrote:We have scores of South Asian restaurants, but they overwhelmingly serve Mughal cuisine. The regional selection has expanded in the last decade or so, but I still haven't seen a Bengali restaurant return since Bay of Bengal closed over twenty years ago.
African food is especially spotty; we have a good-sized Nigerian community with its own restaurants and, like Thais, refugees from the Horn of Africa seem to open restaurants out of proportion with their overall population, but the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is hardly represented at all.
vijayjohn wrote:How can the lamb be happy when there are so many lamb dishes on the menue?!
The lamb is happy not to deal with the world today.
More seriously, "Happy Lamb" does sound very typical of Chinese names.
vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:We have scores of South Asian restaurants, but they overwhelmingly serve Mughal cuisine. The regional selection has expanded in the last decade or so, but I still haven't seen a Bengali restaurant return since Bay of Bengal closed over twenty years ago.
I have never seen a Bengali restaurant in my whole life.
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