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[Hank D Thoreau]

I have mentioned before the large Asian markets where I live and the wonderful whole fish you can get, but we also have great multicultural eating opportunities. Last night was a birthday dinner at a local Indian restaurant in the neighboring town that I lived in for thirteen years. This town is known as the most culturally diverse in the country. We sampled a wide verity of curries and grilled meats, mostly chicken and lamb. What comes with cultural diversity is a lot of great food of many different varieties. The prior night we had dinner at a fairly new multi-story outdoor Korean mall in my neighborhood. This time we skipped the Korean restaurants since the Italian restaurant had finally opened. Construction seemed to take forever. The restaurant has a balcony that sits over the entertainment area. We didn't have a reservation so we ate on the balcony, which was a bit chilly but the food was excellent. K-pop culture was on full display throughout the mall, no doubt to attract young folks. Food and entertainment is the main focus of the mall...and there is a lot of great food, and not all Korean. There is even a very good traditional Mexican restaurant. Take a look at the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in the food court.

[triplebq]

This is one of the benefits of my travel with work. I get to try many different types of food and almost always love it.

[Kristin Meredith]

It is not just having diverse restaurants however,as we have learned.  When moving to our little town in Virginia after living in California for 50 years with the last 30 in SoCal, we did not realize how spoiled we had become to having truly good, authentic ethnic food really close by at very reasoable prices.

We have lots of "diversity" in restuarants even in our little burg -- two Indian, one Thai, two Chinese, two Japanese, several Mexican, two Italian.  Pretty impressive for a county of 50,000, but they are all pretty mediocre.  We think it may be because the local palate can't really take the ethic flavours of authentic cooking so the restaurants have tone it down to almost nothingness, but it has been a major disappointment.

So, I determined the biggest benefit to living in a truly large city is the authentic ethnic food you can get and get fairly close to home!

[Hank D Thoreau]

The quality and authenticity of the food in my area is truly remarkable. When I was in graduate school at USC we had fellow grad students from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. We had some of the first mainland Chinese because a professor in our department had just returned as science attache to China and brought the students with him. China was rebuilding it's intellectual infrastructure which was torn apart by the cultural revolution. The Chinese students would take me to China Town for lunch and order for the table in Chinese. I ate some unusual food by western standards, not knowing what much of it was, and they wouldn't tell me. I would take at least two bites of everything. The first I would eat quickly just to prove that it would not kill me. The second I would chew. The cultural diversity of my upbringing exposed me to a lot of great food.