Most Indian restaurants in the UK will serve dishes that are broadly of Indian origin, albeit made sweeter, creamier and less spicy to suit British tastes. However, a typical Indian restaurant in the UK will also have dishes like [Chicken Tikka Masala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala?wprov=sfla1), [Balti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balti_%28food%29?wprov=sfla1) and various kinds of curries such as [Phall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phall?wprov=sfla1), which masquerade as Indian dishes but are actually of entirely British origin and not eaten in India.
Chinese restaurants in the UK apparently serve food that has basically nothing to do with authentic Chinese food whatsoever, and are more inspired by American-Chinese cuisine. It’s also quite common for Chinese takeaways, particularly in less cosmopolitan areas, to serve Western dishes such as omelette and chips.
In France, very strange flavours of naan are common – you are not going to find ~~Cheese Naan~~, Raclette Naan, Peanut Butter Naan or Chocolate Naan anywhere in India and most Indian people will find the very idea of desecrating good naan like this physically repulsive. Conversely, a Chinese restaurant in India is very likely to serve dishes such as [Gobi Manchurian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_%28dish%29?wprov=sfla1) or [“Hakka” Noodles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_cuisine?wprov=sfla1) that have basically nothing to do with authentic Chinese cuisine.
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Well samosas are quite popular in Portugal (called *chamuças* here), though they’ve long been present here that people don’t really think of them as foreign cuisine or even Indian in origin. I actually don’t find them to be too different from ones I’ve tried in more authentic Indian restaurants, but beef and pork are often used as fillings over here.
Wait, cheese naan is not Indian???? I had it in France, and it was one of the best foods I had eaten in my life. I was also colleague with Indian guys and we would cook together often, so I know how spicy Indian food is, but I’ve never imagined something as delicious as Cheese Naan was not Indian. (I agree that the rest sound like utter vomit, though)
Hmm, hot takes….
I guess an Italian would probably faint if he saw pizza in Romania or Russia, maybe other Eastern European countries as well. I mean, there are plenty of restaurants that do Italian style pizza, some do American-style… but many (especially takeaways) do something like pizza toppings on bread.
Borsch in Romania is completely different from Borsch in Russia (I mean it’s a whole new thing, something you put in soup to make it more sour, while in Russia it’s a dish)
We have pizzas with banana, peanuts, chicken, curry powder and bernaise sauce, or similar variants. It’s very different from any authentic Italian pizza.
In Spain there’s a dish called Cuban rice (arroz a la cubana) which I’m sure has nothing to do with what Cubans would eat. It’s white rice with plain tomato sauce and a fried egg. Sometimes accompanied by a fried banana.
In Germany, there’s Currywurst which is a sausage with a spicy red sauce with curry powder on top. “Toast Hawaii” is toast with ham, a slice of canned pineapple and a slice of processed cheese on top. Both of these were invented in the 50s or 60s when exotic things like curry powder and pineapple became available for regular people.
The typical “Chinese” we have in the Netherlands is usually some Indo-Chinese fusion that’s been downgraded for our palates.
I know of one restaurant in France where the chef did an International Theme Night every month. He hadn’t visited most of the places he featured so for his British Night he winged it from what he’d seen on TV. This meant fish and chips (which he got basically right) but the British have this red gloop with it – raspberry jam, right?
Hotdogs here are one half of a baguette, where a hole has been punched in, then a Wiener and ketchup or mustard shoved into it.
A recent invention is replacing the ketchup (or even the Wiener too) with molten fondue cheese.
It all looks very sensual, but not in a good way.
We have a dish called “Mexican potatoes” which consists of baked potato with chili flakes that is served with a sauce made up of ketchup and mayonnaise. You can order it in almost any Georgian restaurant and I’ve never seen it anywhere else, including in Mexico.
French meat. It’s slices of beef covered with mayo and grated cheese and roasted until well-done.
This is not something from all over Germany, only from my hometown Frankfurt.
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We have our “Frankfurter Grie Soß”, which is a green herb sauce made from seven herbs; borage, chervil, cress, parsley, burnet, sorrel and chives are used. Either we have taken over the basic idea from the French Huguenots, who fled in large numbers from France to us, there it is called “Sauce verte” or from traders from Lombardy, there is a similar green sauce called “Salsa verde”, maybe we stole the idea from both groups, then we combined it with the Wiener Schnitzel from Austria. We call it Frankfurter Schnitzel.
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[https://www.tasteatlas.com/frankfurter-schnitzel](https://www.tasteatlas.com/frankfurter-schnitzel)
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Traditionally, Grie Soß is eaten with boiled potatoes and eggs. Perk for Christians, you could eat it on Fridays as well as during Lent.
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I personally don’t like the Frankfurter Schnitzel. I don’t eat much meat and when I do, I don’t pour whatever sauce on my veal Schnitzel; r/SchnitzelVerbrechen
Edit: Imgur doesn’t work,
Ketchup on pizza, while it’s not what most people do, is not seen as something crazy as it seems to be in other countries
The Carbonara we do in France has little to do with the Italian recipe. It’s just fried bacon cubes and cream (creme fraiche), it’s very popular because it’s very easy and very quick to do and everybody likes it, but it’s miles below the italian version.
All “Chinese” restaurants have the same [cabbage and carrot salad](https://www.dietamojapasja.com/2020/10/surowka-jak-od-chinczyka.html). It’s sweet and sour, sometimes with a noticeable hint of ginger.
This is kind of different, but for dessert at Christmas dinner we in Denmark eat Risalamande, which is basically rice pudding with whipped cream and chopped almonds mixed in. But instead of calling it something with a danish ring to it. We called it Risalamande which is based on the French “riz à l’amande” to make it sound more fancy. It is a dish that originates in Denmark and has absolutely nothing to do with France.
Hello from Austria & Germany, sorry to Switzerland & France. You had something great going. We wanted to be a part of it. We wanted to enjoy it like you do.
But we messed up Raclette. It has nothing to do with the cheese anymore. Here “Raclette” is just an oven you put on a table and you put tiny pans inside, filler with meat, vegetablea, mozzarella and, yes, sometimes raclette cheese. Sorry and I truly hope you will forget everything about this and enjoy Raclette the way it is supposed to be.
Indian restaurants in the US aren’t creamy at all, and are generally pretty spicy unless it’s a buffet. There are traditional ones and Americanized ones. I have friends from South India (Karnataka) and they said the food tastes acceptable, but the preparation and presentation is very unauthentic.
“French tacos” – it’s basically a kebab and fries in a pressed tortilla. [The New Yorker did a deep dive on it.](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/the-unlikely-rise-of-the-french-tacos)
We have the “kapsalon”, which is kebab, fries, cheese and mixed salad all mixed together in an aluminium tub. A kebab shop owner in Rotterdam used to make this as a custom made dish for the barbershop (“kapsalon”) next door, and it became popular.
As another comment said, here in Spain we have arroz ala cubana, a recreation of Cuban food in the Canary Island, basically fried eggs, rice, tomato sauce and fried plantain (tostones), but as we didn’t grow plantains in the Canary Island they replaced it with fried banana (platano canario), wich is sweeter than plantains, and in some variants even substituting the plantain with frankfurt sausages, and then it got popularised in the rest of the country.
(I just searched, and apparently, it also exists in the Philippines and Perú, so it might have spread much earlier than I thought. These versions are made with plantains and the philipino version with ground beef and vegetables, too).
Another Spanish reinterpretation is cannelloni, which is a common at Saint Stephen celebration in Catalonia, filled with a mixture of tomato sauce and the leftover meat of the Christmas dinner, covered by bechamel and cheese. The mroe traditional ground beef bolognese style are also common all over Spain. I think I read somewhere that they aren’t that popular in Italy anymore, correct me if I’m wrong, angry Italians.
Our Chinese food is also an adaptation to Spanish tastes, one of the most common dishes is arroz tres delicias (rice three delicacies) wich is more or less a variation of fried rice, consistent of rice, diced ham (not jamon Serrano), diced carrots, frozen peas, and cut omelette or scrambled eggs, sometimes even frozen shrimps and maybe some soy sauce, if you’re daring. There are more than three things added there, but it’s called three delicacies, I’ve never understood why.
French chili con carne often doesn’t even have chili in it. And no, red peppers are not chilies!
Baklava cheesecake is a a thing in the US but not a thing in Greece and I’m pretty sure not a thing anywhere in Balkans and Middleeast (Baklava is rather common in all of these areas).
It’s good btw! 🙂