“Ethnic food.” Lately, the very term makes me lose my appetite.
I encounter it where I don’t expect it — in mainstream food writing — and where I do: Yelp. Browsing that vast compost pile of opinion, I learn that one restaurant has “just enough ethnicity to make people feel multicultural.” Another, a Latin American joint that sits on what must be Washington’s gentrification line of demarcation, can still pass one reviewer’s ethnic test. Which is, of course: “Look for patrons of that restaurant’s ethnicity eating there.”