In America...

In America, why are 99% of Mexican restaurants cheap and unassuming and 99% of French restaurants expensive and pretentious?

Does Mexico have no haute cuisine? Does France have no cheap and satisfying fare? (I know it does).

Mexicans/Latinos are generally lower/middle class while the French (except for Creole shits I guess) are firmly middle class. If millions of French immigrants had poured into the US since the 1960s, you can bet there would be more low-price French restaurants.

It's cheap and tasty

the french are very stuck up is basically the reason

I think the difference is there's a bunch of middle/lower class mexican americans and not many french immigrants.
If there were I'm sure we would have cheap french food of some sort.

Apparently there are over ten million French-Americans. You wouldn't know it. By contrast, there are only about 1.4 million Japanese-Americans, and 4.8 million Chinese-Americans. Both Chinese and Japanese cuisine have a far greater presence in America than French cuisine, and both can be found in various levels of sophistication. The Japanese are not recent immigrants, either.

Numbers don't always tell the full story of course, but this isn't like Germans, who barely have a culinary culture. We're talking about France here, it has plenty to offer. So I don't think the immigration explanation entirely holds up. It seems that there must be some other reason why Americans never embraced French cuisine as they did with other renowned ethnic cuisines (Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican).

I don't know OP
Today I went to a pretentious Mexican place
>$3-6 for 1 taco
>'salsa bar'
>margatita is called 'el cheapo'

Because Mexican food is garbage and French chefs invented 90% of culinary techniques.

>Japanese cuisine have a far greater presence in America than French cuisine
This isn't true, it's just french cuisine has integrated and we don't notice it as being other like sushi or ramen.

So you're saying it's easy to incorporate French techniques and dishes into classic American cuisine, making exclusively French establishments superfluous. That makes sense I suppose. France and England have a history of this kind of exchange already.

But what examples of this integration would you point to? Not trying to argue, genuinely curious.

People in the US are willing to fork out big dollars for bistro cooking so what is the incentive for them to lower theri prices?

And in Mexico there is only rich people and poor people, hardly any middle classes. hence the food is all cheap fare for shallow pockets with only a handful of michelin rated high-end establishments to break the monotony.

I can't remember ever having seen a french restaurant in the US.

That's the point. They're very rare, and the only ones that do exist serve elegant stuff that's bordering on snobby.

Don't you want a down to earth French restaurant with crusty breads, delicious cheeses, tapenades, charcuterie, and comforting rustic entrees like coq au vin, bouillabaise, beef burgundy, and cassoulet?

If you're eating any of those as an entré you're doing it wrong. They're all main courses in French cuisine.

Entrée means main course in burgerland.

>In America, why are 99% of Mexican restaurants cheap and unassuming and 99% of French restaurants expensive and pretentious?
French restaurants are the oldest form of "real" restaurants in the US. It's not so much that "French is expensive", it's that if you were to look for an expensive restaurant back in the day, it was guaranteed to be French, and in the more backwards and rural parts of America, where no one has ever been to a nice restaurant in the first place, if you ask them to describe a fancy restaurant they will describe a French restaurant, based on some stuff they saw in an old movie. Much like the notion that French people are snobbish, or that wine is a super high class thing that has rituals designed to ferret out the unsophisticated. A lot of Americans who know nothing about the world outside America think that old hollywood films were actually documentaries.

>Does Mexico have no haute cuisine?
It wouldn't be "haute cuisine" because that is a French term. Mexico has some of the best food in the world, and high class restaurants, but almost everything you "know" about fine dining - for example the fact that you said "haute cuisine" - is based on a food culture that is specific to Franch. So, if you go to Mexico expecting a French dining experience, you're not going to find much of it, unless you go to a French place.

>Does France have no cheap and satisfying fare? (I know it does).
Well, at least you knew that. Honestly I was a bit surprised.

Even in a French restaurant?
That could cause confusion.

Because it's an accurate reflection of who they are as people

>They're very rare, and
They're not that rare unless you live in a food desert
>the only ones that do exist serve elegant stuff that's bordering on snobby.
I have a hard time taking any accusations of "elegant snobbery" seriously on 4chins, where Starbucks is considered high class and Chipotle is considered bleeding edge fancy hipster food

There are plenty of inexpensive brasserie-type joints here, but the trouble is, who is the clientele? Who gets to say what's "elegant" and "snobby"? A Veeky Forums NEET? No restaurant - French or otherwise - can serve decent quality meat and drinks and pay rent and all that, at McDonalds prices. Obviously, if anything nicer than McDonalds is highly sophisticated food for millionaires, then French restaurants are not for you.

>Both Chinese and Japanese cuisine have a far greater presence in America than French cuisine, and both can be found in
Not at all true, french dishes and cooking techniques are just an intrinsic part of western cooking in general
Is there a sauce made from flour, butter, and milk, as in, any mac and cheese? That's french
Add wine to a braise? Unless it's pasta, it's french.

You my friend, are a retard.

get a load of this pretentious fag

What we think of as Mexican food is their street food. What is French street food? Cheese and cured meat on a baguette. Gee, where can I get salty meat and cheese on bread?

Yes, there is Mexican Haute Cuisine, both in Mexico and in the US. And, there's also inexpensive French restaurants in the US. There's several bistros close to me that are fantastic and the prices are very average. It just depends where you live and what's available to you.

>Germs have no cuisine
>Murrica has lots of actual Chinese food

You're wrong. You got one thing right however:

>There must be another reason..

Bürgers don't like French food because it's neither fried nor does it contain HFCS, for the avg American that is too much to bear

here in México taste is not tied to the price, basically if you go to an expensive place here you are paying for the ambient, the ambient being not being around poor people (kind of like walmart and costco), in reality it is normal to see "luxury" cars next to your shitty taco stand, there is no class divide in food

If I remember correctly, French cuisine was standardised on noblemen and bourgeois cooking for historical reason (see 'le cuisiner françois', and Escoffier's book). So half of French cuisine is technical and high class, the other half is regional specialties (beef burgundy, bouillabaisse, etc, see above).

This leaves little room for cheap fares. My French student meals were pasta and pizza. The only cheap fares I can think of are crepes, sandwiches (jambon beurre in particular), maybe a slice of quiche but that's not really an easy dish anymore. If you go to a supermarket today, the prepared meals you'll find are boxed pasta, boxed salad, disgusting triangle sandwiches, mediterranean dips (humus, tarama, eggplant dip). If you want to eat out for cheap, you can get kebab, chinese, macca, pizza or crepe. Or eat at a french bistro and get a steak and fried for a bit more.

So no, no cheap fare in France in general.

>Does Mexico have no haute cuisine?
it doesnt, not really.

>Does France have no cheap and satisfying fare?
it does, it's just so similar to general american / western food that there is no big distinction. cheese and ham sandwich on baguette bread, french fries, stuff like that.

>What we think of as Mexican food is their street food
Who is "we"? Some flyover who thinks mexican food is grated colby over ground beef with some iceberg lettuce and sour cream?

What? The shit you're describing is an anglo taco, but it's inspired by an actual taco, which is a street food. Are you taking stupid pills, user?

This is essentially true. I'm no Mexican but having been there several times you basically are paying for ambiance only. The food is typically good, or passable,

The best Mexican food is seafood, btw, in case you didn't know.

>too dumb to get it
>well in that case, the other person must be stupid

The reason is in the historical view of France by Americans. I don't feel like doing the research here but I read this somewhere a while back that in the late 19th and early 20th century America thought France as incredibly sophisticated as a culture. French food was seen as being upscale, with a lot of American chefs going to France to study at their culinary institutes. Then after the wars when TV chefs started appearing, the likes of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin were telling Americans about French haute cuisine and the rest is history.

A good example of this is Grey Goose vodka. Invented by an American marketing guru who realized that Americans see French products as superior in quality, he decided to produce it in France and market it to an American audience who bought it up. It's a mediocre vodka that sells for up-scale prices and people don't know any better. France isn't even a fucking vodka producing nation, I mean yeah, they produce a few brands but they're mostly gimmick vodkas like the rarely produced potato vodkas. Politics play a role in this as well when back in the day Americans wouldn't buy anything from behind the iron curtain so Russian and Polish vodkas were not something people wanted, these days both are doing quite well in America.

There's a perception that's going to be hard to change. It's a stereotype of sorts, those are always hard to change.

On my recent travels I met a lot of French people and out of the maybe 40-50 I came across I would say only 3 were decent people. I've never met scummier people in my life. I don't know how a single country can produce so many shit humans.

>tacos aren't Mexican food
>urban denizens don't eat tacos
do you ever leave your house or

La Madeleine serves cheap French snacks.

false dilema

are you just arguing with an imaginary person in your head now?