One of the newest additions to the high street, Solano's Shoes, caters to youth sub-cultures rather than ethnic tastes: 20% of its customers are black.
East Harlem, home to a cornucopia of fried foods that cover a range ethnic tastes — tostones, chicken fried steak, pork rinds, egg rolls, refried beans, cuchifritos, French fries and onion rings, among others — has a bad reputation when it comes to good nutrition.
Citymeals pays these organizations to purchase the food, prepare it to ethnic tastes and then deliver it.
Part of its strategy is to aim at ethnic groups whose tastes may tend to the frilly.
Diet is based on individual tastes, ethnic background, environment, genetic makeup, as well as your caloric needs based on your level of physical (and mental) activity.
Traceyd, an impeccably maintained Upper East Side boho with a taste for ethnic jewelry, had posted, "Should I give my 16-year-old a Paddy?" Like others in the forum, traceyd had traded up to Hermès, selling her 50-plus "It" bags to focus on Birkins, which start at $7,000: "I thought if I had a Birkin, that's all I needed.
The cooks do a great job jumping back and forth between different ethnic dishes: The Thai food tastes truly Thai, while the Japanese noodle soups also taste like the real thing.
Jokes about poutine on that level are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk — an ethnic ritual that my first taste of lutefisk moved me to compare to teen-age circumcision.
GENERALLY speaking, special wine or beer tasting dinners and ethnic food festivals, (Russian Easter Dinner, Florentine Food Week, et al) are marketing ploys devised by restaurants to boost attendance; nothing wrong with that.
Today, upscale restaurants' chefs are inspired by more humble tastes -- from ethnic street food vendors and idiosyncratic food trucks.
And sometimes, both uptown and down, the jokes were needlessly cruel, coming at the expense of gays or ethnic groups or wallowing in bad taste.
