Asian food in Cincinnati

As a foreign student comes to the United State, there are lots of things that I need to accommodate in my first year. The language difference, the cold weather here, the way that people interact…etc, some might have huge difference between cultures and some might just are trivial things. Among these, however, I found food has the greatest impact on me. I enjoy American food once a while but obviously, if I have choices, I prefer Asian food most of the time. Not that I don't like American food, it’s just my body can’t tolerate myself from eating it every day. Thus, looking for Asian restaurants that provide great oriental cusines is one of my recent interests developed here.

Asian restaurants in Cincy can be roughly categorized into five kinds, which are Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. Being a Taiwanese, though daily cusines we usually have are not the same as Chinese do, we are quite used to Chinese food due to the highly similarity between these two. Chinese food is characterized as various tastes and flavors that people can find sweet, spicy, salty, sour, and even bitter flavor cusines in one menu. The main grains are rice or noodle, always come with few entries and a soup afterward. One of the big differences between Asian and western food is that soup is considered as a finish up dishes which we have it when we are about to finish our meal, not like westerners see it as an appetizer. Despite the taste variety of Chinese food, the ones I tried in Cincinnati are mostly sweet even when some cusines are supposed to be salty and spicy.

Japanese food is another well-accepted and popular cusines in Taiwan since Taiwan once was Japanese colony for 50 years. Japanese cusines are known as healthy, delicate (aka, small portion), and expensive. The representative dishes for Japanese food are shushi and ramen (Japanese noodle). I would say it’s not easy to make shushi tastes very different from the way it should be since the flavor mainly comes from the fish and rice. On the other hand, the ramen I tried here was definitely modified, which I think is good, because the classical ramen in Japan is very salty that sometimes I find difficulty finishing it all. Another great modification of Japanese food I find here is shushi rolls. Americans create the new flavored shushi rolls that are more acceptable to westerners and put avocado in it, in my opinion, making it a perfect match to the rolls, what a genius!

Thai food is spicy, just like Korean food, but with a distinct sour flavor because sour taste increases appetite of people under hot weather, and Thailand is a tropical country. Thai curry and raw papaya slices dressed with cold sour sauce are the signature dishes. However, I haven’t found Thai restaurants here provide the right taste of them, since they are either not spicy or sour enough or they are too sweet. The situation for Korean restaurants is the same that the food they offer is usually sweet and not really spicy. Though there are no good Korean restaurants in Cincinnati, according to my Korean friends, I’ll keep looking for one that provides ideal Korean cusines since I am a big fan of Bi Bim Bap and Su Tofu Jige (hot tofu pot).

Honestly, I seldom try Indian food when I was in Taiwan and I’ve never been to India, thus I have little idea about what traditional, un-modified Indian food should taste. Even though the owners of the restaurants are purely from the countries they represent, most of the Asian restaurants here offer food that are relatively sweet and sometimes tastes very different from the original taste of the cusines. Not that the owners don't want to maintain the original flavor of the cusines and let more foreigners try the real taste of their countries, restaurants need to modify their food to adjust the taste of the locals in order to keep their business running. In place where more Asian and emigrants are populated, such as California, Asian restaurants tend to maintain the food taste as what it should be in their countries and thus more likely for foreigners to taste the original taste of these cusines. Though most of the time I get disappointed because of the food explore trip I have, I still am thankful to these restaurants so I can try different Asian food. And of course, I’ll keep my food adventure going on for the future 3-5 year in Cincinnati.