MovieChat Forums > Big Night (1996) Discussion > Post if you love good food...

Post if you love good food...

posted 18 years ago by happiscotsman
21 replies | jump to latest

...And are fed up with the barbarity that most Americans seem to display when presented with the opportunity to try something magnificent and instead opt for mediocrity. You know,

- "Good" Italian food translates into a visit to the Olive Garden
- Raised eyebrows are the result of suggesting a visit to any sort of resturant that serves African or Middle Eastern cuisine
- Counter service Mexican means "Taco Bell" instead of looking for a taqueria
- Putting cheese on an Italian Beef sandwich
- Not knowing that broiled fish has the opportunity to be so much more tantalizing than anything deep-fried.

I'm sure many of you can share such experiences, just let me include one more. At my church, one brother who is East Indian cooked a dinner for the entire church. The menu included green and red curry, tandori chicken, nan bread, and samosas. He was busy cooking, so he didn't have time to explain to the mostly white crowd what everything was. I went first and loaded up my plate. The rest followed, but with a caution that I would compare to a mine sweeping team. I can't tell you how many people interrupted me while I was trying to eat with questions like "is this safe?" about what was on their plates. UGH! People, just try it, and if you don't like it, THEN DON'T EAT IT!
Not enough people know that happiness is warm pita bread and a bowl of Palastinian style hummus. I end with a quote from roger Ebert's review of this movie:

"Big Night is one of the great food movies, and yet it is so much more. It is about food not as a subject but as a language--the language by which one can speak to gods, can create, can seduce, can aspire to perfection."

AMEN!

Men, if you're willing to fight for our people, I want you!

[–] PlatinumScreen 14 years ago

scotsman, i love good food! i do think that a person's willingness to step out of the box and try new and different foods is one of life's great pleasures. so many miss out on it. i have seen family in tennessee not even eat a dish that was familiar to them because it was made by a person who was not family for fear of getting sick. to them even olive garden is beyond comprehension. ironically though, they used to eat squirrel when my mom was young.

another poster mentioned that traveling can make a person more adventurous in culinary matters. i agree with this. i traveled to many different places as a young girl. once i was in guam, and i was exposed to many guamanian and micronesian dishes and delicacies. when we first arrived there someone in my uncle's church (he was a pastor) had passed away. everyone in the church brought food. i remember the sights and sounds of table after table of the delicious foods of this area of the world. breadfruit fritters, red rice, etc. i also have a very vivid memory of being in a grocery story there with my family and seeing baby octupus wrapped up in the freezer case just waiting for someone to take it home to eat. my reaction wasn't "yuck!". it was "this must be what they eat here in guam."

the older i get i see myself wanting to know more about how other regions of the world eat. in fact, i just ordered a lebanese cookbook and plan to use it extensively. here's to warm pita bread and hummus! and i would add tabbouleh salad and cucumber yogurt dip to that! :)

by the way, the visual of the timpano being cut in big night was the best moment in the whole movie to me! beautiful! i drooled. literally.

[–] smigrobustus 12 years ago

Barbarity?
It never ceases to amaze me how foodies SOMEHOW think that THEIR taste buds set standards for the whole planet.

As long as a te of food has fans, that's all there is to whether its good or bad.

Any other point of view is a study in snobbery.