One problem with living in a ''global village'' (as Marshall McLuhan so succinctly defined our world) is that eventually regional and ethnic differences begin to fade away, and a sort of one-world grayness sets in. Standardization and conformity become the name of the game as the world becomes one big Holiday Inn, a happy-go-lucky package trip for the unadventurous tourists of the world. This sameness has afflicted airlines, hotels, ships; but worst of all, it's run rampant and unchecked throughout the restaurants of the world.
Here in Los Angeles, we're blessed with a virtual mini-universe of ethnic restaurants, each of them passing a particular foreign cuisine through the intensifying filter of the immigrant experience in America. In other words, what we eat here is food as people remember the cuisine they grew up with in their native lands, altered through the use of American ingredients, cooking techniques and tastes. Which is why, when I'm abroad, I like to find out how the dishes I've been eating here for so many years are cooked over there, what they're really like at the source. But what I've discovered is that finding the source is a heck of a lot tougher than you'd imagine.
Some years ago, for instance, I went on a trip to Taiwan. I figured I'd finally get a chance to find out what Chinese food is all about. I told this to my guide, who looked at me like I was crazy. ''We have very good Chinese food here,'' he told me, ''the best in the world. But we also have the best food from many countries. I will prove it to you.'' For days after, he took me to American restaurants (which means steak, steak and more steak), German restaurants and British restaurants; the only way I got to eat Chinese food was by sneaking out when he wasn't around.
Trying to eat native food in Hawaii can be even more difficult. Hawaii is the land of surf 'n' turf, where the indigenous cooking is viewed with a sort of mild disdain. Apparently, the only Hawaiian dish that's been approved by the tourist bureau is mahi mahi, a mild fish that regularly appears on steakhouse menus. Restaurants that serve poi, lomi lomi salmon, kalua pig and so forth are rarer than proverbial hen's teeth. Hawaii has become proof positive of the corollary to the old expression of ''A tourist is someone who travels 5,000 miles to have his picture taken in front of his car.'' The corollary is ''A tourist is someone who travels 10,000 miles to eat the exact same food he eats at home.''
The final proof of all this can be found on the island of Jamaica, where the local food has virtually vanished from public view. Here in Los Angeles, you can find good Jamaican food at places like Cha Cha Cha, Bamboo and Prado. But down Jamaica way, they've determined that tourists aren't especially interested in curried goat, or in ackee and saltfish.
Probably the most popular restaurant in Montego Bay is a place called The Diplomat – a massive white mansion high above the city, with a commanding view of the Bay, and the Caribbean beyond. You dine either on the veranda, cooked by the prevailing winds, or inside in a vast dining room filled with nostalgic reminders of the long lost days of colonial splendor. The food is certainly good, and carefully prepared. But it's also the stuff you can find anywhere in the world – filet of beef with parsley butter, grilled chicken with mushrooms, baked brook trout (trout? in Jamaica?), grilled lamb chops. Many of the ingredients are imported from the United States. Even the lobster came from Maine.
After much nagging, I finally found a real Jamaican restaurant, though I was warned that I wouldn't like it – ''Mostly locals eat there,'' they told me. It was called Cosmo's, and it was nothing more than a thatched hut at the end of a dirt road, right next to the beach. The entire menu consisted of conch soup, curried conch, curried goat, curried lobster, chef's salad and steamed milkfish. It was one of the best meals I've ever had, eaten on mismatched dishware with an assortment of bent and battered utensils. As I recall, it cost under $10 – for two. There wasn't another traveler in the place – just locals and me. I hope it's still there, this last outpost of Jamaican cuisine in Jamaica. But I figure by now, it's probably been replaced by a McDonald's.
– Merrill Shindler