Annoyance: Ethnic food that is completely wrong

Today’s annoyance comes in the form of enthic food that is completely, utterly, and unapologeticly wrong.

My wife and I spent an evening at the mall in Appleton, WI (I had to pick up a fresh pair of Chucks) and we ate at the food court for dinner. After sampling the stuff that the guy with the toothpicks was handing out it came down to either the Cajun place or the Japanese place. The Cajun place had a shorter line so we went with that. It’s called Kato’s Cajun, and the food is…wait for it…not remotely Cajun at all!

What comes to mind when you think Cajun? For me it’s seafood, especially crawfish, sausage, and jumbeliah. This place had no seafood (they had one sign that said something about shrimp, but it was no where in sight), no jumbeliah, nothing with sausage, in short - nothing remotely Cajun at all. In fact, it was just a generic Chinese place with Cajun on the sign.

Guess what was on the menu? Egg rolls, which we all know Louisiana is famous for (not!), fried rice, Lo Mien (which they called “Cajun Noodles”), something called “Cajun chicken” which was indistinguishable from General Tso’s chicken, crab rangoon which I’m sure had been relabeled as well but I didn’t see what they called it, and that chicken entree that you see at every Chinese place that has chicken stir fried with onions and red and green peppers.

Sure Wisconsin is about 1100 miles from the bayou, but surely anyone who has been to a Chinese place anywhere in America will have seen this food before. I would really like to know if this is a common practice, and how far south they are brave enough to go before people laugh them out of the mall for trying to sell crap like that.

I was embarrassed for them. I really was.