You make some good points, especially about the prices possibly being geared toward recent immigrant clientele. Since you focus on the bottom end of the market, I’ll consider the reverse for the sake of argument:<p>Think of the highest end restaurants in your area, establishments where formal attire and reservations are a requirement. The types of places that win awards and accolades, where people that have the means will go to celebrate major life events.<p>In my experience, having lived in major cities on the East and West coasts, those restaurants are almost exclusivity western cuisine – specifically French or Italian derivatives. Japanese cuisine, as the article points out, tends to be the one exception to that rule. Thai, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, etc don’t seem to be represented proportionally to their global popularity in the high-end market.<p>I googled around for “highest ranked restaurants in the United States” and the trend seems, in my opinion, pretty well aligned with this article’s claims. And if you believe that the high-end market indicates what we value as a society, in that it’s what we demonstrate we will pay for and praise handsomely, then there does seem to a eurocentric bias.<p>What I found though provoking in this article, and a sentiment I largely agree with from my own anecdotal experience, is the idea that there’s a sort of prestige hierarchy for types of cuisine in the US.