A married couple who fled Haiti for Virginia achieved their American dream when they opened a variety market on the Eastern Shore, selling hard-to-find spices, sodas and rice to the region’s growing Haitian community.
When they added a Haitian food truck, people drove from an hour away for freshly cooked oxtail, fried plantains and marinated pork.
But Clemene Bastien and Theslet Benoir are now suing the town of Parksley, alleging that it forced their food truck to close. The couple also say a town council member cut the mobile kitchen’s water line and screamed, “Go back to your own country!”
“When we first opened, there were a lot of people” ordering food, Bastien said, speaking through an interpreter. “And the day after, there were a lot of people. And then … they started harassing us.”
How we ended up with a native cuisine inferior to the English is something I don’t get. It isn’t like the entire planet is injecting us with immigrants at all times.
Gotta get out of WASP neighborhoods, there’s tons of good American food developed (mostly by immigrants and slaves) over the hundreds of years since colonization. And it’s not like the native population was eating dirt.
Fried peanuts and oxtail. Fuck Americans that don’t get it.
I’d argue Cajun cooking is native cuisine, granted that was cobbled together from the cooking traditions of several immigrant cultures.
Native to your area. I can’t get it without a bit of work.
The same can be said about provincial french cuisine. You are so used to a world of food chains that you can’t imagine a past history where EVERYTHING was regional.
I live on the east coast and travel to major east coast cities a few times a year for fun. Seeing people in NYC eating at like Chipotle or other fast food drives me bonkers.
I know some people are locals and that’s reasonable, but visiting a place like that and not eating the local grub seems so dumb.