Yeah, I wasn't saying that american food consists solely of burgers and hot dogs, there's definitely lively food scenes in north american big cities. My impress

Yeah, I wasn't saying that american food consists solely of burgers and hot dogs, there's definitely lively food scenes in north american big cities. My impression, though, is that the food diversity in US/Canada has more to do with multiculturalism than with tradition, i.e. you get to pick between indian, thai, mexican, italian, greek, etc and a lot of the twists and novelties are fusions of two or more cultures (e.g. at one festival, I saw a food stand that made tacos... with vietnamese banh-mi ingredients) Chinese food can also have fusion twists (e.g. there's a chinese indian restaurant a few miles away from where I live), but each regional cuisine also has rich local culturalism, and in addition, chinese cuisine can be surprisingly technical. It's downright impressive the number of different ways you can have beef noodles, for example.