> which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south? This isn't remotely relevant. Picking a

> which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south? This isn't remotely relevant. Picking a given regional cuisine and just calling it "Thai food" when transplanted is a completely separate axis from how closely the transplanted cuisine adheres to the dishes from its original country. > As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it. I'm not going off of some random intuition of my own: food chemistry is literally an entire field of science that focuses (in part) on the molecules that produce flavor, and how they interact with each other. They've built taxonomies of these flavors, and Western cuisine tends to use the same flavors in the different components of a dish or meal. By contrast, cuisines like Indian food do the opposite: using multiple flavors which contrast with each other. I'm not using complexity as a value judgment, but as an objective, measurable fact. (The history behind this divergence is really interesting; I can go into it if you'd like). I was using Western in the generally-accepted sense: of European (cultural) ancestry. Obviously American cuisine is less European than Europe, and the parts that are heavily influenced by (e.g.) Mexican cuisine are less subject to the uncontroversially lower level of flavor/complexity in European cuisines overall. The sum of these things still shifts the Western palate towards the direction I'm talking about relative to many other cuisines. Also, I'm talking about the food preferences of the people, and how that shapes cuisine. The obvious example is spicy heat: the fact that "American spicy" and "Thai spicy" is a thing indicates a recognition on the part of the proprietors that the average American palate is calibrated for a different level of heat than the Thai palate. As I said, moving every cuisine towards the American palate to suit it better has the effect of flattening them out a little. A dish from some part of Mexico tweaked to cater to the American palate will be closer to a Thai dish tweaked to cater to the American palate than the original dishes are to each other. Which brings me back to my original point: if you find places with dishes closer to their cuisines of origin than their Americanized version, you'll enjoy a greater variety of flavor, since the flattening process is somewhat mitigated.