The other day I was talking with a friend of mine who lives in Ukraine, and the topic of Ukrainian food came up. I mentioned that we don’t really have a lot of Ukrainian restaurants in Canada, an he replied with “but didn’t a lot of Ukrainians move to Canada?”. He was of course right. According to StatsCan, 1.2 million Canadians claim to be Ukrainian/of Ukrainian descent, as well as 3 million German-Canadians and just under a million Polish-Canadians. And yet the number of restaurants one might see based on these countries’ ethnic cuisines pales in comparison to say, Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Italian food. This feels especially true in the realm of fast/fast-casual dining chains, where you have restaurants like Taco Bell/Panda Express( I realize that these are not actually Mexican/Chinese food, but they are branded as such). I guess my question is, why did the huge migration of Central/Eastern Europeans to North America in the 19th/20th centuries not lead to the development of Central/Eastern European fast/casual food like the Chinese/Indian/Italian/Mexican diasporas did?
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