I’m not sure if the “when-in-Rome” rule of choosing Chinese restaurants originated in the Analects of Confucius or in a 1926 fortune cookie dispensed at a San Francisco chow mein house. Regardless, this principle of choosing among not just Chinese but other exotic ethnic restaurants endures. The low-tech method was to press your nose to restaurant windows and choose the one with the most (and preferably the happiest) native diners. The new method is to google for guidance from critics, bloggers and reader reviewers who themselves are wont to base their judgements on ethnic profiling.  Like The Observer’s Jay Rayner I am reluctant to assume a restaurant is promising merely because it is filled with diners who share its nationality. Yet I, like Rayner, am heartened to find myself the lone outsider in a popular, insider’s refuge. [Read more...]